Join EDC for a screening of two animated shorts followed by conversations with the artists who created them. This is an online event with two artists who envision ecological futures — an opportunity to go deeper into the ideas, processes, and visions shaping two remarkable animated works.
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Transition Systems | Alex Garove
In this animated short, a fully automated factory — devoid of humanity and producing only waste — is transformed when a single seed enters its works. What follows is a surreal, dreamlike reclamation of an industrial landscape by the natural world. To bring this vision to life, Baltimore-based artist-educator Alex Garove used scanography — a process that captures physical objects using a flatbed scanner — to animate the film’s assets. Industrial objects, scratched and desaturated, gradually give way to vivid insects, flowers, and green leaves. Fossils hidden among rocks allude to fossil fuels and extinction; a recurring scanned snakeskin signals growth and transformation. At the heart of it all, a single seed asks: what small forces might dismantle an entire system?
Alex Garove is an artist-educator based in Baltimore, Maryland. Her work is informed by the natural world and relies heavily on arts-based research. Through her artistic process, Alex has explored interdisciplinary connections between the history of scientific understanding, museology, colonialism, botany, and entomology. The resulting artwork fuses a variety of media and techniques including installation, fabrication, digital processes, time-based media, and natural materials. On a normal day in her studio/office, you may find a snakeskin in her flatbed scanner, flowers pressed under stacks of books, insects preserved in alcohol, and a die-cutting machine fabricating vector-based papercuts. As an art educator, Alex’s pedagogical and artistic practices are heavily linked. Alex completed her thesis on arts-science integration in 2022 and is interested in how students and artists construct understanding through artmaking. She is inspired by working in an artistic community with her colleagues and students; one of the many things she loves about teaching is that it keeps her artistic practice fresh.
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The Dreaming World | Alexi Scheiber
A hand-painted solarpunk world slowly emerges from the quiet of suburbia — wildflowers overtaking mowed lawns, houses becoming whimsical mixed-use buildings — in this experimental animation by Alexi Scheiber.
Alexi Scheiber is an experimental animator and multidisciplinary artist whose work has been shown in over fifty film festivals around the world including SUNCINE: Barcelona International Environmental Film Festival, Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Fest, and FREDD: The French International Environmental Film Festival. Through her work as Artistic Coordinator at The Crow’s Nest, an environmentalist art incubator in downtown Baltimore, Alexi curates exhibits around ecological themes. Alexi graduated from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2018 with an Animation BFA and a dual minor in illustration and creative writing. Her undergraduate thesis film A Love Letter for the End of the World received honors from Krakow’s International Green Film Festival and the Adobe Achievement Awards. She received her MFA from the Intermedia and Digital Arts Master of Fine Arts at University of Maryland Baltimore County in May 2025.
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This event is moderated by EDC curator Anand Pandian
Anand Pandian is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. His work aims for ecological awareness, a sense of appreciation for the many beings and elements that sustain our worlds. Anand studied at Amherst College and UC Berkeley, and has taught at Johns Hopkins since 2007. He has written several award-winning books, including Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life and How to Take Them Down, and A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times. Anand also serves as a curator of the Ecological Design Collective, a community for radical ecological imagination and collaboration, meant for researchers, activists, creatives, anyone. He lives with his family in Baltimore, where he is currently working on a new book project on the global fight to build a zero waste future, anchored in stories from the United States, India, Ghana, and Spain.
We encourage you to make a reservation with the link below or join directly here!