Natalie Jeremijenko

I believe in a tongue-first exploration of the world. Food is our most immediate daily relationship to our ecosystem, and there is something delectable and intriguing about it.

Wealth and vegetation go together, and that exacerbates environmental injustice. The poor bear the burden of degraded environments.

Information is not just something you download from the Web. The way trees grow and where birds choose to live are much better signs of water quality than all the data being collected by the EPA.

There's nothing wrong with being anthropomorphic. That's how we understand the world.

Experimenting with your own life is the most fundamental medium we have.

Formally, I did my studies in the sciences, but I was very conscious that I was being deprived of culture. While studying neuroscience, I was running a rock-music festival and was able to use that as a platform to explore what it takes to produce art for 20,000 inebriated 20-somethings.

Juggling many projects and having all these accidental collisions that you can't predict enables a kind of comparative thinking. To focus on a single project from beginning to end is extremely difficult, not just for me, but for many people.

Are kids smarter than adults? All evidence points to that being true.

I created a successful outdoor youth festival - the Liverd festival - against all good advice. It was a great way to explore and investigate social sculptures. Having that as my kind of studio, outside of a museum or precious white-cube gallery, that was a kind of education.

I watch children a great deal; their idea is that rules are always negotiable, whereas you absolutely cannot joke at the airport about your toothpaste, and you cannot rollerblade in Grand Central Station. I keep running up against these things.

The art world is a very prissy little thing over in the corner, while the major cultural forces are being determined by techno science.

Eating together is the most intimate form of kinship. By scripting a work where we share the same kind of food with fish, I'm scripting our interrelationship with them.