Andrew Styan
Australia
Andrew Styan is an emerging new media artist interested in developing strategies for shifting public engagement with the challenge of climate change. Using electronics, computer coding, interactivity and electromechanical devices to create installations, videos and kinetic objects, his practice makes visible the underlying causes of climate change. These conceptual and material concerns reflect a former career in industrial research as a metallurgist in the steel industry, and lifelong interests in nature, photography and science. Styan has exhibited widely locally and nationally and in 2015 he was awarded the University of Western Australia’s prestigious Dr Harold Schenberg fellowship for graduating artists. His recent theoretical and practical research focuses on the socio-economic origins that are common to all crises of ecology, equality and democracy. He is interested in the psychology behind the individual and collective inability to tackle these crises, and the social agency of contemporary art practices and institutions.