Harpreet Sareen is an interaction designer and researcher whose practice examines asymmetries in human-nonhuman relationships through material and technological interventions. He directs the Synthetic Ecosystems Lab at Parsons School of Design where he is Associate Professor of Interaction and Media Design. His work develops what he terms post-anthropocentric design: practices that hybridize organic materials and living organisms with technologies to reveal agency beyond anthropocentric frameworks. Projects including Elowan (a plant-robot hybrid driven by botanical electrical signals), Algaphon (which makes audible the metabolic sounds of photosynthesis in macroalgae), and Argus (in-vivo plant sensors for environmental monitoring) approach more-than-human worlds through sustained material experimentation rather than representation alone.

He holds a Ph.D. from The University of Tokyo and an M.S. from MIT Media Lab. He has held visiting professorships at MIT and Institute Polytechnique de Paris, research positions at Google Creative Lab and Ars Electronica FutureLab, and was a Berggruen Fellow at USC Dornsife. His work has been exhibited at over forty international venues including Ars Electronica Festival, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Kunstgewerbemuseum Dresden, Porto Design Biennale, and Somerset House. Recognitions include the CHI Golden Mouse Award, SXSW Interactive Innovation Award, Edison Gold Award, and NTU Global Digital Art Prize.

Echoes of the Unseen investigates the ethical contradictions embedded in keeping birds in cages - relationships where genuine care and structural constraint coexist without resolution. The project surveys a distributed geography of avian captivity through fieldwork in pet shops in New York, household environments in India, and market stalls across Southeast Asia, where birds live as companions, commodities, or cultural artifacts. Using contact microphones affixed directly to cage structures, the research documents not melodic birdsong but the acoustic ecology of confinement: talon strikes on wire, wing adjustments against barriers, the percussive textures produced when bodies adapted for flight inhabit spaces measured in inches.

This material informs the development of an installation in which vertical columns of tensioned barbed wire transmit the field recordings through bone conduction. Visitors access the sounds by pulling cotton threads taut from wire to ear, making absent birds audible within their own bodies. The barbed wire references enclosure without literalizing the cage, invoking material histories of territory and border control. By aggregating recordings across geographies and contexts, the work resists singular moral narratives about captivity, instead holding open the contradiction between care and constraint that defines relationships where power is unevenly distributed.