SPLINTERED REALITIES

Featured Lecture (for students only)

Geert LOVINK
Location: Riga Stradins University

Geert LOVINK. Stuck on the Platform, Reclaiming the Internet (multimedia presentation on his new book) 
Location: Riga Stradins University

Geert LOVINK.
In this multi-media presentation of his new book Stuck on the Platform, Reclaiming the Internet (Valiz, 2022), Dutch media theorist and internet critic Geert Lovink will summarize the chapters before discussing strategies to overcome the platform blues with the audience. What happens after networks have been succeeded by platforms? How can we battle online sadness and anxiety and redesign the techno-social?

Geert Lovink is a Dutch media theorist, internet critic and author of Uncanny Networks (2002), Dark Fiber (2002), My First Recession (2003), Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012), Social Media Abyss (2016), Organization after Social Media (with Ned Rossiter, 2018), Sad by Design (2019) and Stuck on the Platform (2022). He studied political science at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and received his PhD from the University of Melbourne. In 2004 he founded the Institute of Network Cultures (www.networkcultures.org) at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA). His centre organizes conferences, publications and research networks such as Video Vortex (online video), The Future of Art Criticism and MoneyLab (internet-based revenue models in the arts). Recent projects deal with digital publishing experiments, critical meme research, participatory hybrid events and precarity in the arts. From 2007-2018 He was media theory professor at the European Graduate School. In December 2021 he was appointed Professor of Art and Network Cultures at the UvA Art History Department. The Chair (one day a week) is supported by the HvA.

Deep Europe: ONLINE PRESENTATION SESSION

Rasa SMITE / Luchezar BOYADJIEV / Miklos PETERNAK /
Sally Jane NORMAN / Melentie PANDILOVSKI

Location: Zoom / RIXC Gallery

(each 15 min presentation + 5-10 min conversation; times are approximate and depend on the flow of the conversation; presentations via Zoom, projected in the RIXC gallery and symposium space)

14:00 Rasa SMITE. Introduction “Deep Europe”
14:15 Luchezar BOYADJIEV. Overlapping Identities Revisited or “The Greatest Love of My Life was a non-human'”
14:40 Miklos PETERNAK. “omnipresence or omnivoyance? the dialectics of vision(s) in the real and rear world.”
15:05 Sally Jane NORMAN. Syndicate goals and contexts then and now: spatial and temporal links and gaps
15:30 Melentie PANDILOVSKI. The European Continent at a Turning Point:
Principles and Practises of Inclusion vs Exclusion

+ online, w/o presentation: Olia LIALINA, Janos SUGAR, Iliyana NEDKOVA

Luchezar BOYADJIEV. Overlapping Identities Revisited or “The Greatest Love of My Life was a non-human”

In continuation and upgrade of the notion of “overlapping identities”, the author is exploring the none- colonial edges of Europe. He argues that after centuries under somebody else’s domination, colonized and conquered people develop hybrid cultures and practices with parallel aspects. In view of the recent practices of exhibition making, he will ask for an “hermeneutics of display” to account for the mapping of art practices from extremely diverse and new-to-Europe contexts.

Luchezar Boyadjiev (b. 1957, Sofia) is among the most prominent artists based in Bulgaria. An artist with extensive international practice, he is a public figure with a clear critical stance on the Balkan and international art scene. As an artist, curator, and lecturer, he contributes to establishing new definitions of art and practice, to new discourses and to the emancipation of a younger generation of artists in his home country. His media ranges from drawings and painting, to photography, installations, video and his, by now famous guided tours/performances in various cities, and art exhibitions. Luchezar Boyadjiev has participated in numerous biennials, group exhibitions, conferences and residencies spanning from Sao Paulo to Gwangju, and from Santa Fe to Singapore, as well as most everywhere in Europe. His most recent artistic and curatorial projects are the Institute of Contemporary Art-Sofia contribution to Manifesta 14 Prishtina (“Selfs-plaining. A Triumph of Empathy”), and documenta fifteen (Lumbung / Composting Knowledge) in Kassel. His works are part of museum, corporate and private collections worldwide.

Miklos PETERNAK. Omnipresence or omnivoyance? the dialectics of vision(s) in the real and rear world.

The explanation of the title: omnivoyance refers to Nicolaus Cusanus, omnipresence to ubiquity (Paul Valéry), while the subtitle intends to be a latent hint to the nice metaphor in the title of Rasa Smite 2012 book („Rear-view Mirror of Eastern European History”). The short talk will contain self-referential elements (statistics) about the personal use of media in time.

Miklós Peternák (Budapest, H) Studied history and history of art, professor at the Intermedia Department, Hungarian University of Fine Arts, director of C3: Center for Culture and Communication Foundation, http://www.c3.hu .

Sally Jane NORMAN. Syndicate goals and contexts then and now: spatial and temporal links and gaps.

This subjective approach to certain aspects of Syndicate activity, and its relevance in 2022, is formulated from my position in Aotearoa as a French-Kiwi national. I’m interested in the value of situated, local experience, and in the learning that comes from exchanges that appreciate distance and difference.

Sally Jane Norman Scholar-practitioner working on art and technology, embodiment and expressive gesture, sound environments, cultural policy and research. Director of Te Kōkī/ New Zealand School of Music at Te Herenga Waka/ Victoria University Wellington. Previously Sussex Humanities Lab co-founder, founding Director of Culture Lab at Newcastle University UK, Director of the Ecole européenne supérieure de l’image, STEIM Artistic Guest Director. Dual citizen (Aotearoa-New-Zealand/ France).

Melentie PANDILOVSKI. The European Continent at a Turning Point: Principles and Practises of Inclusion vs Exclusion

My presentation deals with the current situation in Europe, the issue of refugees, internally displaced people, immigration, and diaspora in the final instance. My personal take is informed by concepts of time and space, when speaking about these issues, and is grounded by Heidegger’s notions of temporality and being on the move but also of other phenomenological categories of the lived experience such as spatiality (referring to lived space), corporeality (referring to the lived body) and relationality (referring to the lived other). Heidegger states that homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world, hence, I find it necessary that we rethink that destiny in terms of the history of Being and hopefully reveal at least some of the hidden in this increasingly common experience. I will further be addressing other issues associated with the current situation in Europe, but I remain hopeful that in our brave new world of eternal move around the blue planet, the Heideggerian concept of homelessness that is coming to be the destiny of the world turns into a more positive experience, than it has been in the last few years.

Dr. Melentie Pandilovski is a Curator, Art Historian, Media and Cultural Theorist. He has curated more than 200 projects including exhibitions, symposia, conferences, and workshops, in Europe, Australia, Canada, and the U.S., including SEAFair (Skopje Electronic Art Fair), International Limestone Coast Video Art Festival, STELARC’s Contestable Bodies, Imants Tillers’ Philosophy of Doubt, Keith Armstrong’s Future – Future?, Ian Haig’s The Institute of Fungus, Ian Haig, The Rise of Bio-Society, Age of Catastrophe (group exhibition), Toxicity (group exhibition), Nicholas Folland’s “OTHER HOMES AND GARDENS (version 2)”, etc. Melentie is currently Creative Producer at JOLT Arts in Melbourne, Vice President of AICA Macedonia, and Advisor at International Society for Phenomenology and Media.

Melentie has worked on numerous projects with the international networks: SCCA/ICAN, Syndicate, Net-Time, Spectre, BAN – Balkan Art Network, SEECAN, CAOS, SPM– Society for Phenomenology and Media. His personal art projects include the Internet project “Welcome Back to the Empire”, the solo exhibition “TV Experiment” in Skopje, Macedonia, and “Time Poetry”, a project with-in “Tik- Tak –Tok”, an international interdisciplinary collaboration consisting of two exhibitions of artists’ clocks and time machines, in Dundee (Scotland) and Skopje (Republic of Macedonia). His theoretical research deals with examination of the links between art, culture, technology, identity, and consciousness, and he has edited and published a range of works on those topics.

Deep Europe: ONSITE SESSION (Part 1)

Nina CZEGLEDY / Kathy Rae HUFFMAN / Ryszard W. KLUSZCZYNSKI /
Violeta Vojvodic BALAZ

Location: RIXC Gallery / Zoom

16:30  Nina CZEGLEDY. Beyond the walled borders
16:55 Kathy Rae HUFFMAN. About networking in, before and after the 90s
17:20 Ryszard W. KLUSZCZYNSKI. Syndicate and the so called “East European art” concept
17:45 Violeta Vojvodic BALAZ. The Seminar ‘Moral and Mythology in Contemporary Art’ (Novi Sad, 1995) in the conjuncture of New Europe (1989-2022)

Nina CZEGLEDY. Beyond the walled borders

Beyond Walled Borders is a personal account of my contributive involvement in (mostly) media art events in Deep Europe in the eighties and early nineties.

Nina Czegledy independent curator, media artist, researcher, educator is based in Toronto, Canada. She collaborates internationally on art&science & technology projects. Current curatorial projects: Sensoria, the art and science of our senses, a collaboration between Laznia, Contemporary Art Centre Poland and Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts and Technology, Canada 2022, A Light Footprint in the Cosmos for the Substantial Motion Research Network, Vancouver, 2022, Dobble Debate, digital educational game focused on dis/different abilities with Lynne Heller, OCADU, 2022. Recent curatorial projects: Agents for Change/ Facing the Anthropocene The Museum, Canada 2020; Who’s you? JD Reid Gallery, New Zealand 2019, Leonardo 50th, CyberArts ARS Electronica, Austria, 2018

Kathy Rae HUFFMAN. About networking in, before and after the 90s
Huffman will give examples of communication practices that artists used from the 1960s through the late 1990s and beyond. The various communities established disregarded political borders, and created and intertwined, overlapping web of social networks.

Kathy Rae Huffman is an American freelance curator, networker, and writer. Since the early 1980s, she has curated media exhibitions, and coordinated events for museums, international media art festivals and arts initiatives. Her early interest in artists’ television and video art, and her passion for feminist strategies in online environments promote activist positions. Huffman co-founded FACES: Gender/Technology/Art, an online community for women (1997), and VRML Art (later Web3D Art) with Van Gogh TV (1998). She is a member of the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community Committee and currently resides in Southern California.

Ryszard W. KLUSZCZYNSKI. Syndicate and the so called “East European art” concept

Ryszard W. Kluszczynski is a professor of media and cultural studies, Chair of Department of New Media and Digital Culture, University of Lodz, Poland. Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Lodz. He investigates the issues of new media arts and cyberculture, contemporary art theory and practices, avant-gardes and transdisciplinary cultural transformations, and recent interactions between art, science, technology and politics.

Artistic Director of Art & Science Meeting Program in the Centre for Contemporary Art in Gdansk (2011-). Curator of numerous exhibitions within the Program. Co-curator of travelling international exhibition United States of Europe (2011-2013). Curator of the Second International Biennale of Contemporary Art “Mediations”, Poznan 2010. Chief Curator of Film, Video and Multimedia Arts in the Centre for Contemporary Art – Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw (1990-2001).

Member of International Association of Art Critics (AICA), Cultural Studies Committee of Polish Academy of Science, and Polish Society of Cultural Studies. Editor of “Art Inquiry”, a yearbook on contemporary art, and “Cultural Studies Review”.

Violeta Vojvodic BALAZ. The Seminar ‘Moral and Mythology in Contemporary Art’ (Novi Sad, 1995) in the conjuncture of New Europe (1989-2022)

The seminar, as an open communication platform in real space, gathered artists, scientists, theorists and critics in the discussion that manifested an acute awareness of the tension between ethics and aesthetics (the Yugoslav wars) and a need for artists’ „social engagement through esthetics.” The year 1995, became coagulation point of the new media scene, cultural activism and the formation of computer-based art-science practice in Novi Sad (Vojvodina).

Violeta Vojvodic Balaz holds PhDArts. She worked as media artist in group Urtica (1999-2012), currently she runs research start-up MEMODUCT posthuman.archive, a repository of contemporary media-artistic practices and research in the field of digital humanities, media art history and cyber-anthropology.

Deep Europe: ONSITE SESSION (Part 2)

Raivo KELOMEES / Diana KNĚŽÍNKOVÁ / Geert LOVINK / Stephen KOVATS / Andreas BROECKMANN

Location: RIXC Gallery / Zoom

18:30 Raivo KELOMEES. Collisions on the Eastern-Western Art Axis: The Domestication of Eastern Europe as „Close Other“ in the 1990s
18:50 Diana KNĚŽÍNKOVÁ: In-between peripheral: Latvian artists of the Millennial generation versus the phenomenon of Post-Soviet nostalgia
19:10 Geert LOVINK. From SCCA to Ukraine Support Campaigns: Unfinished Histories
19:30 Stephen KOVATS. Deeper than Fake
19:50 Andreas BROECKMANN. Three revisits to Deep Europe
+ present, w/o presentation: Calin DAN, Katarina ZIVANOVIC

Raivo KELOMEES. Collisions on the Eastern-Western Art Axis: The Domestication of Eastern Europe as „Close Other“ in the 1990s

Author presentation is based on Peeter Linnap’s exhibition “Le Top 50“ (1994) in Tallinn, where organizers tried to make connections with the prominenents of the European art world. As an addition I discuss a similar experiment by Kaisa Eiche in 2021.

Raivo Kelomees, PhD (art history), is an artist, critic and new media researcher. He studied psychology, art history and design in Tartu University and the Academy of Arts in Tallinn. He is senior researcher at the Fine Arts Faculty at the Estonian Academy of Arts and professor at the Pallas University of Applied Sciences. Kelomees is author of Surrealism (Kunst Publishers, 1993) and article collections Screen as a Membrane (Tartu Art College proceedings, 2007) and Social Games in Art Space (EAA, 2013). His doctoral thesis is Postmateriality in Art. Indeterministic Art Practices and Non-Material Art (Dissertationes Academiae Artium Estoniae 3, 2009). Together with Chris Hales he edited the collection of articles Constructing Narrative in Interactive Documentaries (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014).

Diana KNĚŽÍNKOVÁ. In-between peripheral: Latvian artists of the Millennial generation versus the phenomenon of Post-Soviet nostalgia

The presentation will bring up topics such as how the phenomenon of post-soviet nostalgia has influenced Latvian artists of the Millenial generation, is this nostalgia just a social construct, or what has happened with these nostalgic connotations towards the Soviet era after February 24th 2022?

Diana Kněžínková (*1996) is a contemporary art curator who is a part of the independent curatorial platform 3Kurátorky. She graduated with a Master’s degree from the Faculty of Art and Design of the Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, where she continues her Ph.D. studies in Visual Communication. For the past six years, she has been researching the Latvian contemporary art scene focusing on female artists of the Millennial generation.

Geert LOVINK. From SCCA to Ukraine Support Campaigns: Unfinished Histories

In this presentation I will discuss Aaron Moulton’s two exhibits in Bucharest (2019) and Warsaw (2022) about the history of the Soros Contemporary Arts Network and compare this historical approach with the current solidarity efforts regarding Ukrainian artists, for instance through our Amsterdam-based Tactical Media Room and support efforts for the Kyiv Biennale scene.

Geert Lovink is a Dutch media theorist, internet critic and author of Uncanny Networks (2002), Dark Fiber (2002), My First Recession (2003), Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012), Social Media Abyss (2016), Organization after Social Media (with Ned Rossiter, 2018), Sad by Design (2019) and Stuck on the Platform (2022). He studied political science at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and received his PhD from the University of Melbourne. In 2004 he founded the Institute of Network Cultures (www.networkcultures.org) at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA). His centre organizes conferences, publications and research networks such as Video Vortex (online video), The Future of Art Criticism and MoneyLab (internet-based revenue models in the arts). Recent projects deal with digital publishing experiments, critical meme research, participatory hybrid events and precarity in the arts. From 2007-2018 he was media theory professor at the European Graduate School. In December 2021 he was appointed Professor of Art and Network Cultures at the UvA Art History Department. The Chair (one day a week) is supported by the HvA.

Stephen KOVATS. Deeper than Fake
Three decades after shifting into a seemingly new European or even global realm of quasi-
open cultures, of Gen Zeds enconced in TikToks and fuzzy slippers, speaking common global digital languages we suddenly become unsure … of everything. Yes, we have Trumpian fake news to scoff at, benign deep video fakes, along with the uncoverings of truly despical and criminal deeds with which to confront the nastist of conflict influencers in our own backyards. We’ve become experts on fact-checking, ground-truthing and EWER – Early Warning Early Response systems. But has the magnitude of political media left the artist behind? Are we overwhelmed? No, they must take us much further, much deeper, beyond the ‘fake’ …. into a realm of equivocal, essential truths – into new languages, new codes. And challenge the State. Now.

