Join us for a conversation about the issues surrounding the exhibition Treatment: A Plan for Rain, a project by net-based artist Nicholas O’Brien. The artist will moderate a discussion with architect and urbanist Jillian Crandall, artist Ellie Irons, and engineer Paul Grogan. Topics to be discussed include biodiversity, urban planning, and maintenance, and participants will aim to unpack and sort through the interweaving disciplines that influence and affect the strategies and implementation of green infrastructure in the city and beyond.

Treatment: The Plan for Rain rethinks the NYC Department of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) stormwater collection program by focusing on soil biodiversity, transparency, maintenance, and its impact on citizens.

Jillian Crandall
Jillian Crandall is a Registered Architect, urbanist, and researcher focused on local and global networks in infrastructure, mediated urban ecologies, and spaces of cultural and social production across time. She has worked on the design and construction of several civic projects in the New York City metropolitan region. As a writer she is focused on theory and analysis, as well as speculative and experimental fiction.

Paul Grogan
Paul Grogan is an Assistant Professor in the School of Systems and Enterprises at Stevens Institute of Technology. He leads the Collective Design Lab which develops and studies the use of information-based methods and tools for engineering design in systems with distributed architectures.

Ellie Irons
An artist and educator based in Brooklyn and Troy, New York, Ellie Irons works in a variety of media, from drawing to gardening, to reveal how human and nonhuman lives intertwine with other earth systems. She is currently researching the intersection of socially engaged art and urban ecology as an Arts PhD student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.