ELAINE GAN is interested in mapping worlds otherwise. As a DANM research associate and Science & Justice fellow at UCSC in 2011-12, Gan experiments with visualizing time. Her project aims to unpack collisions-synchronies between biocultural entanglements and political economies by considering multiple temporalities that emerge from and enact historically-constituted and contingent cycles of cultivation and exchange for different varieties of rice.

Rice drives the most land- and labor-intensive agricultural system today—a site of massive surplus production and thus, of rationalized exploitations that feed half of the world's human population. Some of the largest cultivation areas, such as the Mekong Delta in Vietnam and the Chao Phraya in Thailand, are also the most biodiverse ecosystems, centuries-old multispecies contact zones. Since the 1960s, market-centric solutions to scarcity and obsolescence propose capital management, expert science, higher yield, faster growth. We know these to be violently unsustainable. And therefore, an urgent task at hand: How else do we care to live?

Gan studied critical art practice at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (NY), earned an MFA in Digital Arts/New Media at University of California, Santa Cruz (CA) and a BA in Architecture at Wellesley College (MA). Her projects have been supported by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York Foundation for the Arts, Jerome Foundation, and NY Department of Cultural Affairs. Her DANM thesis project, "Rice Child (Stirrings)" received the UCSC Chancellor's Award at the Graduate Research Symposium in 2011. #