Stephen Kovats is a DEEP EUROPEan, founding co-director of the r0g_agency for open culture & critical transformation, a Berlin-based organisation applying open source technologies in post-conflict and rapid transformation regions. Previously artistic director of transmediale (Berlin), DEAF (Rotterdam) and ostranenie (Dessau) his current work with r0g_ includes peacebuilding, youth innovation and digital media development. His initatives such as #defyhatenow countering online incitement to violence, the #ASKnet Access to Skills and Knowledge network look to link critical making and digital culture as means to empower marginalised communities. In his spare time he exlpores Media Aesthetic Education Practices at the University of Darmstadt’s International Media Cultures programme. Tweet him @intertwilight or find him hanging around
https://openculture.agency

Andreas BROECKMANN. Three revisits to Deep Europe

Andreas Broeckmann is an art historian and curator who lives in Berlin. He is engaged in the research and documentation project Les Immateriaux Research at Leuphana University Lüneburg (2021-2024). He has been teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts, Leipzig (HGB – Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst) since 2017. He was the Artistic Director of the Leuphana Arts Program (2011-2016) and has curated exhibitions and festivals in major European venues, incl. transmediale and ISEA2010 RUHR. He has been taking care, together with Inke Arns, of the mailing lists Syndicate (1996-2001), and Spectre (since 2001).

Day 2: NATURECULTURES / NAIA – Naturally Artificial Intelligences Art

Anett HOLZHEID / Eva-Maria LOPEZ / Rasa SMITE / Blanca GIMÉNEZ / Daria MILLE / Gerardo NOLASCO-RÓZSÁS
Moderator: Anett HOLZHEID

Location: RIXC Gallery / Zoom

11:00 Anett HOLZHEID. Introducing NAIA – Naturally Artificial Intelligence Art association and Naturecultures Day
11:10 Eva-Maria LOPEZ. Natural Intelligence – Nature & Culture
11:30 Rasa SMITE. Art and Naturally Artificial Intelligences
11:50 Blanca GIMÉNEZ. Presenting Karlsruhe – UNESCO Media art cities network / city of media art visions and projects
12:00 Daria MILLE. SensUs: Augmented Explorations in Karlsruhe –
UNESCO Media Art City
Representatives from Karlsruhe UNESCO Creative Cities Network / City of Media Art
12:15 Gerardo NOLASCO-RÓZSÁS. Posteden: From Hominization To Posthumanism
12:30 Discussions

Anett Holzheid. NatureCultures – Introduction by Moderator
Anett Holzheid (DE) is a humanities and media scholar currently working as scientific consultant at ZKM | Karlsruhe. She has lectured in the fields of culture and media studies at several German universities. After completing two graduate programs and further studies in digital information analysis, she earned her PhD with a dissertation on the history of media culture. Her research interests and curatorial work include artistic environments with a focus on transdisciplinary relations between classical and emerging media art genres. She has conceptualized mediation formats at the intersections of art, science, civic participation, and collaborative engagement.

Eva-Maria LOPEZ. Natural intelligence
In our anthropocentrically and anthropocenically calibrated age, it is about time to switch and refocus our perspective and begin to learn thoroughly from the “intelligence” of nature. For decades, nature’s ability to survive through intelligent adaptive processes has either been ignored, or not yet been fully understood.
NAIA will support artistic creation and research, and encourage further creative interdisciplinary practices that strive to find and shape new contact zones between art and science, nature and technology, sustainable enterprises and social engagement in the 21st century.
In my own media art practice, processes of transformation and adjustment in relation to non-human visibility have come to play a prime role for many years. In the scope of my current project “we resist.” (2022) I analyse the extent to which plants are capable of surviving in our contemporary environments. Following Darwin’s theory of evolution, this project will address the ability of plants to develop strong resistance to “man made” herbicides in a very short period of time: tacitly growing resistance will appear on the scene – both in living gardens and on photographs.

Eva-Maria Lopez is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher working in Karlsruhe and Paris.
Her artwork is occupied with issues relating to nature, society and the
environment due to her double background in art and agriculture.

Daria Mille. Augmented Explorations in Karlsruhe – UNESCO Media Art City

„SensUs. Sensing and Experiencing NatureCultural Sites of Karlsruhe” is a pilot project of NAIA association in Karlsruhe. It has been conceived as an exhibition project that will use Augmented and Mixed Reality (AR/XR) tools for exploring specific “nature-cultural” sites in the city of Karlsruhe, and creating new artworks introducing “more-than-human” as the most inclusive and least anthropocentric perspective. The project is aiming at investigating the relations between the natural and urban environments, tracing historic and contemporary stories, visualizing the data (scientific, environmental, social etc.) and developing imaginative future visions. The project also aims to extend its local “nature-cultural” experiences and to discuss “more-than-human” discourses in a wider international context.

Daria Mille is currently a curator and research associate at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany. Her research interests focus especially on the topics related to the intersection of art, science, and technology (also from a historical perspective), cultural and artistic implications of digitization, and contemporary art. Most recently Daria Mille has curated and co-curated the following shows: “BioMedia. The Age of Media with Life-like Behavior” (2021/2022, at ZKM and Centre des Arts in Enghien-les-Bains, France), “Critical Zones. Observatories for Earthly Politics” (2020–2022 at ZKM and Goethe-Institutes in Mumbai), “Negative Space. Trajectories of Sculpture” (ZKM, 2019), “Hybrid Layers” (ZKM, 2017/2018), and others. She has been giving lectures internationally, is an author of several scientific essays and other publications, and serves as a member of various juries.

Gerardo NOLASCO-RÓZSÁS. POSTEDEN:
FROM HOMINIZATION TO POSTHUMANISM

Throughout its history, the apple tree has developed a diversity of symbioses with various species. In our species its fruit, besides being food, have been grafted into social imaginaries in symbolic ways — its meaning is different from place to place. In Nordic mythology it represents immortality. For the Celts, eating it gives wisdom and strength. In the Catholic religion, it is the fruit that was forbidden. In ancient Greece, it had more to do with eroticism and sexuality. Posteden, follows the story of 3 characters from 3 different historical periods – hominization, humanism and posthumanism. The apple emerges as a symbolic element of desire within Western culture and is the main axis that intertwines the stories and reflects upon the different modes by which human and non-human beings are made subjects. The project approaches the apple, by analysing its symbiosis with other agents in historical, contemporary, and speculative
contexts. As well as the instances in which these symbiotic systems are inserted into the social imaginaries in a symbolic way.

Gerardo Nolasco-Rózsás (*1975) is an artist, researcher, and independent publisher born in Mexico City. He uses many media in his artistic works, from painting to machine learning and datasets. His work has been exhibited at innumerable international galleries and museums, including the Centro Cultural de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City (MX), the Kunsthalle Budapest (HU), the Kunsthalle Basel (CH), the ZKM | Karlsruhe, and the 58th Biennale in Venice (IT). He lives and works in Karlsruhe.

Naturecultures: MORE-THAN-HUMAN (Parallel Session 1A)

Beatrice ZAIDENBERG (LIMB) / Ally BISSHOP / Annee MIRON / Theun KARELSE
Moderator: Anett HOLZHEID

Location: Zoom (Breakout Rooms) / RIXC Gallery.

(15 min presentation + 5 min for 1 question)

13:00 Beatrice ZAIDENBERG (LIMB). Hydrograhism – hydroecology as speculative writing
13:20 Ally BISSHOP. Mythopoesis, speculation, divination, vibration: artistic methods for human-spider communication.
13:40 Annee MIRON. Graslands
14:00 Theun KARELSE. Monster Code

Beatrice ZAIDENBERG (LIMB). Hydrograhism – hydroecology as speculative writing

The artist collective LIMB is a child of the pandemic. During the apex of videoconference and online collaborative whiteboards, Sam Kaufman, Margot Minnot-Thomas, Beatrice Zaidenberg and Juliette Pépin became eager to replenish their minds with challenging perspectives outside of their comfort zone and at the same time distance themselves from 2020 anxiety-driven uncertainties.
LIMB’s research and artistic practice are rooted in each member’s ongoing endeavour to counteract western obsessions in fixing nonhuman bodies. Fixations can consist of sealing/enprisoning non-humans in aseptic vitrines for an indefinite time or through enclosing taxonomic classification which speaks the language of abjection.
The fruitful diversions of LIMB’s discussions, frustrations, and friendship are visualised in their still-growing thinking map. As each of LIMB’s members started to build an island made of visual and linguistic points of departure, the work slowly grew into a map where navigating is only possible by constantly changing scales and perspectives. Once the sanitary situation allowed it, the collective decided to take those entangled syllables and collages into a physical exhibition which took place at the CCA Brighton in November 2021 And so, Hydrographic was born.
The exhibition was a collaborative effort of forming and drafting, rewriting, and erasing forms of (nonhuman) agency. Ultimately, the curatorial practice was rooted in a visual and bodily heterarchical network of knowledge transfer. Hydrographism is an outstanding example of how digital tools can start to work as sensitive surfaces, as inscribing agencies, and as archives. In the exhibition, each member’s individual contribution to the collective growing body of connections was represented by a physical vitrine. Visitors were invited to leave, bring and take objects that responded to the exhibition’s themes and public program. In this way, anyone could contribute to a living archive feeding into new eco-poetic methods of more-than-human kinship.

LIMB is a collective of artists, writers, researchers and curators based between the UK, France, and Germany. Through collaborative projects and individual practices, they share a pluridisciplinary approach and think through entangled issues surrounding ecologies, interspecies communication, nonhuman life-worlds, aesthetics and language. Research-as-practice and practice-as-research lie at the heart of their work, and they continually engage in direct and indirect co-creations with webs of nonhuman interdependence.

Network: https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_l9sO-dQ=/?share_link_id=429690487362
Brighton CCA exhibition: https://brightoncca.art/event/hydrographism

Ally BISSHOP. Mythopoesis, speculation, divination, vibration: artistic methods for human-spider communication.
This paper explores some affective, mythopoetic and speculative possibilities for interspecies communication with invertebrate animals via artistic mediations of encounters with web-building spiders. Specifically, it examines speculative forays into human-spider communication extending from artist Tomás Saraceno’s interdisciplinary Arachnophilia research: the spider jam sessions or human-spider concerts, and the arachnomancy or spider divination project. Spiders are abject figures of nonhuman otherness that index a relation to alterity; their queer behaviours, morphologies and sensorium underscore a seemingly impassable species and ontological divide – challenging the possibility of human-spider relation, let alone communication. This paper traces how sensory and affective attunements across thresholds of difference offer alternative frameworks for imagining ‘communication’ with creatures like spiders (and other invertebrates) with whom we do not share language, scales, temporalities, sensory capacities.
To think with, communicate with, invertebrate animals is a necessarily speculative endeavour. In investigating Saraceno’s speculative human-spider mediations, this paper traces their mythopoetic dimensions—how these experiments enrol worlding praxes that move between art, science and fabulation to offer propositions for thinking interspecies communication. Analysis of Saraceno’s artworks offers two alluring and overlapping propositions for affectively and radically mediating species and relational thresholds: vibration and divination; both of which are read as ‘techniques’ for producing shared knowledge at the blurred boundaries between reality and fiction, between seemingly non-communicating perceptual worlds. In turn, these techniques work to ‘radically mediate’ encounters with invertebrate others, opening up a relational threshold that does not simply link pre-existing bodies, but which produces and transforms human and nonhuman subjects in the generative event of their meeting. Saraceno’s interspecies encounters are theorised as mythopoetic interventions that aim at drawing forth the nonhuman within the human, and locating possibilities for attunement, resonance and ‘collective enunciation’ within.

Ally Bisshop (Ph.D. UNSW Art and Design 2018) is an artistic researcher whose work reaches across disciplines to critically and creatively explore the material, affective, ethical and relational thresholds between human and nonhuman. She is Lecturer at Griffith University Film School in Brisbane, Australia, and an active member of Tomás Saraceno’s transdisciplinary Arachnophilia research project – which uses the figure of the web-building spider to explore ecological possibilities for interspecies relation.

Annee MIRON. Graslands
The grasslands ecological community of Australia’s Victorian Volcanic Plain is classified as Critically Endangered. Less than 2% remains compared to the late 18th century time of European invasion. And many of their unique species of plants and animals are on the brink of extinction.
The garden at our apartment block was lifeless. When the wind blew nothing moved. The European trees were dying and the flat plane of lawn was ruled by couch grass and oxalis. So around 2017, I began a grasslands garden. As it grew, it changed the reasons others chose to live here.
And it changed me. It generated connections. Soon I recognised it was a major artwork.
The materials are our living others: plants and animals, the weather, the earth, the cast of shadows, our relationships, our histories, our learning, and the knowledge expressed between species. I started changing the garden in 2008, soon after I arrived. I tried broad brush strokes. Abstractions of one or two species. Often they all died. Then I observed that they like to have certain friends around to thrive. And so the indigenous grasslands found their way back. Its making and unmaking are both seasonal and perpetual objects. Always complete and always leading me to the next connection. Its essential diversity expresses strength, resilience, and hope.

Annee Miron is a visual artist based on the unceded First Nations lands of the Woi Wurrung and Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin nation, Australia. Her practice uses found materials to create artworks that express our relationships with plants and places.

Theun Karelse. Monster Code
“Monster refers to the power of human imagination, Code refers to encoding information through narrative strategies.

This talk gives an overview of experiments with encoding knowledge directly into landscape, indigenous moral geographies and landscape as memory-palace.

For most of human evolution the vast volume of cultural and environmental insight needed to thrive and indeed survive were passed on without written texts or databases. This was done in many ways in many different contexts, but it is hard to overstate how important the narrative structures were that consolidated knowledge across generations. These practices were universal, also in European contexts, but have been so thoroughly forgotten that there is no name for them.

MonsterCode is particularly interested in situations where immaterial cultural heritage is ‘stored’ directly into the landscape itself. Through hands-on experimentation this talk explores the different ways in which mental landscapes can be constructed, how different kinds of ‘data’ can be organised to form rich mental landscapes. For thousands (if not ten-thousands) of years landscape gave structure to thinking. Long walking lines formed central indexes connecting vast knowledge sets. The land even acted to some as a framework for moral guidance. Mental landscapes change the structure of thought. Representing knowledge holistically in a single space or collection of lines enable the practitioner to see patterns and relationships in ways writing can’t. Through narratives the landscape gains an entire layer of life. When applied to land, it gains a permanence that may rival any library. With evidence of narratives retaining knowledge over 8000 years.

Many theorists speak about what would constitute a more-than human culture. This talk explores it as a practice. This is applied animism; what happens if you start to infuse your own living environment with an entire layer of animism, where streets, rivers, stones, swamps, or beaches become part of your mental landscape. Animism is often dismissed as superstition, instead of seeing it as a vital means of consolidating crucial cultural knowledge and indeed wisdom.

This talk also explores experiments with the power of characters within knowledge-keeping narratives. In many cultures throughout time, mythical beings (monsters) have served to warn and protect, influencing our behaviour and carrying moral force.

A modern day example: the adjustment of a state highway in 2008 so as not to disturb a Taniwha (a water monster, often a warning against danger and acting de facto as super-natural spokesperson and protector of an important local resource) living in an ecologically important swamp near a bend in a river. Other examples include Iceland and Ireland. This talk closes with and exploration of the roles of monsters in an uncertain and changing world.

Theun Karelse (NL) studied fine-arts at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam before joining FoAM, a distributed group of transdisciplinary laboratories operating at the interstices of art, science, nature and everyday life. Theun’s interests and experimental practice explore edges between art, environment, technology and archaeology. He practices and supports ecosystem and landscape regeneration in Europe, India and Afrika. His outdoor studio consists of gardens that serve as testing grounds for urban biodiversity, climate adaptation and indigenous knowledge systems. Theun is a board member of the Embassy of the Earth and part of the Future of the Delta team at the Embassy of the Northsea.

Naturecultures: TERRESTRIAL COEXISTENCES (Parallel Session 1B)

Christina STADLBAUER / Marjan DE MEY / Leni VAN GOIDSENHOVEN / Maija DEMITERE / Christina VINKE / Juan DUARTE
Moderator: Daria MILLE

Location: Zoom (Breakout Rooms) / RIXC Gallery.

