About

Dr Joshua Wodak is a researcher, writer, and artist whose work explores what it means to not only be alive during the current upheaval (climate crisis, Anthropocene, Sixth Extinction Event et. al.), but to be alive to upheaval itself. That is: how to live on an inherently unstable Earth, and in an inherently catastrophic cosmos.

With anthropogenic climate change constituting an unplanned and unintentional experiment on the biosphere and atmosphere, his work explores the ethics and efficacy of plans to intentionally mitigate human impact on the biosphere, through synthetic biology, and on the atmosphere, through climate engineering. Drawing on the fields of Environmental Humanities and Science and Technology Studies, this work is produced through practice based research in art and museum exhibitions on the Anthropocene.

He holds a BA (Honours) in Anthropology (Sydney University, 2002), a PhD in Interdisciplinary Cross-Cultural Research (Australian National University, 2011) and has exhibited his media art, sculpture and interactive installations in art galleries, museums and festivals across Australia and internationally. These projects include: when i was a buoyant, photo-portraits of climate change data physically projected onto participants' bodies to illustrate sea level rise measured against the human body; jubilee venn diagrams?, video-portraits that animate diagrams of climate change trajectories to form Cartesian graphs with the human body; Facing Futures Free From Fear, an audiovisual installation that maps global carbon dioxide emissions onto a 12metre long sculpted heat map rising from domestic-scale floor to ceiling; ISEA Bright Future, an interactive audiovisual installation powered by participants' cycling, where participants collaboratively control a 3D light and sound sculpture of pre-extinction and post-extinction evolutionary trajectories; and shape Things To come, an immersive sculpture that maps projected sea level rise onto physical sites of a city, to depict future sea shores from different climate trajectories produced through different geoengineering interventions..

From 2020-2025 he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, and, before joining ICS he was a Lecturer at UNSW Art & Design; a Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Project 'Understanding Australia in The Age of Humans: Localising the Anthropocene'; and a Key Researcher of the Andrew Mellon Australia-Pacific Observatory in Environmental Humanities, Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney.

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Current

Senior Lecturer
School of Humanities and Communication Arts
Western Sydney University

Chief Investigator
ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology

Recent

- Fixing Futures: Planetary Futures between Speculation and Control | group exhibition | Museum Giersch of the Goethe University, Frankfurt | 4 April – 31 August 2025 | Curator : Laura Domes

- when i was a buoyant | solo exhibition | Union Theatre Gallery, Lithgow | 13 - 16 February 2025 | Curator: Ann Niddrie.

 

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