Meet a MnDRIVE Human in the Data Fellow: Nicholas Bauch

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Nicholas Bauch
Department of Art, College of Liberal Arts
MnDRIVE Area: Environment

MnDRIVE Human in the Data Fellow, Summer 2021

 

The Shape of Water: Re-mediating limnological shape files into physical form

Nicholas Bauch is an artist and a geographer. His primary concern is how to embody everyday landscapes in ways that challenge the economic, social, and environmental inequalities we live with today. He is motivated by the absurdity of trying to physically “be” in landscapes built for commerce and extraction. It is a stimulating, intellectual type of activism, pointing toward the systems that enable the reproduction of strife, planting seeds of their undoing. His schemes for being in landscape are normally done alone, while the public-facing results include video, performance, printmaking, installation, sound, and photography.

For this project, he begins with a geographical dataset comprised of the circumference outline shapes of all the lakes in Minnesota. From there, he manipulates this data into an art installation, an experience room which involves unique “lake” prints, water samples, musical instruments, and a performing character.

Bauch holds a Ph.D. in geography from the University of California-Los Angeles (2010), and is currently a Master of Fine Arts student in the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota.  Find out more at: www.geographystudio.org

 

Photo by Xavier Tavera, 2021

 

 

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