(15 min presentation + 5 min for 1 question)

Christina STADLBAUER, Marjan DE MEY, Leni VAN GOIDSENHOVEN. BactoHealing – A Novel Interpretation of The Concept of Healing By Interweaving Science, Philosophy and Art
Maija DEMITERE. Food and Art.
Christina VINKE. Homo Deus

Christina STADLBAUER, Marjan DE MEY, Leni VAN GOIDSENHOVEN. BactoHealing – A Novel Interpretation of The Concept of Healing By Interweaving Science, Philosophy and Art
BactoHealing is an interdisciplinary research project which draws on ‘Kin Tsugi’, an ancient Japanese technique to fix ceramics with gold or silver. Remarkable for this transformative repair technique is that it aestheticizes the traces of the cracks and the repair or healing process itself. With our project BactoHealing we propose to mend cracks with the help of microorganisms: Bacteria and fungi are engineered for the task of growing a solid bond that mimics “scar tissue” over the fracture. The investigation is a multidisciplinary hands-on quest for applied science (i.e. Engineering of an adhesive or a scar tissue) and simultaneously opens an inquiry around the ethics of cutting-edge synthetic biology (i.e.Sustainable lab practices / deciding over microorganisms’ manipulation or death at any given moment) and the meaning and possibilities of healing processes (i.e. What can we learn from microorganisms about healing?).
For this contribution, I focus on the importance of including philosophical considerations in the development of a scientific investigation. This is not a self-evident practice and demands for a trans-disciplinary approach. In the project, the ethics is not an afterthought nor a side note: As BactoHealing works with the ethics of recovery and healing, it is significant that we ask how to include bioethics as part of the scientific methodology itself. Instead of results, the focus of my presentation lies on the unfolding of a work in progress and the process of generating new knowledge and creating artworks linked with science.

Maija DEMITERE. Food and Art
The presentation briefly investigates and describes the history of food representation in visual arts and performances (The Futurist Cookbook), and how it is paralleled to technological developments. After looking at an anthology of selected works, I will share my own research in food and sustainability and how, in my view, it can perfectly illustrate human behaviour and contemporary views on nature and ecology. In my research I’m investigating the human-animal, the emotional, spoiled, egotistical and instinct driven creature that is poisoning the planet. My goal is to find patterns and ways how to change the habits of this human-animal, to promote more sustainable lifestyle choices on a local and global scale.

Maija Demitere is a new media artist and researcher working in the field of slow media art and deep sustainability. Her focus is food production, everyday eating habits, gardening, and the role of nature and environment in the lives of contemporary people living in cities.

Christina VINKE. Homo Deus
Aesthetics is sensual cognition. You can only know what you experience yourself. Science says that plants grow better when you speak to them. Therefore, an experiment was carried out with two jars of cress in a controlled scientific environment. The general conditions to which the cress was exposed were constantly monitored. The book “Facing Gaia” by Bruno Latour was read to one jar over a period of seven days while the other jar was exposed to silence. Every day, the cress growth was measured.
Bruno Latour states in his publication “Facing Gaia”, that there is the domain of culture and that of nature, “domains that are at once distinct and impossible to separate completely.” By saying this, Bruno Latour refers to the Gaia hypothesis created by the microbiologist Lynn Margulis and the chemist, biophysicist and medical scientist James Lovelock in mid-1960. The Gaia hypothesis states that the globe and its biosphere can be observed as a living organism, insofar the biosphere creates and sustains living conditions and the evolution of complex organisms. This leads to various interferences between nature and culture, between technological interventions and the globe’s ecosystem. This artistic experiment using controlled isolated scientific environments in order to understand and analyse our strongly interconnected world raises questions about the meaning, limits, ambiguities, reliability and general truth of science.

Christina Vinke lives and works in Karlsruhe, Germany. In her interdisciplinary and multimedial artistic research and practices she deals mostly with the means of human perception.

Juan Duarte Regino is a Ph.D. artist-researcher at Aalto University, working with environmental sound to explore sensing in-between nature and technology. Juan is interested in developing methods for augmented listening, which combine machine learning with remote sensing. To explore how computers could deep-listen to expand human sensory. His proposal attempts to redefine human and machine listening from a manifold worldview. His work comprises lectures, workshops, and sound interventions.

Naturecultures: NEW ECOSOPHIES (Parallel Session 2A)

Ricardo DAL FARRA / Maite CAJARAVILLE / Lívia NOLASCO-RÓZSÁS / Marthin ROZO / Juan Felipe SEHUANES / Caroline ELGH
Moderator: Eva-Maria LOPEZ

Location: Zoom (Breakout Rooms) / RIXC Gallery

(15 min presentation + 5 min / 1-2 questions)

Ricardo DAL FARRA. Balance-Unbalance: Ecology, ArtScience, and Citizenship.
Maite CAJARAVILLE. VEXTRE, Augmenting the Rural Reality
Lívia NOLASCO-RÓZSÁS. Beyond Matter
Marthin ROZO, Juan Felipe SEHUANES. BAT EXPERIENCE Pollination Through Sound
Caroline ELGH. Tracing environmental imaginaries in contemporary art

Ricardo DAL FARRA. Balance-Unbalance: Ecology, ArtScience, and Citizenship.

Traditional disaster management approaches are insufficient to deal with the current problems and rising risks.
New forms of collaboration are needed to inspire people and organizations to link knowledge with action.

Artists could inspire new explorations and contribute with innovative perspectives and critical thinking to actively
participate in solving some of our major challenges, such as the spiraling environmental crisis. We need to develop
creative ways to facilitate a paradigm shift toward a sustainable tomorrow. Creative thinking, innovative tools, and
transdisciplinary actions could produce perceptual, intellectual, and pragmatic changes.

One initiative that aims to use the media arts as a catalyst, with the intent of generating a deeper awareness and
creating lasting intellectual working partnerships to face the many facets of the environmental crisis, is the Balance-Unbalance international project. Balance-Unbalance conferences have been held in Colombia, the US, The Netherlands, Argentina, Canada, and the UK since 2010, on top of international exhibitions, online multidisciplinary
gatherings with experts from many different fields, and an Art & Climate University Chair recently launched.

By bringing people from different sectors of our society to think together, and facilitate symbiotic and
transdisciplinary collaborative project developments, Balance-Unbalance and its associated initiatives (‘art! climate’ and EChO), are turning feasible to connect artistic creation, scientific research, and tangible tools for
change. https://www.facebook.com/balanceunbalance

Dr. Dal Farra is professor of electronic arts and music at Concordia University, Canada and director of the electronic arts research centre CEIARTE-UNTREF, Argentina. He is Founder of the international symposia Balance-Unbalance (BunB) and Understanding Visual Music (UVM). Dal Farra has been director of Hexagram in Canada, coordinator of the Multimedia Communication national program of the Federal Ministry of Education in Argentina, and researcher of UNESCO, France, for its project Digi-Arts. He designed university and high school programs on art-science.
Ricardo created the Latin American Electroacoustic Music Collection hosted by the Daniel Langlois Foundation, Canada. He is a board member of ISEA International. Dal Farra is a composer and artist specialized in transdisciplinary actions with science and emergent technologies.

Maite CAJARAVILLE. VEXTRE, Augmenting the Rural Reality
“Some Spanish regions are facing serious problems of depopulation in rural areas, just like other European Union countries. After decades of new extractivism, blind faith in growth and an intentional concentration of services and opportunities for progress in urban areas, the countryside emerges as a place where living meaningful and healthy lives is still possible. In this context, art and culture seem to be the best way to overcome the dichotomy.

Maite Cajaraville, Spanish pioneer on new media art, was born in one of these emptied European regions, Extremadura. Combining this personal approach with her social and political vision, she started this data based electronic art project in 2017 to draw attention to rural communities and ultra-capitalism inequities.

From an exhaustive investigation of a variety of socioeconomic data of the municipalities of a region, Cajaraville generates physical and virtual three-dimensional sculptures. A 3D printer is used to create the physical ceramic piece, while the virtual piece is presented in augmented reality. In both physical and virtual sculptures, increases represent positive coefficients and depressions negative factors such as depopulation, female unemployment or other forms of inequality.

The project adopted the name VEXTRE in 2021, following a solo exhibition at the MEIAC Museum (Badajoz, Spain), but it was actually born five years ago as an invitation to talk about the rural world and its conditioning factors, but also about the new ruralities as a green territory of recovery, beauty, talent, culture, care and collaboration.

It started with data from the Spanish region of Extremadura, but its interoperability allows it to keep evolving locally and internationally. On February 19, 2022, the translation of VEXTRE’s modus operandi to the Portuguese region of Alentejo was presented under the name of ALVEX in an individual exhibition at the Art and Culture Centre of the Eugénio de Almeida Foundation (Évora, Portugal), where the two sculptures created from socioeconomic data of this region and the two created for VEXTRE Extremadura can be seen together until August.

In Autumn 2021, the project started building its own textual narratives, a digital community and a conversation on rural culture and future, taking sustainable development goals as a compass.

Beautiful Aesthetics is inherent to VEXTRE by its artistic condition, but it goes beyond, as it has been built on fostering and showing the beauty that emerges from data.

Data visualisation reaches a beautiful, functional and innovative dimension through VEXTRE’s pieces. Natalia Piñuel, curator of the instances to date, Extremadura (Spain) and Alentejo (Portugal), has called them “”sculptures of the future””. José Alberto Ferreira, co-curator of the Portuguese exhibition, named them “oracles”, underlining the powerful atmosphere that those ceramic pieces cause in the audience, an almost magical environment that the company of the virtual extensions does not break, but even intensifies, bringing people an impactive experience.

As cryptic as the oracles of bygone times, the sculptures speak of each region’s raw materials, its demographic profile and its economic constraints, presenting the territory in an eloquent three-dimensional form. They show large amounts of information at first glance but then attract people to get closer to the details, both aesthetic and informative, that the volumes and textures of their highs and lows convey. Since these ups and downs represent the well-being and discomfort of the municipalities in the region under study, it can be said that both the ethics and the aesthetics of data make the sculptures an example of rare beauty.

As with an oracle, it is not the answers that matter, but rather what we do with them. From the outset, the opportunity the visitor is presented with for doing away with stereotypes and preconceived ideas about the territory is remarkably functional and effective in political terms.

In addition, the combination of ceramics and augmented reality creates a landscape where rural communities meet technology. Crafts merge with the most advanced art, drawing the union of raw materials and virtual elements and highlighting the inherent beauty of the coexistence of tech and nature when one is used to preserve the other.

Sustainable, inter-operable. The rural network.
As a pioneering artistic project, VEXTRE undertakes several challenges in terms of sustainability.

VEXTRE ensures its sustainable growth over the time. Its interoperability allows the project to instance itself along the EU rural communities, empowering rural areas to work together for a fairer society and a more sustainable lifestyle.

It uses free technologies and Creative Commons licensing. The 3D ceramic printer manufacturing and processes, the datasets and the methodology are published in the digital realm. This way, the project advances a path and gives a wink at the development of more local, sustainable, inclusive and innovative industries, as well as a model of creative based entrepreneurship.

As for social return on investment, VEXTRE encourages co-design and facilitates a dialogue among rural communities through digital tools and cultural mediators. To date, there have been more than 20 activities around the project that can be seen as a call to action to reduce inequalities and prejudices, awakening rural communities with a message about the urgency of taking care of natural resources to preserve the next generation’s future.

Besides, VEXTRE’s sculptures are printed in ceramic, a traditional non-polluting material that connects art with environmental sustainability.

The rural digital community.
VEXTRE itself is aiming to be a starting point to achieve the inclusion of rural territories and to overcome the rural-urban dichotomy as a factor of inequality, widening the gap between wealth and poverty and the unequal access to quality education.

A series of narratives that facilitate dialogue and drive the audience to share a collective exercise of critical thinking emerge through the pieces. The audience’s reflection is also promoted on social media, re-published and cheered/followed by the digital cultural mediators. Each individual feels that his or her opinion has the same value as the others do, generating a space and a time of respect, empathy and a feeling of belonging. The data flows by using the same pathways that define cultural transmission, through affective, community, social and educational processes, thus building identity.

At the same time, the project reformulates internalised prejudices about rural territories by linking them with a technological and advanced image that interferes with traditional patterns of backwardness. This happens not just as part of its electronic art condition. VEXTRE also proposes a hybrid augmented reality display that interacts with the community through any mobile device. Each piece has its own website and a specific augmented reality filter, also available through Instagram. This set enables people to visualise the socio-economic data, experience for themselves the visual capabilities of augmented reality and include the virtual piece in their photos, encouraging reflection on the territory and rekindling a sense of belonging by allowing them to walk their region around the world or place it in their most everyday spaces or with their loved ones. By breaking the museums’ limits, Cajaraville advances other possible formats for art exhibitions that go beyond the classic white cube.

VEXTRE provides the community with artworks that everyone can take on their mobile phones, bringing art closer even to citizens living in remote rural areas.”

Here you can find a text in English about the project:
https://info.vextre.org/vextre-data-based-electronic-art-promotes-conversation-about-rural-reality/

More links:
https://alvex.vextre.org/
https://vextre.org/
https://info.vextre.org/in-english/

Instagram: where we collect people’s participation
https://www.instagram.com/vextre_extremadura/

Facebook: Vextre, augmenting the rural reality
@VEXTRE
https://www.facebook.com/VEXTRE

For the last ten years Maite Cajaraville has combined being an artist and a creative in the field of the new media. Master of Fine Arts in Contemporary Art Theory and Practice from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Graduate degree in Computing (Madrid, 1991-93). She completed her multidisciplinary training in the Frankfurt School of Visual Arts (Germany, 1993-96) thanks to a “Pépinières européennes” grant.

Studied at the “Städelschule für Bildende Kunst” in Frankfurt under the artists and teachers Peter Weibel and Thomas Bayrle’s guidance, and specialized in interdisciplinary art, video-creation and digital art.

Among her most outstanding exhibitions are:
The Swimmer”, Centro Pompidou de Málaga, produced by MEIAC in 2006; BerlinFest, Berlin; Kunstverein de Frankfurt; ISIS- Symmetry, Washington D.C.; ARSLAB, Torino; New Europe, Venice Bienal, La Zitella; “Flux of Influences”, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; “UPDATE”, international multimedia festival in Copenhagen European Cultural Capital; “V Cyberconf” Fundación Arte y Tecnología, Telefónica, Madrid; Advanced Music Festival Sónar, Museo Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona; Art Futura, Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid; Hannover 2000, comisioned by José Lebrero and Ricardo Echevarría; Mad’01, Madrid; Mediarama, Sevilla; “Todo fluye: Infografía española”, Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid… Internationally her artwork has been displayed largely world wide, along EU, South America, Russia Cameroon, Taiwan,…

Lívia NOLASCO-RÓZSÁS. Beyond Matter
Beyond Matter is an international, collaborative, practice-based research project that takes cultural heritage and culture in development to the verge of virtual reality. It does this by reflecting on the virtual condition with a specific emphasis on its spatial aspects in art production, curating, and mediation via numerous activities and formats, including the digital revival of selected past landmark exhibitions, art and archival exhibitions, conferences, artist residency programs, an online platform, and publications. This common undertaking seeks to engage with a contemporary shift—largely attributable to the rapid development and ubiquitous presence and use of computation and information technology—in the production and mediation of visual art within institutional frameworks.
The shift is seismic, and it is leading to a condition that may be summarised as “the virtual.” If the postmodern condition was a “crisis of narratives,” as Jean-François Lyotard put it, the virtual condition reflects a crisis of dichotomies. Its analysis suggests that dichotomies are losing their validity: presence and absence, physical and computer-generated, real and simulated. The artificially generated increasingly dominates our reality, intertwines the physical with the virtual, and skews the linearity of time. This has extensive implications for the spatial aspects of curating and mediating visual arts, as well as their reception. The museum transmogrified into a hybrid entity integrating a geographical location with various digital platforms; instead of one there is an affluence of exhibition spaces, an extended but also porous system of multiple dimensions.

Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás has been curating and co-curating exhibitions at contemporary and media art institutions internationally, among other countries in China, Germany, Hungary, India, Latvia, Poland, Slovakia, Sweden, etc. since 2006. These events have fostered dialogues between different geographical locations focusing on the constantly changing media of contemporary art and intersections with various disciplines. She initiated and developed thematic exhibitions raising various questions such as the genealogy and social impact of planetary computation and computer code, electronic surveillance and democracy, functions and processes of science in relation to automated economy, mediated visions of built environments, and synesthetic perception related to integration of minority groups in contemporary art mediation. Although her activity has mainly been affiliated with two institutions, Kunsthalle Budapest and ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, she curated exhibitions at institutions such as Chronus Art Center Shanghai, Arsenal Gallery Białystok, Badischer Kunstverein Karlsruhe, Energy Museum Vilnius, Kunsthalle Zilina, National Library of Latvia, Tallinn Art Hall, Trafó House of Contemporary Arts Budapest.

