On November 17, 2016, Ariane Lourie Harrison and Seth Harrison of Brooklyn-based design firm Harrison Atelier gave a special Outside the Box gallery talk on “Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest.” Harrison Atelier’s work conveys environmental urgency through tenderness, humor, and beauty. Architect Ariane Lourie Harrison and designer and writer Seth Harrison focused discussion on Pipilotti Rist’s Administrating Eternity (2011), and explored similar themes and strategies at play across the various layers of Rist’s work, from content and image to sound and physical environment.

Outside the Box offers a roster of gallery-based talks given by a variety of guest speakers over the course of a season. In this series, lecturers with diverse backgrounds and affinities addressed the New Museum’s fall exhibition, “Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest,” in forty-five- to sixty-minute presentations taking place in the Museum’s galleries. As a way to emphasize the Museum’s strong commitment to new art and new ideas, Outside the Box gallery talks are open to the public and are intended to provide participants with multidisciplinary perspectives on New Museum exhibitions. To this end, lecturers speak about the exhibition or themes emergent in Rist’s works from the various positions they occupy—be they academic, personal, political, or otherwise. With their distinct individual relationships to the artist and works on view, lecturers engage in rich investigations that illuminate and probe the Museum’s current exhibition program.

Brooklyn-based design firm Harrison Atelier creates pavilions, installations, and performances in which the audience is invited to resist ready interpretations of the intertwining of humans and technology. Founded in 2009, its collaborative vision joins the diverse backgrounds of its founders: Ariane Lourie Harrison, an architect who teaches at the Yale School of Architecture, and Seth Harrison, a writer, designer, and biotechnology entrepreneur. The organization reflects its founders’ deeply collaborative approach to creating work, traversing the borders of art, science, technology, and nature. HAt’s activities include performance design, installation design, and writing exploring the posthuman entanglement of human, technology, and nature within the built environment; they have produced work on topics such as aging (Anchises, 2010), the pharmaceutical industry and the placebo effect (Pharmacophore, 2013), the industrial logic of food-animal production (Veal, 2013), and the uses and abuses of the idea of species (Species Niches, 2014). Harrison Atelier performance-installations have been presented at Pavilion Dance, Bournemouth, UK; the Arnolfini Theater, Bristol, UK; Abrons Arts Center, New York; Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; and the Invisible Dog Art Center, Brooklyn. The firm received first prize from UCAL, Switzerland, for their design of a Water Mogul’s mansion (2012) and was shortlisted for World Stage Design’s Installation Design Award (2013).