Welcome to Live from the Threshold: an Art–Science Conversation, a podcast series emerging from a collaboration between Artists with Evidence and the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

In this second episode of the series, Artists with Evidence Program Director Ines Montalvao visits Kathy High at The Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy (NY) on the eastern bank of the historic Hudson River. Recorded in the Sanctuary’s radio room, this conversation unfolds as an intimate exchange shaped by place, practice, and a long-standing commitment to art-science collaborations.

Kathy High is an interdisciplinary artist working in the space where art, biology, and technology touch—often uncomfortably, often generatively. Her practice is a sustained dialogue with living systems: the tender and uneasy ecologies between species, the felt registers of empathy and animal sentience, and the ethical and socio-political entanglements of biotechnology and surrounding industries. She collaborates as readily with scientists as with artists, approaching the laboratory as a site of inquiry and encounter.

Kathy High is Professor of Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she maintains a laboratory within the Center for Biotech and Interdisciplinary Studies. There, at the intersection of art and the life sciences, she cultivates practices that open new kinds of relation—between species, between disciplines, and between the stories we tell about what life is and what it might yet become.

She is a co-director for the urban environmental center, NATURE Lab, that Ines also had the pleasure to visit in Troy, part of the community media organization Kathy also co-founded, The Sanctuary for Independent Media. She has received awards including the Guggenheim Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and National Endowment for Arts.

Interdisciplinary artist, educator and also co-director of NATURE Lab, Ellie Irons, also joins briefly in this episode, adding another layer to the conversation on ecological attention and community-based practice.

Positioned once again at the threshold—between disciplines, forms of knowledge, and ways of being—this episode deepens the series’ exploration of care, community, and more-than-human thinking.

Welcome to the threshold. Enjoy.

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This podcast was produced by Ben Larsen. The music for Live from the Threshold is Song for Barbara, composed and performed by N. Scott Johnson in honor of his friend, the artist Barbara Hammer.