Marthin ROZO. Juan Felipe SEHUANES. BAT EXPERIENCE Pollination Through Sound
In BAT EXPERIENCE you have the opportunity to embody the Lesser Long-Nosed bat, a resident of the deserts of Central and North America and perceive this arid landscape through active echolocation. Your goal is to use your new senses to find the plants you like to feed on! With the help of virtual reality, we visualise the ‘acoustic image’ bats create when using echolocation and offer a glimpse to their amazing world from a non-human perspective. This immersive experience seeks to generate awareness and fascination for these winged inhabitants of this ecosystem and thereby promote conservation.

Bats use active echolocation to perceive the world around them, which, different to all of our senses, is an active way of sensing. This is especially difficult to understand from a human perspective since all our senses work passively. We do not need to send anything to the environment to see or hear. On the other hand, bats are in constant communication with their environment by sending calls and waiting for the returning echoes. From this acoustic way of perception, some plants have exploited different strategies to reflect the ultrasound more clearly and thereby attract these winged mammals. Hundreds of years of coexistence were needed to achieve a sophisticated form of communication, between the vocal-auditory organs of the bat and the sexual organs of the plant. Living together and shaping each other.
This collaboration in art and biology aims to make both visible and interactive, the acoustic communication between pollinating bats and the plants they feed on.

Marthin Rozo is a Colombian multimedia artist who works and researches on the intersection between art and biology for the conservation and recognition of biodiversity. He is a PhD Candidate in Artistic Research at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and received his MA in Art & Science in the same university with recognition from the city of Vienna for his Master’s Thesis. His work has been shown internationally. He lives and works in Vienna, Austria.

Here you can take a look at the demo video:
https://vimeo.com/683994859
Password: Bat2022

Juan Felipe Sehuanes is a Biologist who was born and raised in Colombia. Today he lives
in Germany, where he works as a Data Scientist. He is also currently finishing his PhD in acoustic communication of bats and is a genuine enthusiast of promoting Science and Research that reaches the general audience

Caroline ELGH. Tracing environmental imaginaries in contemporary art

We are living in an era of environmental degradation and species loss where humans urgently need to find new ways of imagining the world we inhabit. In this conference paper I seek to acknowledge the oceanic, and more specifically algal, turn within contemporary visual art and its capabilities to invoke Chthulucene types of environmental imaginaries at the edge of the Baltic Sea. Imagination is here understood as a site of interplay between material and perceptual worlds; a way of seeing, sensing, thinking and dreaming the formation of knowledge (Yusoff and Gabrys 2011). With the Chuthulucene, Donna Haraway introduces “multispecies assemblages” to envision possible survival and calls for a situated and embodied knowledge approach that reclaims vision to unpack the complex planetary entanglements, interdependences and interconnections (Haraway 2015). Thinking through art, feminism, science fiction and the concept of Chthulucene types of environmental imaginaries I seek to spin intricate algal threads between various environmental pasts and futures with an invitation to dive deep and think differently. By way of this naturalcultural understanding of current environmental challenges, how can art imagine alternative futures or worlds we might choose to live in?

Caroline Elgh is an art curator and PhD researcher in gender studies at Linköping University, Sweden. Her research and curatorial work explore cultural imaginaries, postdisciplinary processes and art-science collaborations, with main emphasis on visual artists working with environmental and speculative fiction themes. Previously as a curator at Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm she organized group exhibitions such as Cosmological Arrows and NewMaterialism.

Naturecultures: ECO-FEMINISM / SOCIO-ECOLOGICAL JUSTICE
(Parallel Session 2B)

Meghan Moe BEITIKS / Taguhi TOROSYAN / Stefanie WUSCHITZ / Patricia J. REIS / Aurora DEL RIO / Time's Up
Moderator: Beatrice ZAIDENBERG (tbc.

Location: Zoom (Breakout Rooms) / RIXC Gallery.

(15 min presentation + 5 min / 1-2 questions)

Meghan Moe BEITIKS. Performing Resilience for Systemic Pain
Taguhi TOROSYAN, Stefanie WUSCHITZ, Patricia J. REIS. Feminist Hardware: Building Technoecofeminist Circuits As An Artistic Practice
Raphael ARAR. An Ecological Oracle
Aurora DEL RIO. Longing contaminated realities
Time’s Up. There is no author: Co-creation of intertwined future scenarios, embodied and experienced.
Juan DUARTE. Sensing and forecasting atmospheric soundscapes

Meghan Moe BEITIKS. Performing Resilience for Systemic Pain
How might performance serve as a means for facing ubiquitous trauma and pain, in humans and ecologies?

While reflecting on her multidisciplinary work Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience, artist Meghan Moe Beitiks considers bodies of knowledge in Trauma Theory, Intersectional Feminist Philosophy, Ecology, Disability Studies, New Materialism, Object-Oriented Ontology, Gender Studies, Artistic Research, Psychology, Performance Studies, Social Justice, Performance Philosophy, Performance Art, and a series of first-person interviews in an attempt to answer that question. Beitiks brings us through the first-person process of making the work and the real-life, embodied encounters with the theories explored within it as an expansion of the work itself. Facing down difficult issues like trauma, discrimination, and the vulnerability of the body, Beitiks looks to commonalities across species and disciplines as means of developing resilience and cultivating communities. Rather than paint a picture of glorious potential utopias, Beitiks takes a hard look at herself as an embodiment of the values explored in the work, and stays with the difficult, sucky, troubling, work to be done.

“Performing Resilience for Systemic Pain” is a vulnerable book about the quiet presence and hard look needed to shift systems away from their oppressive, destructive realities. For “Splintered Realities,” Beitiks would read a selection from the book, published by Routledge in 2022. https://www.routledge.com/Performing-Resilience-for-Systemic-Pain/Beitiks/p/book/9780367469580

Meghan Moe Beitiks works with associations and disassociations of culture/nature/structure. She analyzes perceptions of ecology though the lenses of site, history, emotions, and her own body in order to produce work that analyzes relationships with the non-human. The work emerges as video, performance, installation, writing or photography depending on what arises from her process of research and improvisation.

She received her BA in Theater Arts from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she studied playwriting, acting, movement and scenic design. She has an MFA in Performance Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied Bio Art, Social Practice, Environmental Chemistry, and performance methodologies.

Taguhi TOROSYAN, Stefanie WUSCHITZ, Patricia J. REIS
The current paper explores strategies and methods for empathic, eco-sentient, de-colonial and anti-racist electronic circuits for artistic purposes. The paper presents a work-in-progress on Feminist Hacking: Building Circuits as an Artistic Practice, an international art-based research project commissioned by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and hosted by the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. It proposes a strategy and method for empathic, eco-sentient, de-colonial and anti-racist action in the field of art, science and technology. Feminist hacking involves an intensive knowledge-sharing process, through workshops and other forms of exchange. Building upon the legacy of cyberfeminist and technofeminst discourses and practices and extending them further into a new materialist, posthuman and feminist ethical grounds in the form of technoecofeminist hacking, we propose a model of ‘feminist hardware.’ The paper describes the development, prototyping, testing and analysis of diffractive art practices with technologies and shares specific tools for media art-making grounded in fair practices of hardware production and its future open access and modification (licensed as open hardware).

Stefanie Wuschitz works at the intersection of art, research and technology, with a particular focus on feminism, open source technology and peer production. 2006 She graduated from the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Transmediale Kunst) with honours. 2008 she completed her Master’s at TISCH School of the arts at NYU and became Digital Art Fellow at Umeå University in Sweden. 2009 she founded the feminist hackerspace Mz* Baltazar’s Laboratory in Vienna, encouraging art and technology that is developed from a female perspective. In 2014 she finished her PhD with the title ‘Feminist Hackerspaces. A Research on Feminist Space Collectives in Open Culture’ at the Vienna University of Technology.

Patrícia J. Reis (b. 1981, Lisbon, PT) is an installation media artist based in Vienna (AT) whose practice encompasses different formats and media to examine our relationship with modern technology. Through an ongoing investigation that destabilizes the boundaries between science, technology, magic and spiritual beliefs, she explores the questions “How do we believe in machines?” and “How technology is shaping us bodily?”. In her complex installations, she often appeals to the visitor’s sensoriality in an intimate and sensual way, encouraging them to become active participants. Seeking to subvert visuality as a primary mode of experience, she plays with technology as a means to expand and stimulate corporeal perceptions in the viewer. Inspired by Media theory and Cybernetics, Reis analyses similar modus operandi among humans and machines, such as program, system and automatism, suggesting the human body as such, and playing around with its own sensorial mechanisms. Her work becomes distinctive in the contemporary art scene by combining such disparate imagery, with contrasting media (painting, sculpture, photography, video, interactive systems) and materials (paper, resin, styrofoam, wood, metal, foam, textile).

She studied Painting (ESAD, Superior School of Art and Desing, Caldas da Rainha Portugal, 2004), Media Art (Master program at the Lusófona University, Lisbon, Portugal, 2011), and she holds a PhD in Art (University of Évora, Portugal, 2016).

Reis was a fellow researcher from the National Science Technology Foundation of Portugal (2011-2015). From 2006 to 2012, she was lecturing Photography, Video and Digital Arts at the Polytechnic Institute of Beja, Portugal, as a full-time Assistant Professor. Currently, she is a post-doc researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (AT) within the framework of the art-based research titled “”Feminist hacking: building circuits as an artistic practice”” and she is a Lecturer at the Digital Arts Department of the University of Applied Arts in Vienna (AT), and at the Media Design department of the Art University in Linz, (AT). Currently, she is also a guest post-doc researcher at the Weizenbaum Institut at TU in Berlin. Since 2012 Reis has been offering workshops, exhibitions, and talks, locally and internationally (Brussels, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Madrid, San Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and San Francisco).

Taguhi Torosyan is an artist, curator and researcher based in Vienna, Austria. She is working at the intersection of hacker/maker cultures, feminist new materialisms, relational art and pedagogy, and posthuman ecologies. She is a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

She has contributed to conferences and symposia as a chair, coordinator and speaker, including New Materialist Informatics – University of Kassel, 2021, Politics of the Machines – POM Berlin 2021, Transfeminist Hacking Symposium: Spaces, Communities, Practices 2019, POM-EVA Copenhagen / Aalborg University 2018, RE:TRACE International Conference for Histories of Media Art, Science
and Technology / Department of Image Science, DUK and Austrian Academy of Sciences 2017, and International Summer Seminars for Art Curators in 2010.”

Raphael ARAR. An Ecological Oracle
An Ecological Oracle seeks to turn the gallery into a microcosm of the social dynamics of our impending climate catastrophe. The installation engages participants in game-like dynamics wherein they will need to self-organise throughout the exhibition to maintain the dynamic equilibrium of the system. The work hinges on a sculptural component consisting of two beakers that serve as a metaphor for planetary boundaries. One beaker is full of water and represents the available water supply on the planet, while the other begins empty. Nested within it is a smaller beaker full of red-dyed liquid, representing the tipping point of climate change. As participants enter the space, the system monitors the degradation of its calibrated constraints. Deviations from these calibrated levels impact the system accordingly. As values exceed limits, water flows from the full beaker to the empty one and vice versa, its rate of flow corresponding to the magnitude of deviations. At a certain threshold, the once empty beaker hits its tipping point, and red-dyed liquid taints the water supply. As a result, any collective effort by participants in the space to combat deleterious effects becomes futile. A multimedia visualisation accompanies the installation providing real-time feedback and an estimate of climate collapse. Will a participant’s sense of individualism and entitlement supersede their concern for the collective and future generations?

Raphael Arar works at the nexus of complex systems, transdisciplinary design and arts-based research. His work highlights the social, political and economic implications of technological acceleration and human-to-machine interaction. His artwork has been exhibited at venues internationally including the ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Moscow Museum of Applied Art, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Gamble House Museum, Boston Cyberarts Gallery, and Athens Video Art Festival. Notable commissions include Noema Magazine, Goethe Institut, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, Intel Labs and IBM Research. Commercially, his design work has been featured in publications including Forbes, TED, Inc. Magazine, FastCompany, Wired and others.

Aurora DEL RIO. Longing contaminated realities
We live in an environment soaked with different forms of contamination. During the Russian/Ukrainian conflict, we have fearfully witnessed the overtake of military nuclear infrastructures in the context of the possible beginning of an atomic war, where radioactive contamination could have easily spread all over the planet. But when considering contamination as a wider concept, one which also denotes a form of interrelation/co-existence of apparently unrelated entities, we are reminded that contamination itself cannot be characterised only by negative assumptions. I propose that there is indeed a longing for contamination, which lies perhaps underneath humans’ attraction to radioactive power. Perhaps what is at stake is not fully acknowledged by the usual means of finding answers. Perhaps looking at ancient myths and symbolic images could help human consciousness to make sense of the actual state of the world, to be able to re-imagine possible futures. Thinking of contamination as entangled in symbolic images and thought forms, I propose to explore this idea also through my artistic work which is based on the re-creation of ritualistic practices, as a way of looking for a form of embodied knowledge.

Aurora Del Rio is a multidisciplinary artist and Ph.D. candidate at Aalto University, based in Helsinki. She holds a BA in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts Bologna, and an MFA in Creative Practice from Transart Institute Berlin/New York. Her artistic practice investigates the relationship between humans and nature and how the perception of contaminated spaces influences the creation of reality. She is interested in the space of potentiality that originates when definition is avoided or misplaced, and the liminal space of failure.

Time’s Up. Co-creation of intertwined future scenarios, embodied and experienced.
It’s 2047. We missed the bus. Dropped the ball. Mumbled the punchline. In 2022 every indicator points towards a future where we do not meet the Paris goals. What if? What if we don’t (from that future: we didn’t), but then we pick up the ball and started playing a different game? What if the dystopia of ecological collapse in the forests and oceans, significant sea level rise, mass extinctions and weather extremes were to be embraced by a socio-political utopic vision?
The Turnton series of experiential future fragments looks at an imagined coastal European city in 2047, imagining life where most of the oceanic life is part of the “Rise of the Slime,” algal blooms belch toxic gasses and the bees have all but disappeared. Migration has become a part of life, Radical Recycling is normal and fossil fuels are contraband. The world is cultivated with seaweed a part of urban planning and jellyfish on the menu; all agriculture is regenerative and all technology is appropriate. And still we fall in and out of love.
I hear futures and I forget. I see futures and I remember. I do futures and I understand.
We will discuss the visions and signals, developments and speculations that make up the Turnton world, the processes of co-creating this massively multi-authored future storyworld, the Mut zur Lücke (courage of the gap) and the immersive experience of being in a possible future. Each Turnton fragment is an Experiential Future Physical Narrative. Each fragment is an intertwining of human, mechanical and natural systems. Turnton does not predict, but proposes. Turnton has no answers, but offers many questions. Turnton is about everyday life in a new world; the process is a social dreaming; the goal is curiosity, encouraging us all to hang around to find out how our story carries on and be part of that ongoing co-authoring and co-composition process process. Given that the future is nothing more or less than a giant speculative fiction that we are co-writing together; we would like to claim that we had better start sharing our first (and second) drafts so we can write a better story together. Future is a verb. And a skill. We need our exercise.

Time’s Up is a cultural research organisation, an artist connective, a living lab. Our research is based upon constructing interactive situations, inviting an audience into them and encouraging their playful experience-driven exploration of the space and its behaviours, alone and in groups. Our goals are to collaboratively investigate the world and its options with a general public, communicating and discussing these discoveries through workshops, publications, teaching and symposia.
Since 2019 Time’s Up has been working together with the Design Investigations group at the University of Applied Arts Vienna on the Experiential Futures art-based research project Curiouser and Curiouser cried Alice.

Juan DUARTE.
Sensing and forecasting atmospheric soundscapes
This presentation will discuss sensing atmosphere technologies tied with forecasting prediction, following traces from ancient sound instruments that applied musical craft and mythical narratives. Beyond a resonance with the atmospheric energies, these technologies might be regarded as a medium to elucidate natural agencies and other non-human entities. Sound-transductive technologies were determinant in obtaining knowledge about air and wind dynamics. Likewise, in the humanities, ambient poetics and eco-mimesis rendered the atmosphere as discernible, evoking a perceivable surrounding world. In this context, I propose that the coordination of humans and machines listening to the atmosphere might be helpful in augmenting the human perception of environments.

SCREENING PROGRAM

Po-Hao CHI, Rae HSU, Nancy VALLADARES // Tinkerer's Program: Margaux WHEELOCK-SHEW // Felipe CASTELBLANCO, Lydia ZIMMERMANN, Ñambi Rimai Pan Amazon Media Collective // Allison Leigh HOLT // Julia MENSCH, Naomi HENNING
Curators: Rasa SMITE, Raitis SMITS
Location: RIXC Gallery (onsite) / Zoom (online)

The screenings will be followed by Q&A from the audience to authors online.

