During this talk, fields will examine the social implications for a science of work and the biography of the spirometer. The spirometer’s measure of lung capacity is inextricable from the racializing surveillance of statistical law, by which entropy, energy and research into fatigue all have contributed to the creation of categories of difference and determined values of vitality.
Bio: fields harrington (b. 1986 Sacramento, CA; based in Brooklyn, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice considers the blurring of boundaries between poetics and science. His work revisits the history of western empiricism and scientific systems, addressing legacies of violence as well as the enmeshment of science, racism, and ideology. By appropriating scientific processes and subverting their grammar, his desire is to relieve the black subjective experience from a legacy of historical violence. The weaving of artistic and scientific languages deployed in his work proposes the formation of a relational knowledge that recodes science through poetics.
fields received his BFA from the University of North Texas and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. He was a participant in the Whitney Independent Studio Program (2019-2020).