ARCHIVO LAB | Visual Artist 2026

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REBECCA NAJDOWSKI 

Australia

WEBSITE

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Rebecca Najdowski is an Australian-American artist engaging with the ways that imaging technologies can visualise the climate crisis through more-than-human modes of perception. Her current project, Another Nature, uses multispectral imaging, microscopy, and generative AI to create speculative encounters with wildfire and regeneration.

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LAB PROJECT

ANOTHER NATURE: IMAGE GEOLOGY

‘Image Geology’ investigates the paradox at the heart of environmental imaging: using extractive technologies to document ecological destruction. This project traces imaging technologies’ material origins, from rare earth minerals in camera sensors to energy infrastructures powering AI imagery. Building on Jussi Parikka’s ‘A Geology of Media’ and Jennifer Gabrys’s digital environmentalism work, the project positions archives as simultaneously geological records and digital repositories. I work with multiple material ‘archives’: rare earth mining documentation, environmental monitoring datasets, and my own imaging devices as geological specimens. Through methods like microscopy of sensor components and infrared imaging of sites, along with investigating how generative processes can use minimal computational resources, I aim to expose extractive networks behind digital images and uncover geological narratives within photographic archives. This extends my ‘Another Nature’ project that uses multispectral imaging and microscopy to record wildfire and climate impacts. Where that explores what we see through more-than- human sensing, ‘Image Geology’ probes technological seeing’s environmental cost. Through experimental practice, I aim to develop more climate-conscious approaches to image-making that foreground rather than obscure photography’s environmental costs. Beyond moving images and photography, I hope the project will yield pedagogical materials for photographic curriculum.

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