18:30  Po-Hao CHI, Rae HSU, Nancy VALLADARES. DJULIS001. 3000 Years Among Microbes (10 min Presentation and Q&A) (MIT ACT 2021)
18:50 Tinkerer’s Program (with MIT ACT): Margaux WHEELOCK-SHEW. Testing Grounds, Part I (8 min + 8 min)
19:30 Felipe CASTELBLANCO, Lydia ZIMMERMANN, Ñambi Rimai Pan Amazon Media Collective. Ayenan: Water Territories (35 min + 5 min Q&A)
20:15 Allison Leigh HOLT. Stitching the Future with Clues (15 min + 5 min Q&A)
20:35 Julia MENSCH, Naomi HENNING. Ese ajeno sur (35 min)

Po-Hao CHI, Rae HSU, Nancy VALLADARES. DJULIS001. 3000 Years Among Microbes

DJULIS001 is about the reunion between the Mars indigenous and the “human” ancestor bacteria, retrieved from the “3000 Years Among Microbes” project. The project’s title came from an unpublished manuscript by American writer Mark Twain in 1905. The story is about a microbiologist mistakenly turned into a bacteria by a magician and observed the world from a nonhuman perspective that retained its human memory. Inspired by this story, the team took a microbial view and created a fictional character of extremophile bacteria that inhabits Mars. During project development, Zone Sound Creative studio and artists visited Taiwan National Space Organization and a NASA lunar mock-up base in the Western Desert during the 1960s space race, filmed on locations, and collected microbial samples. Juxtaposing extreme landscapes with microscopic images blurs the distinction between humans and microbes and further replaces the human “individual” definition with the concept of “holobiont.” It speculates on an alternative space future through rapidly evolving technologies from the microbial to the planetary scale, with the logic of “symbiosis” and “kinship.” Project website: https://3000yearsamongmicrobes.com/

“3000 Years Among Microbes” is a collaborative project presented by Zone Sound Creative studio from Taiwan. MIT ACT graduates Po-Hao Chi, Rae Hsu, and Nancy Valladares initiated the project to investigate a language distinguished from metaphors of colonization. They are interdisciplinary artists with diverse backgrounds and an interest in non-human perspectives.

Tinkerer’s Program (with MIT ACT): Margaux WHEELOCK-SHEW. Testing Grounds, Part I (8 min + 8 min)

Testing Grounds (I) was shot the Summer of 2021 while returning from a scouting trip in northern New Mexico. The video was shot from a Boeing 737 of the evaporation ponds, wind plants, and crop irrigation systems of central Utah. Testing grounds is the first in a trilogy if works examining haptic modes of vision in relation to the landscape.

Margaux Wheelock-Shew is an architect, educator, and artist, currently living and working between Boston and New York City. They are a graduate of The Cooper Union and an M. Arch II candidate at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Their work is centralized around interrogations of ground as a non-static backdrop that defines and records.

Felipe CASTELBLANCO, Lydia ZIMMERMANN, Ñambi Rimai Pan Amazon Media Collective. Ayenan: Water Territories
‘Ayenan’ is the smallest particle in the universe that jumpstarts life.
This film documents a counter-expedition that follows the upward movement of water throughout its natural cycle, going from the Andean-Amazon foothills to the Atlantic Ocean on the coast of Colombia. Along the way, the journey reveals the traces of a long-forgotten expedition in search of El Dorado and the territorial philosophy of Indigenous groups from the region. Climbing up from a river in the lower Amazon to a lake in the upper Andes, members of Ñambi Rimai Media Collective come to a sacred landscape in order to plant water back into the mountain and return a long-lost treasure. Together they create an offering, a ritual, which embodies situated forms of biocultural peace-building between regions, cultures, and non-human worlds.

Felipe Castelblanco is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher working at the intersection of participatory, film, and Media Art. His work explores institutional forms, creates platforms for inter-epistemic dialogue, and engages and unlikely audiences in remote places. Felipe holds an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University (USA) and earned a Ph.D. from the Kunstuniversität Linz (Austria) and the Make/Sense Graduate School (Basel HGK), exploring avenues for epistemic justice in the Colombian Pan-Amazon region. In 2015 he served as a Cultural Emissary for the U.S State Department to the Philippines, through which he developed an ambitious participatory project around inter-cultural diplomacy at sea. Felipe has been the recipient of several international awards, including the Starr Fellowship at the Royal Academy Schools in London, a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency, and was the 2021 finalist for the Breakthrough Awards from the Breaking Walls Foundation in Berlin for his efforts towards biocultural peacebuilding in Colombia. Recent shows include the 2019 Quebec Biennial, Helmhaus Zurich (Switzerland), Seasons of Media at ZKM in Karlsruhe (Germany), and the Queens International at the Queens Museum in New York.

Lydia Zimmermann. Filmmaker, artist & mentor, Swiss and Spanish. BA in film at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne.
MA in Transdisciplinarity at the University of the Arts, Zurich, ZHdK. I have written, edited, and directed shorts, feature narrative films, tv movies, documentaries, and produced video installations for art galleries and museums. I have had the privilege to teach film in schools, universities, and NGOs. For the past 20 years, I have been experimenting with the media, in and out the commercial frame. Observing and listening are my working tools and I believe that film has many forms: it can be a door, a dream, a letter, a mirror, a scream, an exorcism. A weaver of relationships and sometimes a story,
I have filmed and taught film in Spain, Switzerland, Australia, Guatemala, Haiti, Burkina Faso, Myanmar, Ecuador, and Colombia. Educated in two cultures using four tongues, I like to bridge between people and places capturing the presence of both.
I am currently developing film projects with Artisan Films, Eddie Saeta Productions, Testamento PC, and Ralda World. SL.
In the field of artistic research, I am the founding member and curator of Kunstruktur, a Zurich-based artistic collective dedicated to seeding human kindness through the media of film, storytelling, and performative actions. In Barcelona, I am the co-curator of Curtidas, an artist residency, and space for artistic-social exchange and experimentation.

Ñambi Rimai is a new Indigenous Media Collective operating in the Colombian Pan Amazon region, between the high Andes and the lower Amazon. This initiative emerged after a series of workshops and field work conducted by Felipe Castelblanco in 2018/2020 while working in close cooperation with the central government of the Inga Nation and Ambulante Colombia. The mission of the Media Collective is to support processes of self-governance, preservation of cultural, territorial control and communication all across the territories and beyond.

Allison Leigh HOLT. Stitching the Future with Clues

Stitching the Future with Clues is a single-channel film (runtime: 14:30). A neurodivergent-futurist manifesto, a pandemic public service announcement, considering feedback systems as philosophical frameworks. Animated diagrams, audio and video feedback processes, and expanded cinema techniques reveal, through a cybernetic lens, neurodivergence as a system of sense-making; one differently attuned to temporal, psychic, and environmental embodied existence, holding key insights for urgent world-building. A poetic intersection dismissing the boundaries between art and science, and invocation. Commissioned by The Ford Foundation Gallery.

Julia MENSCH, Naomi HENNING. Ese ajeno sure

Faust, the genius project-maker and engineer looks back at the work of his life-time: prospering cultural landscapes, newly created lands, modern harbours and a merchant fleet carrying goods from far-away continents. Faust is the logistics-king of international free trade, with Mephisto as his chief-ideologue and henchman. Only a nameless traveller and a friendly old couple, Philemon and Baucis, appear as their adversaries, who quickly fall prey to the capitalist turnover.
How could Faust, in his final incarnation as land-developer, be understood today, how can his success, his burning ambition, his blindness and subsequent death be re-interpreted? Marshal Berman’s interpretation of Faust reveals a reading of Faust’s success and failure as a metaphor for a (moral) crisis of capitalist modernity.

In cross-referencing Faust with the on-going violent repression of indigenous land claims in Patagonia, we look to the far-away and yet so near geographies of this Faustian relation to nature, and plead for those who resist, and who have resisted through history.

The video essay is a reflection on the deaths of activists like Santiago Maldonado, Rafael Nahuel, or Elias Garay, who died in the course of land conflicts in Patagonia. How can they be named and remembered? How can this Faustian megalomania be translated into a form of critique that targets extractivism, dispossession, and the alliance of state institutions with the interests of latifundistas and international corporations like Benetton?
And what does all this have to do with us?

Julia Mensch is a Berlin based visual artist. She studied at the Universidad Nacional de las Artes (UNA) in Buenos Aires and Hito Steyerl’s class at the Universität der Künste (UdK) in Berlin. She develops her practice on the basis of long-term research, readings of fiction and theory, interviews and visits to archives and territories. Her work is an intersection of text, drawing, installation, public events, photography, video and lecture performance as a means to opening collective dialogues regarding political and social contexts and future scenarios. Her practice deals with the history of Socialism and Communism, and with environmental sociopolitical conflicts. She has taken part in several international residency programs and exhibitions in Europe and South America, and has received grants from the Senate of Berlin/DE, Pro Helvetia/CH, Amt für Kultur Appenzell Ausserrhoden/CH, Schlesinger Stiftung/CH, Sulzberg Stiftung/CH, Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (German Academic Exchange Service, DAAD)/DE, Robert Bosch Foundation/DE and Fondo Nacional de las Artes (National Fund for the Arts, FNA)/AR, among others.
She is currently a PhD Candidate at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and part of the research project “Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant” (2022-2025), realised with Yvonne Volkart (lead), Felipe Castelblanco, and Rasa Smite, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, and hosted by the Institute Art Gender Nature at the Academy of Art and Design FHNW Basel.

LIVING TECHNOLOGIES / Renewable Futures (RF) Network
Living Technologies: RF THEMATIC KEYNOTE PANEL (Plenary Session)

Kristin BERGAUST / Hege TAPIO / Maria CASTELLANOS /
Stefano NICHELE / Jens HAUSER
Moderator: Rasa SMITE

Location: Zoom / RIXC Gallery

Kristin BERGAUST. Living Technologies / Oslofjord Ecologies
Hege TAPIO. Caring Futures
Maria CASTELLANOS. Other Intelligences. Plant-Human Interspecies Dialogues
Stefano NICHELE. Towards Living Technologies and Artificial General Intelligence
Jens HAUSER. Green Revisited – Encountering Emerging Naturecultures, Book Presentation

Kristin BERGAUST. Living Technologies / Oslofjord Ecologies

FeLT, Futures of Living Technologies engages in the relations and intersections that occur between human beings, living organisms, environments and machines, relations that might evoke a sense of the uncanny. Following artistic sensibilities and concerns, artistic methods can provide entrance points that open new questions and speculation in artistic and public discourse. Fast advancement in life-sciences and life-technologies heightens the importance of moving beyond dichotomies: the locked discourses that on one end create unreflected technophilia and on the other a standstill of technophobia. We strive for diversity, addressing complex issues in complex manners, while not looking for unified aesthetics or styles. However, framing the work in an ecological discourse has been a main driver and common denomination.

The FeLT project emerged from the work of individuals who invested their time and research interests for art and science, embodied through practices of contemporary art, humanities, computer science, human-computer interaction, neuroscience and experimental pedagogy.

Three tracks of research are identified within FeLT:
Making with: multispecies communication and co-creation. Practices of communication and co-creation with living organisms – such as microorganisms, plants or animals – might involve working with technologically complex systems as well as agriculture or indigenous knowledges and traditions.
Living technologies: living environments, humans, machines, intelligence, life and emotions, including how complex structures and functions of living organisms have entered the hybrid and synthetic technologies.
Sensorium: how we experience, interpret and develop applied aesthetics today. How can the sensorium as an expanded aesthetics provide new modalities for connecting with natural environments?

FeLT started from educational activities in the first place. Now, a new round of critical questioning is needed: How can we undertake the next step from an artistic transdisciplinary research environment to enter an educational reality and institutional framework? What can our contribution be to different levels of education and to different professional trajectories? What possible educational needs can be identified for the future of such trajectories and levels? Could we develop education to change the institution?

Kristin Bergaust is educated at the University of Oslo and at the National Academy of Fine Art in Oslo. She works as an artist, researcher and educator. She is a professor at the Faculty of Technology, Art and Design in OsloMet, Oslo since 2008. She was formerly professor and head of Intermedia at Trondheim Academy of Fine Arts, NTNU (2001-2008) and artistic director of Atelier Nord media lab for artists (1997 to 2001). Currently, she is interested in transdisciplinary efforts to contribute to ecological and transcultural processes in urban contexts through artistic research methods and technological developments. She leads FeLT Futures of Living Technologies https://www.feltproject.no. Further projects and documentation of research and artistic work at https://www.kristinbergaust.com

Hege TAPIO. Caring Futures
Today, questions of technology, future sustainability, care and welfare services are inevitably entangled. According to Norwegian Public Paper Innovation in care (NOU 2011:11), welfare technology is defined as “technological assistance that contributes to increased safety, security, social participation, mobility and physical and cultural activity, that strengthens the individual’s ability to manage themselves in everyday life despite illness and social, psychological or physical disability”. If we follow this definition, welfare technology is an undivided benefit for us citizens. But what is at stake if welfare technology also contributes to insecurity, confusion, and loneliness?
This is the starting point for the interdisciplinary research project Caring Futures: Developing care ethics for technology-mediated care practices at the University of Stavanger, funded by the Norwegian Research Council. This project examines tensions between society’s need for new technology on the one hand, and relational and professional care cultures on the other. How do we experience, recognise and understand care, humanity and vulnerability under new technological regimes?
The overall aim of the project is to contribute radically interdisciplinary research that can ensure quality in technology-mediated care practices, and safeguard care ethical perspectives in relational work. This has implications for both practice, policy and education. As part of this interdisciplinary approach, we have incorporated the art exhibition CARING FUTURES into our project. In collaboration with artist, curator and researcher Hege Tapio (i/o/lab, OsloMet), we have invited eight artists who, in different ways, pose critical, creative and speculative questions about humanity and care in our time characterized by rapid changes and technological solutions to challenges in society. With the art exhibition CARING FUTURES, we hope to take care ethics and it’s emphasis on social and collective processes seriously. Our aim for the art exhibition is to facilitate creative spaces for reflection and understanding of what is happening around us today, both socially, culturally and politically.

Hege Tapio is an artist and a curator based in Stavanger, Norway. Her interest in emerging media interconnecting art, new technology and science, led to the foundation of i/o/lab – Center for Future Art since 2001, where she established and curated Article biennial – a festival for the electronic and unstable art. Tapio is currently pursuing her artistic research as Phd fellow at FeLT – Futures of Living Technologies at OsloMet. Tapio is also involved as curator in the research project Caring futures: developing new care ethics for technology-mediated care practices (QUALITECH) at the University of Stavanger. And part of the team of NOBA – Norwegian Bioart Arena, developing and programming the Norwegian hub for Bioart located at Vitenparken by Campus Ås, Norway. Ingvil Hellstrand is associate professor in gender studies at the Department for Caring and Ethics, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Stavanger, Norway (UiS). Her research interests are storytelling practices and knowledge production, science fiction and the posthuman. Ingvil is currently involved in the interdisciplinary research project Caring Futures: Developing Care Ethics for Technology-Mediated Care Practices as lead of the work package Imaginaries of the Care Robot, bringing together science fiction as method, care and technologies of care, and posthuman ethics. Ingvil is a member of The posthumanities hub, and a founding member of The Monster Network.

Maria CASTELLANOS. Other Intelligences. Plant-Human Interspecies Dialogues
Other intelligences is an artistic research that aims to explore the communication between plants remotely by using AI tools. Through this project we seek to know more about the plants’ language and behavior and try to understand a better these living beings with we co-habit in the Earth.
Through the use of technology as a tool, we have created a network of plants connected to the Internet. A network analogous to the network of roots and mycelia of fungi that take place in the forest that the Professor of Forest Ecology Suzanne Simard began to study almost three decades ago. This woods’ network allows trees and plants to communicate with each other by sharing information and nutrients. In Other Intelligences, our network, is made up of data, algorithms and actuators, and it allows us to investigate alternative relationships with nature and technology through the use of artistic methodologies.

Maria CASTELLANOS. is an artist and researcher working at the intersection of art, science, technology and society. She is currently working as a postdoc researcher at Oslo Metropolitan University, in the framework of FeLT Project –Futures of Living Technologies–
She holds a Bachelor’s degree and a Doctorate in Contemporary Arts Practices from the University of Vigo (SP), with an Extraordinary Phd Award 2016. Her dissertation entitled “The bionic skin. Technological Membranes as Body Interfaces in Artistic Practice” focuses on technological prosthesis, more specifically in hybridizations between cyborgs and wearables as a paradigm of extending human sensorial capabilities.
Her artistic practice focuses primarily on the research about human sensory boundaries and the creation of complex systems that promote the communication and the understanding between humans and non human beings.

