Tega Brain & Sam Lavigne
Tega Brain, an artist and environmental engineer, and Sam Lavigne, an artist and educator, collaborate on projects involving ecology, data and digital infrastructure.
Artwork in the collection
Cabinet of Refusals
About the artwork
An installation bringing together websites, browser extensions and email services to explore refusal of surveillance, data extraction and hyperproductivity. NEWART Centre participated in its production.
Artistic practice and research
Their works repurpose websites, software and everyday services to examine surveillance, automation and the attention economy. Humour and participation are central to their critical engagement with technological systems.
Tega Brain (Australia) is an artist and environmental engineer, a professor at New York University and co-author, with Golan Levin, of Code as Creative Medium (MIT Press). Sam Lavigne is an artist and programmer; he has taught at ITP/NYU, The New School and the School for Poetic Computation, and was a Magic Grant fellow at the Brown Institute, Columbia University. Together they have created projects such as The Good Life (Enron Simulator, 2017), The New Organs (2018), Synthetic Messenger (2019), New York Apartment (2020), commissioned by the Whitney Museum for its artport platform, and Perfect Sleep (2021), shown at Ars Electronica in 2022. In 2025 Pioneer Works (New York) presented How to Get to Zero, the largest survey of their individual and collaborative practice to date.