Carolin Melia Brendel is a media artist, artistic researcher and sociologist of finance. Her work explores the multimodal nexus between power relations and knowledge formations using transmedial, installative, post-anthropocentric and collaborative methods. She develops antidisciplinary onto-epistemologies at the interface of art and science in the form of artistic research apparati. For her PhD project marine media metabolisms at the University of the Arts Bremen and the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW, she examines material-discursive cycles of digital infrastructures and their entanglement with the deep ocean hydrosphere in the context of digital capitalism.
Her artistic practice is informed by her multidisciplinary background in Critical Studies and Video Art (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, art class of Dorit Margreiter), Sociology of Finance (Goethe University Frankfurt & École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales Paris) and Social and Cultural Anthropology (University of Vienna). Her artistic solo and group works have been presented in the context of Wiener Festwochen, Kunsthalle Wien, Künstlerverein Malkasten Düsseldorf, Schaufler Lab Dresden, Swiss Artistic Research Network and through Eternal Terra Ear at Transmedia Research Institute Milan a. o. She is author of the book Aerobic Topologies: socio-spatial knowledge practices of fermenting microbes (2025), published with Schlebrügge.editor.
Photo: Natalija Galić