Stefano NICHELE. Towards Living Technologies and Artificial General Intelligence
Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more and more pervasive as it is deployed in a wide variety of domains that impact our everyday life. While such AIs are “narrow”, meaning that they can only perform very specific tasks, they may still produce decisions that are biased, discriminating, not transparent, and with possibilities of misuse. AI research is now transitioning towards more general artificial intelligence, that is AIs that are able to generalize to different domains like humans do. The success of AGI will transform our society into a hybrid ecosystem of biological organisms and living technologies. Such transition poses new ethical, moral, and social challenges.

Stefano Nichele is a Full Professor of Machine Learning at the Østfold University College (Norway) and at the Oslo Metropolitan University (Norway). His research interests are Artificial Intelligence (AI), Artificial Life (ALife), and Complex Systems (CS). Nichele’s long term goal is to understand how intelligence can emerge in machines as it does in biological organisms, towards machines that are more adaptive, alive, and generally intelligent. Nichele is IEEE senior member, chair of IEEE CIS Task Force on Artificial Life and Complex Adaptive Systems, Deputy Member of the Board of NORA (Norwegian Artificial Intelligence Research Consortium).

Living Technologies: AI/ML AND BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS (Parallel Session 3A)

Oron CATTS / Andrew BURRELL / Yuri KUZMIN / Varvara GULJAJEVA / Oksana CHEPELYK / Elke REINHUBER
Moderator: Hege TAPIO
Location: Zoom / RIXC Gallery

(15 min presentation + 5 min / 1-2 questions)

Oron CATTS. Metabolic Rift Technologies
Andrew BURRELL. over.Ground:underStory, a more-than-human collaboration
Yuri KUZMIN, Varvara GULJAJEVA. Dwelling in a synthetic landscape: A parallax view of AI-generated landscapes in art.
Oksana CHEPELYK. Analytical Instruments for Audio-Visual Translation of Metabolomics merging genotype and environment regarding climate changes
Elke REINHUBER. ConformiTree

Oron CATTS. Metabolic Rift Technologies
In the name of sustainability, many new food production and agricultural ventures, such as vertical farming and cellular agriculture, propose systems that remove natural elements from the process of production. Many synthetic biology based food tech “solutions” are presented as having less (or no) impact on the environment. We call these approaches “Metabolic Rift Technologies”. Metabolic rift technologies call for separation from nature following a similar mindset that leads tech companies to promote the Metaverse as a nature free site for human habitation, obscuring the environmental costs of such existence. This talk will explore and unpack Metabolic Rift Technologies, while highlighting the urgent need to culturally scrutinise Prometheanism with its extractive approaches that considers Earth as a resource for human needs and wants where human innovation and technology will solve environmental problems.

Oron Catts is an artist, researcher and curator whose pioneering work with the Tissue Culture and Art Project which he established in 1996 is considered a leading biological art project. In 2000 he co-founded SymbioticA, an artistic research centre housed within the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology, The University of Western Australia. Under Catts’ leadership SymbioticA has gone on to win the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica in Hybrid Art (2007) the WA Premier Science Award (2008) and became a Centre for Excellence in 2008. In 2009 Catts was recognised by Thames & Hudson’s “60 Innovators Shaping our Creative Future” book in the category “Beyond Design”, and by Icon Magazine (UK) as one of the top 20 Designers, “making the future and transforming the way we work”.

Catts interest is Life; more specifically the shifting relations and perceptions of life in the light of new knowledge and it applications. Often working in collaboration with other artists (mainly Dr. Ionat Zurr) and scientists, Catts have developed a body of work that speak volumes about the need for new cultural articulation of evolving concepts of life. Catts was a Research Fellow in Harvard Medical School, a visiting Scholar at the Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University, and a Visiting Professor of Design Interaction, Royal College of Arts, London. Catts’ ideas and projects reach beyond the confines of art; his work is often cited as inspiration to diverse areas such as new materials, textiles, design, architecture, ethics, fiction, and food.

Andrew BURRELL. over.Ground:underStory, a more-than-human collaboration
OverGround:underStory is a more-than-human collaboration borne out of an entangled network of relationships between Andrew Burrell and the physical/digital ecologies they exist within. Signs of non-human mark making are sought within physical ecologies (animal+, vegetable+, mineral+) and are reinterpreted in and by digital ecologies (image generation, image recognition, text generation, www networks, code).

OverGround:underStory is an evolving body of work that uses design led methods to explore what it means to be intrinsically bound to more-than-human networks on a precipice of uncertain futures. How do we more deeply understand these networks through material practice-based research—coming to some sort of knowing through doing.

The presentation will begin with a performance of a co-created spoken word / visual narrative (short excerpt here: https://andrewburrell.net/blog/overground-understory-read-to-me) and then discuss other iterations of the project, including the web-based outcome commissioned by Runway Journal, guest edited by Nancy Mauro-Flude (http://runway.org.au/andrew-burrell/). It will investigate how this project creates a space for collaboration between trees (Stringy Bark Eucalypts), Wombats, machine learning models and humans. It will then discuss some of the moral and ethical implications exposed through these works when machine learning processes—such as Large Language Models (eg: GPT3) and image generating Transformer Models (eg: DALL.E 2)—are considered as part of the more-than-human networks involved in the co-creation process.

Dr Andrew Burrell  is a practice-based researcher and educator exploring virtual and digitally mediated environments as a site for the construction, experience and exploration of memory as narrative. His process is one of worlding in virtual space—visualising otherwise unseen connections and entanglements. His ongoing research investigates the relationship between imagined and remembered narrative and how the multi-layered biological and technological encoding of human subjectivity may be portrayed within, and inform the design of, virtual environments.

Burrell’s practice ranges from traditional academic research exploring the creative potential for virtual environments to visualise complex informational relationships to webXR based immersive experiences and large scale collaborative projects in virtual environments. He is currently interested in the ongoing development of smaller scale experiments to more deeply explore questions of the material, philosophical and phenomenological aspects of virtual environments to form a deeper understanding of their intrinsic affordances. This practice is always framed by an underlying concern for developing ethical and sustainable methods for engaging with current and emerging technologies during a global climate crisis.

Director of Visual Communication and senior lecturer, faculty of Design, Architecture and Building at the University of Technology Sydney. Lives and works in Gadigal Country.

https://andrewburrell.net

Yuri KUZMIN. Varvara GULJAJEVA. Dwelling in a synthetic landscape: A parallax view of AI-generated landscapes in art.
The history of humanity’s relationship with landscape is a complex one, full of conflicting dispositions and changing attitudes, which, in a broader sense, is symptomatic of our relationship with nature at large. At a given time and with a given purpose we view landscape as an object of contemplation, a monument of nature, or even as an interlocutor, but at the same time, it is often turned into a backdrop for anthropocentric narratives, a convenient deposit of meanings and natural resources, preferably distributed in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Armed with a vast and ever growing arsenal of world-building techniques, we have become capable of mapping, transforming, simulating existing landscapes and creating the new ones ex nihilo. These artificial or synthetic landscapes are the subject of this study. We focus on the concept of landscapes created via the use of different forms of artificial intelligence. We analyze several artworks loosely belonging to ocular and non-ocular traditions of landscape art (Gu), which rely on different computational strategies and machine learning techniques to generate places that defy the oppositions of imaginary and real, virtual and actual, familiar and unfamiliar. In doing so, we are less concerned with the emerging aesthetics of AI-generated imagery and the distribution of visual cues or questions of style, authorship and cultural legitimacy, but instead, propose to revisit the Heideggerian notion of “dwelling” as a way of fostering a specific form of sensibility that could possibly allow human and inhuman subjects to relate to and inhabit the said landscapes (Heidegger, Ingold).

References:
Gu, Yi. Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting. Harvard University Asia Center, 2020.
Heidegger, Martin. “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”. Poetry, Language Thought, Harper Perennial, 2001, pp. 141-160.
Ingold, Tim. “The Temporality of the Landscape.” World Archaeology, vol. 25, no. 2, Oct. 1993, pp. 152–174.

Yuri Kuzmin is an artist and researcher, currently pursuing PhD studies in Computational Media and Arts at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Dr Varvara Guljajeva is an artist and researcher holding the position of Assistant Professor in Computational Media and Arts at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou). Previously, she held positions at the Estonian Academy of Arts and Elisava Design School in Barcelona. Varvara was invited as a visiting researcher to XRL, Hong Kong City University, IAMAS (Ogaki, Japan), LJMU (Liverpool, UK), Interface Cultures in the Linz University of Art, and Design, Blekinge Institute of Technology (Karlshamn, Sweden). Her PhD thesis “From Interaction to Post-Participation: The Disappearing Role of the Active Participant” (defended in 2018 in Estonian Academy of Arts) was selected as the highest-ranking abstracts by Leonardo Labs in 2020.

As an artist, she works together with Mar Canet forming an artist duo Varvara & Mar. Often the duo’s work is inspired by the information age. In their practice, they confront social changes and the impact of the technological era. The duo has been exhibiting in international shows since 2009. Their works were shown at MAD in New York, FACT in Liverpool, Santa Monica in Barcelona, Barbican in London, Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, Ars Electronica museum in Linz, ZKM in Karlsruhe, and more.

Oksana CHEPELYK. “Analytical Instruments for Audio-Visual Translation of Metabolomics” merging genotype and environment regarding climate changes
Scientific combination of experimental ecology and next-generation -omics technologies (including genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics and metabolomics) represent an unprecedented opportunity to characterise the patterns of local adaptation and phenotypic plasticity in natural systems and to understand the complex relationships between phenotype, genotype and environment. In the face of climate change the research using sonification and translation of complex biochemical events into visual elements can serve as a sensorial argument for fundamental knowledge about our vulnerable ecosystems.
The science-art is researched as a contemporary art trend with focus on sonification and visual representation of scientific data of metabolomics. Historical reference as “Homage to Leonardo” to his search for universe understanding, through Xenakis is taken as a starting point of research toward our time with the help of AI machine learning technology. Using physical characteristics of NMR – Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy and mass spectrometry in measuring metabolome methodology with different spins (Ramamoorthy) it is possible to approach audio-visual representation. Molecular Sonification, namely the encoding of molecules as music, can allow encoding of many molecular properties (Cernak).
Anthropogenic factors and climate change are leading to significant changes shown in “The Ocean” installation, presented at HYBRID-ART 2022, which sound is dealing with metabolomics and visual material refers to hybridity not only of the form, as to the distortion of living species and aquatic environment, but also to the process of hybridising consciousness and its distortions, associated with hybrid warfare.

Dr. Oksana Chepelyk is a leading researcher of the New Technologies Department, Modern Art Research Institute of Ukraine, author of book “The Interaction of Architectural Spaces, Contemporary Art and New Technologies” (2009) and curator of International Festival of Social Sculpture, Kyiv. Oksana studied art in Kyiv, followed a PhD course, Amsterdam University, Banff Centre, Canada, Bauhaus Dessau, Germany, Fulbright Research Program at UCLA, USA. Awards: ArtsLink1997/2007 Award (USA), FilmVideo99 (Italy), EMAF2003 Werkleitz Award 2003 (Germany), Artraker Award2013 (UK), Best Project2018 (Taiwan). Works shown: MOMA, NY; MMA, Zagreb; German Historical Museum, Berlin and Munich; Museum of the Arts History, Vienna; MCA, Skopje; MJT, LA; Art Arsenal Museum, Kyiv; “DIGITAL MEDIA Valencia”, Spain; MACZUL, Maracaibo, Venezuela, “The File”, Sao Paolo; LPM-2016/2017 Amsterdam; MADATAC-2020, Madrid; EDAF-2022, “Manifesta 14”, Prishtina, Ars Electronica 2022, Linz.

Elke REINHUBER. ConformiTree
“Rooted deep in the ground, trees are anything but flexible. The project ConformiTree seeks to liberate a certain plant species from their locations and transforms their image into a range of different formats and media.
In today’s restless world, where living conditions change rapidly and force inhabitants to change their residence, trees in all their different manifestations are a sign of permanence. They constitute in many of the world’s mythologies an important element, because of their longevity. Climatic conditions are changing, economic factors are also shifting, and, still, armed conflicts trigger temporary or permanent migration, but the perennial plants with woody stems stay put, sometimes for centuries. They can provide stability.
While I keep trying to adjust myself to different global locations, cultures, possibilities, requirements and rules during my journey through life, I observed in Hong Kong, how these gigantic plants are responding to their environment fixed on their spot. Some have adapted themselves whereas others are allowed to demand adjustments of their surroundings. Having experienced the recent changes in the country itself, the restrictions, lockdowns and quarantines, I became fascinated how the roots of the common roadside trees are making best use of the area available to them and grow along these constraints. Despite being confined in a small space for all their life, their canopy expands, they flourish and bloom.
I felt inspired and comforted by my observation and started to capture the different root formations, initially with my mobile phone camera, attempted then to fit the images into the square of my Hasselblad, expanded to analogue 6×9 cm before realising that the flexibility of presenting and sharing beyond the two-dimensional space on the wall is crucial for these images. Finally scanned with a laser detector, the roots together with their ‘frame‘ became transitional and can be perceived in their spatial dimension as an AR overlay of the digitised b/w images, serving as the QR marker.
Although the plane photographic image of these (mainly Banyan) trees could be easily distributed and shared like their seeds, the actual spatial information is not easy to convey. Therefore, the roots have been captured in 3D with LiDAR on their site and can now travel in their sculptural glory to anyplace on the globe – their image may be adjusted to any size, format, aspect ratio or surface.
A tree’s lifespan is not only determined by its species, but also by its location. In a metropolis such as Hong Kong, trees often live for only about 40 years because of pollution and urban development. The root system is its most important asset, as it provides stability, balance and a way for the tree to get nutrients from the soil. The Banyan tree has adapted to grow in wet grounds, unsuitable for other trees; it belongs to a group of trees called “”strangler figs”” because it can grow on top of other trees and eventually kill them by blocking their sunlight supply.
Images of immobile objects carry the paradox that they can embark on journeys that are denied to these objects themselves. When we describe photography, the focus is on aspects that constitute the essence of a photograph: we record a moment in time, document a place where we stay only for a limited period, or we capture the fleeting encounter with a person.
With photogrammetry or LiDAR, we can even document the spatial dimension from all sides and keep a memory of the tree’s struggle to survive in the provided space, adjusting its root system to the restricted surroundings, while the upper part thrives and blossoms.”

Elke Reinhuber is a media artist, researcher and educator who teaches currently at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong as Associate Professor for Expanded Photography. Reinhuber is imagining a life on the Holodeck, to explore alternative realities with ease. When immersed herself for the first time in the panoramic photographs she had prepared for a 360° environment, the trained photographer realised that her medium was finally no longer constricted by the limitations of the frame. In her work, she explores different modes of presentation and strategies of storytelling to emphasise the parallel existence of multiple truths and the correlation between decisions and emotions. With her interest in representing cultural heritage digitally, she has created immersive S3D video installations, videos for spherical and circular domes or panoramic screens as well as VR and AR projects.
Reinhuber holds a PhD from UNSW Art and Design, Sydney for her exploration on choice, decision making and counterfactual thinking in media arts and has been invited to speak at international conferences and to exhibit her award winning artistic research in renown institutions such as V&A Digital Futures, London; GRID Biennial Photofestival Amsterdam; ZKM Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany; Museum für Fotografie, Winterthur, Switzerland; Bozar Brussels, Belgium, and Manifesta Palermo, Italy.

Living Technologies: TECHNO-ECOLOGICAL SENSORIUMS (Parallel Session 3B)

Ellen PEARLMAN / Daniela DE PAULIS / Karen LANCEL / Hermen MAAT / Frances Maria BRAZIER / Jānis GARANČS / Haralds DRAVNIEKS / Hanna HAASLAHTI
Moderator: Anna PRIEDOLA

Location: Zoom / RIXC Galler

(15 min presentation + 5 min / 1-2 questions)

Ellen PEARLMAN. Language Is Leaving Me – A Preliminary Investigation
Daniela DE PAULIS. Mare Incognito
Karen LANCEL, Hermen MAAT, Frances Maria BRAZIER. ‘Empathy Ecologies’: New Connections between Humans and Plants in Techno-Ecological Sensoriums.
Jānis GARANČS. speculative value sensorium
Haralds DRAVNIEKS. Hyperverse
Hanna HAASLAHTI. Faceship

Ellen PEARLMAN. Language Is Leaving Me – A Preliminary Investigation
In 2021 Open AI introduced CLIP and VQGAN, neural network architectures for still and moving text-to-image models, further redefining components of contemporary visual culture. How these images are rendered and generated, beginning with their data sources, then their algorithmic parameters, and finally their prompt modifiers are a complex and often obscure process for those not well versed in computer science. This paper presents initial findings of an on-going multi-year development process for “Language Is Leaving Me”, an operatic mixed reality performance installation focusing on AI, computer vision, sound, biometrics and epigenetic, or inherited traumatic memories of cultures of diaspora. This first paper of an eventual series of papers examines multi-lingual presentations of simple word prompts, commonly referred to as ‘prompt engineering’ and how, combined with various image bank data sources, they render visually revealing biases and flaws in their structures. These processes have serious implications for these newly forming visual taxonomies and beyond.

