Beatriz da Costa

Beatriz da Costa (1974 – 2012) was an interdisciplinary artist and tactical media practitioner working at the intersection of contemporary art, science, engineering, and politics. Her work takes the form of public participatory interventions, locative media, conceptual tool building, and critical writing. Issues addressed in her work include the use of emergent technologies to investigate context-specific configurations of social injustice, the politics of transgenic organisms, and the social repercussions of ubiquitous surveillance technologies. Da Costa made frequent use of “wetware” in her projects and in her late work became interested in the potential of interspecies co-production in promoting the responsible use of natural resources and environmental sustainability. Through her work, da Costa examined the role of the artist as a political actor engaged in technoscientific discourses, which is the topic of her 2010 book Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience, co-edited with Kavita Philip. Da Costa was a co-founder of Preemptive Media (2002-2008), an arts, activism, and technology group with Brooke Singer and Jamie Schulte, and a former collaborator of Critical Art Ensemble (2000-2005), a collective of tactical media practitioners dedicated to exploring the intersections between art, technology, radical politics, and critical theory, where she took part in the development and implementation of various bio-tech initiatives and models of contestational science. Da Costa was an Associate Professor of Studio Art at the University of California, Irvine.