Nancy Baker Cahill: AR, Expanded Cinema, and Social Sculpture in Polycrisis

Engagement Strategies and Sympoeisis
A lecture by Nancy Baker Cahill, fellow at the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures.

Nancy Baker Cahill is a transdisciplinary artist whose work examines complex systems, with an emphasis on the relationship between consciousness, intelligence, and embodiment. Systems thinking is integral to her poetics; her concerns focus on power and its biopolitical impacts, particularly ecological and social harms.

In this talk, Nancy Baker Cahill, who is currently a fellow at the the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures (University of Applied Arts Vienna), will discuss projects in her research-based practice that address creative co-building: what has worked, failed, and remains unknown. The talk will address human perception, ecological imagination, sensory expansion, and the work of sense-making through overlapping existential crises.

Using a blend of analog and digital media, Baker Cahill creates immersive experiences, video installations, sculptures, and conceptual projects that engage the human sensorium and are rooted in drawing. Since 2018, she has been the Founder and Artistic Director of 4th Wall, a free, AR public art platform exploring resistance and inclusive (often participatory) creative expression, which she considers to be a form of social sculpture. Her monumental AR artworks build on the lineage of ecofeminist land art, often highlighting interdependence and the more-than-human. She takes a critical approach to all of the emerging technologies she uses, subverting convention to offer alternative imaginaries.

Baker Cahill has received the 2026 USA Fellowship Award, the 2025 Full Dome Festival’s Janus Award for Best Feature Film, the 2024 Infinity Festival’s Monolith Award for New Media Fine Art, the 2022 LACMA Art +Tech Grant, a 2022 C.O.L.A. Master Artist Fellowship, and the 2021 Williams College Bicentennial Medal of Honor. She is a former Berggruen Institute Artist Fellow, is an Affiliate at the Harvard metaLAB, and a TEDx speaker. In 2026, she will be an Artist Fellow at the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures in Vienna.

Solo museum presentations include LACMA, The Hammer Museum, The Whitney Museum, The Georgia Museum of Art, and an upcoming solo exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Art. Her work is held in the collections of LACMA, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Georgia Museum of Art, The Museum of Art and History; RFC Art Collection, The Smart Museum of Art, The Winthrop University Collection, The Lyman Allyn Art Museum, and 0x Collection in Basel, Switzerland.

She has been profiled in many publications, including The Art Newspaper, Frieze, and The New York Times. Her essays appear in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Nam June Paik Art Center Reader and October Magazine.

Research interests are Digital bioacoustics, the physics of light and perception, biomimicry, systemic power and networked resistance.