Ellen Pearlman is a New York based media artist, curator, writer and critic. She is a Research Fellow at MIT, Senior Research Assistant Professor at RISEBA University in Riga, Latvia and a Contributing Editor to Performance Arts Journal (PAJ) MIT Press. Ellen is the Director and co-founder of ThoughtWorks Arts, a global research and innovation lab that includes the well regarded ThoughtWorks ArtsResidency. A Fulbright Scholar to the Department of Mathematics Warsaw University, Poland, she is also a Fulbright World Learning Specialist in Art, New Media and Technology, a n EU Vertigo STARTS Laureate (Horizon 2020), a Zero1 American Arts Incubator/U.S. State Department cultural envoy to Kyiv, Ukraine, and a Fulbright Alumni Ties grantee. Ellen received her Ph.D. in Digital Media from the School of Creative Media at Hong Kong City University where she received two outstanding academic achievement awards. She premiered her brain opera “Noor”, a fully immersive interactive brainwave opera at ISEA Hong Kong and the Microwave International Festival, HK. Her PhD thesis, “Is There A Place In Human Consciousness Where Surveillance Cannot Go?” was awarded highest global ranking from Leonardo LABS abstracts. “AIBO”, an emotionally intelligent artificial intelligent brainwave opera premiered at the Estonian Music Academy’s state of the art black box theater, and was presented at Vertigo STARTS Days in Paris, France.

Daniela DE PAULIS. Mare Incognito
Mare Incognito is an interdisciplinary project exploring the poetic and philosophical aspects of transitional states of consciousness during sleep. The project includes a series of live performances poetically highlighting the gradual dissolution of consciousness and of the thinking process while falling asleep, alternatively shifting from the subjective to the cosmic perspective. During each performance, the brain activity of sleep is transmitted into space, in real time, by a radio antenna of the Square Kilometre Array in Cambridge, United Kingdom. The project crosses various fields of research, including radio astronomy, neuroscience, performance art, cosmology and intellectual history. Mare Incognito is a collaboration bringing together and stimulating intellectual exchange among researchers from renowned international institutions.

Daniela De Paulis is a former contemporary dancer and a media artist exhibiting internationally. She is also a licensed radio operator (IU0IDY) and a radio telescope operator. Her artistic practice is informed by Space in its widest meaning. Since 2009 she has been implementing radio technologies and philosophies in her art projects. She is currently artist in residence at the SETI Institute and recipient of the Baruch Bloomberg Fellowship in Astrobiology at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia.
She is collaborating with some prominent research institutes such as INAF (Italian Research Institute for Radio Astronomy), the Donders Centre for Neuroimaging and the University of Cambridge. For her projects, she has been using state of the art radio telescopes, such as the Square Kilometre Array in the UK, as well as historical antennas, such as the Bochum Radio Observatory (DE) and the Dwingeloo radio telescope (NL). Here she initiated the art activities, working there from 2009 and 2019. At the Dwingeloo radio telescope she has developed the Visual Moonbounce technology (also called EME-SSTV), in collaboration with international radio operators, and a series of innovative projects combining radio technologies with live performance art and neuroscience. From 2010 to 2019 she has been collaborating with Astronomers Without Borders as the founder and director of the Arts programme. More recently, she has been collaborating with the Human Space Program, lead by space philosopher Frank White, with the Space and Society Working Group lead by philosopher James Schwartz and with the Lifeboat Foundation.

Karen LANCEL, Hermen MAAT, Frances Maria BRAZIER. ‘Empathy Ecologies’: New Connections between Humans and Plants in Techno-Ecological Sensoriums.
Can empathic new connections between humans, plants and technology be orchestrated in shared neurofeedback systems? This paper discusses the art and science research ‘Empathy Ecologies’ (Lancel/Maat 2020-2022); a critical and hopeful narrative about future Techno-Ecological Sensoriums.
Increasingly, sustainable eco-systems are explored on the basis of actor-oriented approaches in which both human and non-human actors co-exist. This requires new awareness of different modes of multi-species interaction (Latour 1990, Haraway 2016, Morton 2018). This paper’s research focuses specifically on co-existence between humans, plants and digital technology. It explores whether ambiguous relations in splintered realities can facilitate shared empathetic awareness in such co-existence.
A speculative, participatory ‘empathy script’ has been designed for an artistic performance; that includes a neural network in which a) biometric feedback of human-plant sensitivity (in a mini-forest of aerial root-plants) and b) human empathic interaction of kissing and caressing, are connected in c) an synthesised neurofeedback system and real-time soundscape. To this purpose, a brain computer interface is connected to plant C02 consumption and photosynthesis sensors. Together, humans and plants explore a new perspective on planetary, yet unpredictable ecologies of empathy. Performance presentations include Frascati Theaters Amsterdam (2020) and Museum for Circular Economy and MuHKA Museum Antwerpen (2022).
This paper presents the first results of the ‘empathy script’ orchestrated for the performance installation, based on artist observations and participants responses. New, promising insights are presented on human-plant interaction, of hybridity and symbiosis. This fundamental research inspires new perspectives on future development of AI/AE neural networks and Techno-Ecological Sensoriums.

Media art and science research duo Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat (Lancel/Maat, www.lancelmaat.nl) have presented their work internationally at Venice Biennial 2015; Ars Electronica Linz; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; RIXC Riga; LABoral Gijon; HeK Basel; ZKM Karlsruhe; Transmediale Berlin; Waag Society Amsterdam; Nabi Art Centre Seoul; Eyebeam New York; ISEA Istanbul, Hongkong, Gwangju and Helsinki.
Their pioneering performance research in the field of neuro-bio-technological entanglement and AI is supported by University of Technology Delft (Participatory Systems Lab), HanzeHogeSchool and University Groningen, Creative Industries Fund, Mondriaanfonds.
Residencies include EMAP/EMARE European Media Art Platform and RIXC Riga; MediaArt Center Banff Canada; TASML (Tsinghua University Art, Science and Media Lab) Beijing; Iaspis Stockholm. .
Lancel/Maat’s works were honoured international art, media and science awards and grants, including TASIE Award for Art & Science and Innovation Beijing 2019; NFF Netherlands Film Festival Interactive Golden Calve Interactive nomination 2019; Mondriaan Fund Grants for Established Artists 2000-2020; Dutch Canon of Digital Art 1960-2000 / LIMA; Netherlands Society for Scientific Research (NWO).
Lancel and Maat teach MFA Media Art and lecture internationally (Tsinghua University; Royal Art Academy The Hague; TEDX Istanbul; Vitra Design Basel; CHI Montreal; KTH Royal Institute of technology Stockholm Sweden; MA Film & television Amsterdam). They have (co-)published in Springer Verlag, Frontiers, Leonardo/MIT, Intellect Books UK) and their art works have been included in private and museum collections.

Jānis GARANČS. speculative value sensorium
This presentation will feature an speculative illustration of a dystopian hybrid organism whose purpose is transformation of energy resources into a ludic experience. and is motivated by the re-emergent and growing prominence of gambling factors in global economic activities – such as institutional promotion of increasingly complex investment products for masses, crypto-asset trading, online casinos, etc. Political philosopher Michael J. Sandel describes several last decades as a “drift from ‘market economy’ to becoming a ‘market society’”. Algorithmically manipulated financial trading is a prominent arena where algorithms merge with human emotions and value-seeking drives into a global hybrid sensorium. As sociologist Georg Simmel had observed it already in 1900: “Reality and value as mutually independent categories through which our conceptions become images of the world”. Mapping of the behaviour patterns in trader psychology has been an important aspect of the training in the trading process, besides the implementation and development of various mathematical models. It now appears that value storage and trading infrastructure increasingly merge with methods of manipulation of human attention and emotions, and are mediated by computer networks, and increasingly – Machine Learning and AI. As a practical effort in artistic research in phenomenology and neuroaesthetics, this work proposes a set of parameters for simulated anisotropy, useful for designing the structure, notation, and physical, mathematical dimensions in the VR interface and environment.

Jānis Garančs is an artist and immersive media researcher. He has initial training in classical fine arts in Riga, further studies of video and computer art at the KKH, Stockholm, and digital audio-visual media at the KHM (Academy of Media Arts), Cologne. Since 2000 he works primarily with interactive multimedia installations and performances, focusing on stereoscopic imagery and 3D sound, exploring perceptual phenomenology of immersive audiovisual expression. He has contributed to various international media art community events as an artist, presenter in events like Ars Electronica, Transmediale, DEAF, ISEA, Expo 2000 and venues such as BNMI/Banff, V2/Rotterdam, SAT/Montreal, ICA/London, RIXC/Riga. Additionally, he has been involved in several international research projects focusing on interactive TV platforms. He is a co-founder and project consultant at RIXC Centre for New Media Culture.

Haralds DRAVNIEKS. Hyperverse
We live in digital world. Technologies has become integral part of our daily life. More and more people are plugging into this new technologies without even knowing what they are signing up for. Trough out my masters research and now with my Phd studies I am trying to get ahead in fields of technologies and to understand what are the possibilities and future in this digital field. My experiments with new technologies has led me into creating of my own digital world and digital self and now I want to use my knowledge to create hyperverse- digital universe where artists collaborate to create colorful, immersive world.

Hanna HAASLAHTI. Faceship
Computer vision technologies that track and recognize have created categories that elicit fear and segregation. Digital face technologies can also be used to transcend the surveillance paradigm of computational identity with play and performance. To possess and be possessed, to control and be controlled – we take different roles to learn more about ourselves.

I research narrative possibilities of digital doubles in various participatory formations. In recent years I have been developing a concept for a face capturing platform, which combines performance, documentary and installation. I consider the human face as a unique and radical manifestation of selfhood, igniting multiple roles and relationships that move beyond the binary worldview and single individualism.

Face is a social mask that hides and protects our emotions, but it’s also a node in an unique chronological trajectory. Each human face headlines an ancient genealogy, the people and beings that find their contemporary shape in me. My face is a gift from them. Keywords: digital doubles, narrative simulation.

Hanna Haaslahti is a media artist/director working with image and interaction. My central tool is computer vision and interactive storytelling and I am interested in how machines shape social relations. My artworks generate new narrative interactions between people, in which I explore the possibilities of human-machine-human collaboration. Scientific research on perception, vision and machine learning/artificial intelligence inspires me, as well as everyday observations about human life in the age of machines.

Living Technologies: BEYOND GREEN (Parallel Session 4A)

Bart Hubert Maria VANDEPUT / Marietta RADOMSKA / Anna PRIEDOLA / Mayra ROJO
Moderator: Kristin BERGAUST

Location: Zoom / RIXC Gallery

(15 min presentation + 5 min / 1-2 questions)

Bart Hubert Maria VANDEPUT. The Extinction of Respiratory Cooling Tower Bodies and their Ecosystems
Marietta RADOMSKA. Between Crisis Imaginaries and Arts of Eco-Grief
Anna PRIEDOLA. Dairy Diaries: Dementia and Memory Institutions
Mayra ROJO. The deaths of Gutenberg: ‘Nosotros organísmico’

Bart Hubert Maria VANDEPUT. The Extinction of Respiratory Cooling Tower Bodies and their Ecosystems
Like concrete trees, evaporative cooling towers of electric power generating plants enable complex and interdependent relationships of multiple organisms in the cooling water microbiome and ecosystem. Many of these towers are on a path of deactivation and destruction in the grand scheme of transiting to so-called renewable energies. Hence, with detrimental impact on the ecosystem they create the conditions for.
Many other questions and tensions emerge from this perspective that is troping away from stereotypical views on these iconic parts of landscapes. For the green-tech-will-solve-the-All adhering sapiens: how to make use of biofilm bio-colours in sapiens innovative biotechnological material thinking, – applications and – products like solar cells? For the egalitarian Ecocentrists: how to combine the need for reduction of Co2 emissions with the rights of the other-than-human entities in the tower ecosystem – rivers, slimes, algae, fungi, plants, animals, soil, atmosphere, light, shade? For the pataphysicists: what is the impossible solution in this particular case? For the pharma biologists: what are the relationalities in the biofilms and how to model these when entangling possibly pathogenically in lung tissue?

For the artist, these questions fuse an artistic research that is inquiring:
– ways to render the respiratory cooling tower bodies´ ecosystem visible and
– finding ways to report back to the entities there within;
– what ways of play – doings–undergoings – can be enacted and with which entities spinning into the playfield?
– ways of awareness of the artistic_scientific agency that is becoming a part of this evolving ecosystem of microbes, light, energies, minerals, Legionella p., natural-dyed solar cell, pH, lung tissue modelling, gravel, slime, spirit, algae, sand, titanium dioxide, science, biofilm, cooling towers, protozoa, cellulose, ecology, platinum, glass, polymer, researcher, agar, bio-scaffold, salt, colour molecules, player, metal, iodine, spectrometer, electrifying, root, soap, vibration, glass-cutter, respiration, emotion, hustler, energy dreams, improvisation, air, water molecules, amoebe, ethics, de-Petri-ied dish, gelatin, latex, reviewer, copper, sociology, pyomelanin, antimicrobial agent, microfiber, sanding, antibacterial agent.

Dr. Bart Vandeput (Bartaku) is an artist researcher holding a Ph.D. in Arts (Aalto University, Finland). The art practice evolves since two decades, with collaborative experience in tying species, matter and disciplines. This, both within the energy- and bioarts as in between art, science and humanities. The practice is fused by light, energies, living, – non-living and in betweening bodies. It evolves through leaky loops of making_questioning, with a key role for chance, improvisation and unstable media. Bartaku processes spin on through art work(ing)s, lectures, writings and public labs. His monograph “Baroa belaobara: berryapple is published in June 2021”.

Marietta RADOMSKA. Between Crisis Imaginaries and Arts of Eco-Grief
In the Anthropocene, the epoch of climate change and environmental destruction that render certain habitats unliveable and induce socio-economic inequalities and shared ‘more-than-human’ vulnerabilities, death and loss become urgent environmental concerns. As climate scientists indicate, in order to achieve UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), a much more radical transformative action is needed from all stakeholders: governments, the private sector, communities and individuals (Höhne et al. 2020). Simultaneously, climate change, wars – as it is painfully manifested through the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine – and unsustainable living conditions contribute to the mortality and suffering of humans and nonhumans, destruction of entire ecosystems and populations, loss of biodiversity, the sixth mass extinction, and ‘slow’ – as well as very abrupt – environmental violence (Nixon 2011; Neimanis 2020; Åsberg & Radomska 2021). All of these evoke feelings of anger, anxiety and grief, manifested both globally and locally in popular-scientific narratives, cultural and artistic expressions, and environmental activism.
This paper explores crisis imaginaries linked to more-than-human death, dying and extinction, as well as questions of ecological grief (or eco-grief), which the former are inherently entwined with. After unpacking the genealogy of the concept of eco-grief and its interlinked notions, I briefly sketch out the theoretical framework of Queer Death Studies, which this presentation is grounded in, and subsequently I look at several examples of contemporary bio-, eco-and media art that mobilise and – at times – subvert the notions of and mourning the more-than-human.

