Upcoming Events
Art+ Science #6: Extended Landscapes: Beneath Our Feet, Above Our Heads, & Back in Time with Peggy Weil — LIVE ONLY, no recording
Thursday, August 6, 5:00 to 6:00 pm PT
on Zoom
LIVE ONLY! No recording will be available
Artist Peggy Weil will speak on Zoom about her current MoMA exhibition, Core Memory, and her series Expanded Landscapes, works that visualize the layers of the Earth that exist “beneath our feet, above our heads, and back in time.” This event is live only. No recording will be available.
An innovator in digital portraiture, Weil’s practice ranges from large-scale public installations to videos and interactive art. Since 2011, the artist has focused on what she calls “Extended Landscapes.” Weil’s current exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Core Memory, brings together two of the artist’s “underscapes”: 88 Cores, a video descent through the Greenland ice sheet, and 18 Cores, which unearths images of rock cores from beneath California’s Salton Sea.
About Peggy Weil
Peggy Weil is a multi-disciplinary artist and designer based in Los Angeles. Her work explores physical, digital, cultural, and socio-political landscapes through work spanning video installation, large-scale public art, and pioneering digital interactive media. Her long-form video installation 88 Cores has shown across the US, from The Climate Museum in NYC (2018) to currently at MoMA’s Core Memory (2026). Her public installations include UnderLA for CURRENT:LA Public Art Biennial 2016 and HeadsUP! 2012 in Times Square.
Since 2011, her ongoing Extended Landscapes series has produced landscape portraits focused on the unseen processes of climate change. In 2007, collaborating with Nonny de la Peña, she co-created foundational immersive journalism and VR projects centered on human rights, including Gone Gitmo, a virtual installation of Guantánamo Prison exhibited internationally. In 1998, Weil created MrMind, an early netart chatbot that asked visitors, “Can you convince me that you are human?” Sixteen years of global conversations from MrMind became the libretto for The Blurring Test: Songs of MrMind, performed in New York in 2020 and 2023.
A Harvard and MIT graduate, she was a member of the Architecture Machine Group (precursor to the MIT Media Lab), grounding her practice in early human-computer interaction and AI discourse. She is co-author of Inventing Eliza: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI (MIT Press, June 2026), and has taught at CCA, UCLA, and USC.
See Peggy’s work online at:
Learn about her MoMA show, Core Memory, here. moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5890
Photos by permission of the artist.
Stay tuned for details about our upcoming 30th birthday party for WEAD and screening of Maintenance Artist, the first feature documentary about groundbreaking public artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, the New York City Sanitation Department’s artist-in-residence.