Marietta Radomska, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in Environmental Humanities at Linköping University (Unit Gender Studies), SE; director of The Eco- and Bioart Lab; research team member of The Posthumanities Hub; and co-founder of Queer Death Studies Network. She works at the intersection of posthumanities, environmental humanities, continental philosophy, feminist theory, queer death studies, visual culture and contemporary art. In years 2017-20 Radomska was the leader of the project ‘Ecologies of Death: Environment, Body and Ethics in Contemporary Art’ (funder: The Swedish Research Council), and in 2020-22 of the project ‘Queer Ecologies of Extinction and Multispecies Futures of the Baltic Sea’ (funder: MISTRA-Formas, as part of The Seed Box: Environmental Humanities Collaboratory). Since 2017 she has formed part of the State of the Art Network steering group. She is the author of Uncontainable Life: A Biophilosophy of Bioart (2016); co-editor of the book series ‘Focus on More-than-human Humanities’ at Routledge (with Cecilia Åsberg); and has published in Australian Feminist Studies; Somatechnics; Women, Gender & Research, Artnodes, Environment and Planning E, among others. Web: www.mariettaradomska.com

Anna PRIEDOLA. Dairy Diaries: Dementia and Memory Institutions
The art as research project “Dairy Diaries” explores representation and experiences of dementia in Latvia via interviews, archival work in a medicine history museum, data visualisations, and workshops with dementia patients and the wider public, realised with the help of art mediators. Dementia is still a very stigmatised condition in Latvia, and the main aim for the art project was open up a discussion about it in a wider public using food both as an activity and a medium for depicting dementia statistics and degradation processes. “Dairy Diares” explores the challenge of care and treatment, and co-existence of people with various needs in a progress-driven capitalist system.

Anna Priedola is a trans-disciplinary artist and cultural producer residing in Liepaja, Latvia. In her artistic practice she explores social issues often working with food as a material in arts and data visualisation to explore the multi–sensoral properties it entails. Anna Priedola works holds an academic position in Liepaja University Faculty of Humanitarian Sciences and Arts, and currently works also as the deans substitute of the faculty.

Mayra ROJO. The deaths of Gutenberg: ‘Nosotros organísmico’
The deaths of Gutenberg: ‘Nosotros organísmico’, proposes a speculative fabulation of interspecies relations, an artistic investigation that mixes theory and praxis, poetics and politics of representation. The beginning is an experiment of biotransformation of books by Pleurotus fungi to create a necrosystem, where the symbolic hybridization of the book and the word will occur in living organisms that envision a future beyond the human.
Microbial and fungal biosynthesis represents a symbiotic universe that is enriched when read in the light of the ‘nosótrica’ notion of the living of the original Tojolabal communities and the particularity of the meaning of stench in the Otomi culture of central Mexico.
The power of narration, oral or written, re-signifies the value of life, which allows us to understand it as a technology of language. The horizon of ‘nosótrico’ imaginations of the indigenous communities of Mexico create friction with the paradigm of progress and modernity. Therefore, speculative fabulations, as an inventive force, question the hegemony of a biomedical aesthetics centred on the formation of digital skills and productions in the practices of bio-art.
This process of observation creates an unexpected learning experience of the living and its disruptive realities, which in the words of Velásquez Barriga allows us to ‘confront them without being stunned by the advent of their overwhelming complexity and then resolve themselves as emancipatory, critical and proactive collectivities in constant transformation of themselves and their contexts.

Mayra Rojo is a Mexican artist, interdisciplinary researcher and curator in visual arts and body discourses (gender and race), design and textile innovation research. She has received honorary mentions for doctoral and master final dissertations. She developed postdoctoral research about bacterial cellulose for textile and design. As an artist, she was selected the first artist woman in the resident Air-Montreux, Switzerland (2019). She and the Mexican performer Víctor Martínez developed Laboratory of actions in Public Space (Berlin, 2019). She currently develops the curatorial research Monstruas: teratology of the feminine. She was invited as a curator in the Project Traslados in Santiago de Chile under the topic collective curatorships and migration (2016). Among her papers, stands out The monster as a figure of an economy of the destruction of form in contemporary art: Cabeça do avesso de Lia Menna Barreto.

Recent theoretical publications: The return of the monster: Subversive power, (Exotopías Magazine, Mexico, 2019), Zombi, Zumbi, Zombie: The sound of the multitude, (Utopía Magazine, España, 2019).

Living Technologies: RENEWABLE FUTURES (Parallel Session 4B)

Eva SOMMEREGGER / Dietmar KOERING / Maike GEBKER / Zbigniew OKSIUTA / Andrew PATERSON
Moderator: Maija DEMITERE

Location: Zoom / RIXC Gallery

(15 min presentation + 5 min / 1-2 questions)

Eva SOMMEREGGER, Dietmar KOERING. Vessels for new Digital Landscapes
Maike GEBKER. Technology as an Ecosystem Actor
Zbigniew OKSIUTA. Merging of the Biological and the Digital.
Andrew PATERSON. Art(s) & Cultural Heritage Futures: Orientations in Fjordbyen Lier & Drammen

Eva SOMMEREGGER. Dietmar KOERING. Vessels for new Digital Landscapes
“To co-exist, and particularly to co-live, with algorithms and living environments request for new conceptual models of space – new models that transgress binary oppositions, able to reflect the multi-layered and interconnected coexistence of the digital and the physical, as well as the living and non-living beyond their distinction.

The proposed text discusses the limitations of Western concepts concerning the design of spaces loaded with digitally supported practices and data collection. Aware that we can only ever develop a partial understanding of non-Western thought, we aim to raise the consciousness of the specificities of the world models constructed by Polynesian navigation.

Following Haraway’s speculative fabulation method (1), new architectural models are sought to create new terrain beyond binary oppositions, reflecting the multi-layered and interconnected coexistence of the digital and the physical beyond their distinction. Traditional Western concepts of spatiality, such as those by Euclid, Descartes or Newton – a source of prejudice in Western, educated, industrialised, wealthy and democratic thinking (2) – cannot cope with the multi-layered and intertwined nature of digital and physical interdependence. To leave behind binary divisions and notions of unchangeable, pre-existing container space, the theories of Deleuze and Guattari proved more beneficial. The world does not emerge from the subject, but processes of subjectivation emerge from the interactions between body and world (3).

In search of a conception of avatar navigation, interestingly, non-Western representations can also serve well: Conceptual models of Polynesian navigation create an animated world in flux around the traveller (4). During a journey, the moving canoe is the fixed point of reference, while the islands, flock of birds and fish, currents, winds and the like pass by the boat along the itinerary. Many of these Polynesian world model qualities apply to the body when it communicates or resides in the digital medium: The body is fixed while the digital architecture moves in the flow. Consequently, the water metaphor, to be found in data streams and in practices of navigating or surfing the internet, reminds us that the rules learned from (human) life on earthly grounds no longer apply to the posthuman world of data. Instead, humans need architecture, such as a boat or a digital device, to find their ways in the flowing cosmos.

Furthermore, the shift from discussing spaces as territory co-inhabited by humans to an undefined realm in which humans have no place can be retracted in recent architectural discourse: While NOX’s Freshwater-Pavilion from 1997 (5), for instance, aims at the interaction of built environment and human audience by making a certain degree of human habitation visible through state-of-the-art technology, recent projects like the Google data centres and the like eerily construct architectures in which humans are seen as superfluous, declared mere accessories (6). The biggest discrepancy with their predecessors, such as libraries or teaching institutions, is their interconnectedness with the digital domains that depend on them: The physicality of data centres can only provide an index or indication of the vast digital and data spaces they host. But, equally, they create an awareness of the enormous physical-spatial resources required for data storage and the functioning of the digital, underlining the reciprocal relationships and interconnections of the digital and the physical that go far beyond binary categorisation.

In our research, we are looking for a new architectural narrative, inspired by the animated world model constructed around the Polynesian canoe, to cope with and counteract the demands made by the unpredictable digital flow and to contribute another partial perspective to a non-binary theory of new data landscapes.

Eva Sommeregger and Dietmar Koering are senior researchers at the LMDA Research Institute at the Academy of Arts of Latvia. Eva Sommeregger is co-founder of eyeTry architecture and senior scientist at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Eva received her Master’s degrees from Bartlett UCL London and TU Vienna and her PhD from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She was a Schütte-Lihotzky Research Fellow in 2010 and an Architect in Residence at MAK in Los Angeles in 2011. In 2018 she co-founded the Magazin exhibition space for contemporary architecture in Vienna. Her research is concerned with models of thought that relate to the spatiality of the human body. Her practice includes writing, curating and developing experimental digital spaces that have been exhibited at MoMa New York City and the Venice Architecture Biennale, among others. Dietmar Köring is the director of the architectural research firm Arphenotype, where he focuses on blurring the boundaries between different artistic disciplines. He studied architecture at the University of Western Sydney and at the Muthesius Academy of Art, where he graduated as Dipl.-Ing. (FH). Dietmar received his Master’s degree from Bartlett UCL London and his Dr.-Ing. from the Technical University of Berlin. He was a Jaap Bakema Fellow at the NAI in Rotterdam in 2010 and co-chair of eCAADe 2020 in Berlin. His current research focuses on architectural design, addressing the relationship between humans and machines, and the perception and influence of ethics and space in the age of artificial intelligence.

Maike GEBKER. Technology as an Ecosystem Actor
The forest in itself is a constantly balancing ecosystem. Species, such as trees and the mycorrhizal network exist in a life-sustaining symbioses. The network is used by trees to send signals about external threats to collaborating plants. Due to effects of climate change and environmental degradation, this symbiosis is weakened by droughts and flooding. The transfer of signals is no longer given and the health of the ecosystem is under constant risk. Therefore, this concept questions how the forest ecosystem can be supported by technological instruments to fight against the consequences of climate change.

FORSY-A is a speculative design project of an AI temporally bridging the communication gap of trees in the forest ecosystem. It tracks the meteorological and historical data of endangered forest areas through satellite monitoring, sensing and modeling techniques. Once extreme weather conditions are forecasted, FORSY-A analyzes the forest‘s air components for chemical compounds, emitted by threatened trees. As an agent-based learning algorithm, FORSY-A learns to understand the signals of trees in correlation with weather patterns and sensing data. If an attack of a herbivore for instance is detected, FORSY-A uses the data of the air components and instructs a mechanical laboratory to produce the chemical substance of the natural defense mechanism. Drones will then spray these substances in the endangered forest ecosystem to let distant trees naturally pre-immunize. The ecosystem communication is thereby bridged by FORSY-A, supporting the forest until the natural communication network is strengthened again.

The project questions the potential of technology as a tool to design for the more-than-human and to let humans become more sensitive of environmental communication and needs. FORSY-A as a concept is designed to display the splintered realities within natural and artificial environment as well as perspectives in between. The intersection of humans, living organisms and machines in this project provides a platform to reflect on how splintered we want our co-existing futures to be.

The uploaded file shows the interface of FORSY-A. The centered section displays the monitoring of threatened trees, while the lower part analyzes these trees and the forest region in detail. On the left side, meteorological and historical data and mappings of the region are shown. The right side analyzes the chemical compounds in the forest ecosystem and alarms if a threat is detected.

Zbigniew OKSIUTA. Merging of the Biological and the Digital.
“Merging of the Biological and the Digital.
Horizontal screen as a new soil.
Flatness and Cosmos.
“Even though we navigate daily through a perceptual world of three spatial dimensions and reason occasionally about higher dimensional arenas with mathematical ease, the world portrayed on our information displays is caught up in the two-dimensionality of the endless flatlands of paper and video screen. Escaping this flatland is the essential task of envisioning information — for all the interesting worlds (physical, biological, imaginary, human) that we seek to understand are inevitably and happily multivariate in nature. Not flatlands.”
Envisioning Information by Edward R. Tufte, 12

The project presents a vision of the future: a fusion of biological and digital languages.
It analyses the evolution of information recording and envisioning in human culture, from the era of early handwriting, through typewriting and printing, to the digital flat touchscreen technology.
The research explores the flat surface phenomenon, and its dominant potential in encoding information as writing texts, printing and displaying of images (books, paintings, films).
“…beginning with
the ancient Greeks, Western culture has been dominated by an ocularcentric paradigm, a vision-generated, vision-concreted interpretation of knowledge, truth and reality.”
Juhanni Palasmma (2)
As a first step, I suggest changing the position and scale of a sheet of paper, a television monitor or a computer screen. The Display surface of the screen should be located horizontally. We can then not only see it, but touch it, we can work on it, walk on it, build objects on it and even breed on it.
The next vision is the nature of this screen. This is not a death glass screen. It is more a flat surface of water, a surface of a lake or a soft polymeric flatness of agarose in an immense Petri dish.
Essential references include the 1972 Supersurface Project by the Italian group Superstudio, a vision of “Life without objects” – a world environmentally reduced to flatness, all urban functions condensed to a large, flat surface.
Heavy liquids and gels are the medium behind the idea: they flat and unrestricted surfaces become a mirror and screen for digital information, its deepness – the cradle of biological life. A thick polymeric water layer (agar-agar) will simultaneously serve as a digital information displayer and a new soil for actual biological farming, the new future reality, agriculture field and landscape.
The ultimate goal is to envision a future wherein digital bits merge with biological proteins.
Information is as valuable as matter or energy.
Information is physical!

Zbigniew Oksiuta is an architect, artist and researcher experimenting with the possibility of designing biological structures. He holds a Master of Architecture from The Warsaw University of Technology, Poland.
His projects examine new wet technologies and biological materials which enable the development of new kinds of biological objects in the biosphere and in space.

Work of Zbigniew Oksiuta has been exhibited at many prominent venues worldwide including the Venice Biennial 2004; the ArchiLab d’Orleans 2004; Ars Electronica Linz 2007; Center for Contemporary Art Warsaw 2007; FACT Foundation for Arts and Creative Technology Liverpool 2008; Casino Luxembourg 2009, Kapelica Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia 2010; Science Gallery, Dublin 2011, Arsenal Gallery Białystok, Poland 2018, Broad Art Museum Lansing, Michigan 2018, Centre for Contemporary Art Laznia 2, Gdańsk, Poland 2019

Zbigniew Oksiuta has lectured and presented his ideas at a number of universities, art and scientific institutions including: National Gallery Warsaw; Slade School of Art London; Architectural Association London; Pratt Institute New York; Faculty of Architecture Landscape and Design UofT Toronto; Southern California Institute of Architecture Los Angeles; Columbia University New York; The School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Royal College of Art, London; MS2 Art Museum, Lodz, Poland, ESARQ School of Architecture UIC Barcelona, Spain.

Andrew PATERSON. Art(s) & Cultural Heritage Futures: Orientations in Fjordbyen Lier & Drammen
“This paper shares the process and theoretical background to a pedagogical workshop led by the author that encouraged young cultural workers, artists and educators at OsloMet Art in Society programme to think and imagine cultural production in relation to a large-scale future urban-rural development plan called Fjordbyen Lier & Drammen, providing housing, community and social-health services for 16,000 persons, set to be completed between 2030-2050.

The workshop brought experience in socially-engaged art, process-based art+science and research, and aligned with artistic methods, especially performative practice that brings people together, and encourages the construction of narratives via walking. In particular, site and surface-based engagement of Lier & Drammen municipalities over 3 days allowed for a preliminary focus on cultural heritage, especially the different forms- tangible, intangible, natural -that make up the inheritance of past cultures in our present, and which it is, maybe naively, imagined to sustainably be carried on in the future. This included visits to sites such as a Viking burial mound, a bird sanctuary, a working farm store, a potential future cultural centre, and the old and new (to be completed in 2025) hospital sites which have been important shared facilities between the neighbouring municipalities.

Critical archeological and heritage theory, such as that of Rodney Harrison (2011), has challenged the focus of these disciplines on the past and ‘depth’ metaphors, re-orientating meaning-making towards ‘of and in the present’, with ‘surface surveys’ that contain pasts, presents and possible futures. As an innovative addition, the workshop took this inspiration can combined it with speculative near-future fiction, e.g. solarpunk, and cultural event design, the workshop participants were encouraged to consider what is currently present as the basis for future arts & cultural heritage imaginations, as if they themselves in 10-20 years may be employed in the municipality.

Such possible futures for Fjordbyen Lier & Drammen were narratives that involved and combined traces of what remains of the past , celebrated as cultural heritage in contemporary times, with that of what might be desirable in 20 or 30 years ahead. The textual or spoken narratives shared at the end of the workshop were free of, and contrasting with, the urban, environmental and architectural ocular-dominated imaging process already employed in the planning of the large-scale development.

Artists and cultural workers have a role in assisting the community in facilitating positive futures in the local community, combining appropriate and ecological, social, and technological perspectives. Due to the socio-ecological emphasis of the new Fjordbyen development site, and it’s long time-span of 20-30 years of development, connecting and affecting both the pre-existing agricultural and post-industrial heritage of the area, encourages a need for care and attention, and stewardship over a longer duration of human and non-human life relations.

The paper concludes that it is important for them to be involved in pre-figuration in urban planning, including cultural practices and transdisciplinary thinking at an early stage in municipal transformation. It argues that it is necessary also to look ahead early with the trans-generational perspective, which ‘arts & heritage futures’ provides, so that municipalities encourage supporting culture within the communities who already live there, those who may come and stay in the future.