RALF BAECKER

Meta.Morf X – Digital Wild / Trondheim kunstmuseum – Gråmølna, March 5 – May 3, 2020 / Curator: Espen Gangvik

RALF BAECKER [de]
RANDOM ACCESS MEMORY

Random Access Memory is a fully functional digital memory. Instead of operating on semiconducting components to represent either the binary states of 0 (zero) or 1 (one), the memory uses grains of sand as storage material. Sand grains can be read, placed or removed on a rotating disc by a three axis pick and place mechanism combined with a microscope camera to track the position of a single sand grain. This memory mechanism is prone to errors thru misreadings, bouncing grains and other imponderabilities.

Furthermore the machines performs a computational process on this memory. The algorithm, executed on the sand grains, is a so called Turmite, a two dimensional operating Turing Machine. It’s only goal it is to write as many 1’s (stones) as possible in the memory and to avoid a termination, following a strict rule. This process emerges complex and repetitive pattern on the disc. R A M investigates the contrast of a “pure” mathematical process (algorithm) and its “impure” material implementation into the world.

Random Access Memory reflects on the interaction of idea and matter and their encounter in contemporary information technology. It forms some kind of hybrid between contemporary and an ancient technology. Computing with sand, Geomancy or ‛ilm al-raml (science of the sand) is an old arabic divination technique based on sand grains, or other geological material, that were “casted” on a plane surface. A strict set of rules, recursively applied on the grains get condensed in order to gain knowledge about the future. Nowadays boolean algebra is inscribed into thin layers of purified silicon, another geological material, in order to execute complex simulations like weather prediction on it.

Produced with support of the Graduate School of the University of the Arts, Berlin with support of the Einstein Foundation.

rlfbckr.org

Ralf Baecker (b. 1977 Düseseldorf, Germany) is an artist working at the interface of art, science and technology. Through installations and machines, Baecker explores fundamental mechanisms of new media and technologies. In his representations and specializations of digital and technological processes he offers a poetic sight behind the surfaces of contemporary image making. At the core of his objects lies the entanglement of the virtual with the real, or rather, with the world. With a media-archaeological outlook, Ralf Baecker digs within obsolete devices for traces and functions that are still detectable in technologies today. His work seeks to form a hybrid between contemporary digital methodologies and a material oriented artistic practice. As a result, he understands technology not as a tool but rather as an epistemological instrument, in order to pose elemental questions about a world perceived through technological impressions.

Baecker has been awarded multiple prizes and grants for his artistic work, including the grand prize of the Japan Media Art Festival in 2017, an honorary mention at the Prix Ars Electronica in 2012 and 2014, the second prize at the VIDA 14.0 Art & Artificial Life Award in Madrid, a working grand of the Stiftung Kunstfond Bonn, the Stiftung Niedersachsen work stipend for Media Art 2010 and the stipend of the Graduate School for the Arts from the University of the Arts in Berlin and the Einstein Foundation.

His work has been presented in international festivals and exhibitions, such as the International Triennial of New Media Art 2014 in Beijing, Künstlerhaus Wien, ZKM | Center for Art and New Media in Karlsruhe, Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, WINZAVOD Center for Contemporary Art in Moscow, Laboral Centro de Arte in Gijon, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), NTT InterCommunication Center in Tokyo, Kasseler Kunstverein and Malmö Konsthall.
Since 2016 he teaches at the University of the Arts Bremen as Professor for Experimental Design of New Technologies in the Digital Media program.

SANDRINE DEUMIER

Meta.Morf X – Digital Wild / Trondheim kunstmuseum – Gråmølna, March 5 – May 3, 2020 / Curator: Espen Gangvik ///

DISNOVATION.ORG

Meta.Morf X – Digital Wild / Trondheim kunstmuseum – Gråmølna, March 5 – May 3, 2020 / Curator: Espen Gangvik

DISNOVATION.ORG [fr/pl]
SHANZHAI ARCHEOLOGY

The Chinese term shanzhai (山寨) refers to counterfeit consumer goods. This includes imitation, trademark infringement, parody, lookalikes and improved goods, particularly in the field of electronics. A shanzhai (literally shan: mountain, zhai: stronghold) denotes a remote village in the mountains where bandits had once recreated their own form of society, far from the rules of the emperor.

Shanzhai Archeology presents an extraordinary collection of mobile phones from this technological interbreeding Made in China. These are hybrid products developed at an incredible speed merging piracy, reverse engineering, unique creativity and self-taught skills.
In this collection, a Buddha Phone, becomes a virtual altar by pressing a special key. The “smallest in the world” or Prisoner Phone is made of 99% plastic and is barely detectable by the authorities. There’s the Taser Phone, marketed as a self-defense weapon, or the Sound System Phone, catering for China’s pensioners as it can broadcast loud sound outdoors, being heard above the din of the public dances they love. It also comes with several gigabytes of old-fashioned communist songs that Chinese pensioners are particularly keen on. Other curious devices include strawberry or car-shaped phones, devices with in-built electric razors, lighters, power banks, video projectors and other impressive features.

A profitable business produced by small companies, shanzhai mainly happens out of Western sight, due to regulations that forbid most of these hybrid products to circulate legally across borders. Nevertheless, shanzhai devices fulfil a bespoke need or desire for hundreds of thousands of consumers in countries around the world, not just in China.

At a time when shanzhai might be under threat— following the Chinese government’s decision to clean up the country of its counterfeiter reputation—this project casts a critical eye at the results of unfettered technological innovation, through the relatively unknown history of the shanzhai.

Positioning this project at the crossroads between art and anthropology, the artists explore the cultural value of shanzhai and the radical otherness of its creative process; an open manufacturing model resulting in singular design solutions outside streamlined market forces and global innovation myths.

—Irini Papadimitriou, London, January 2018

Shanzhai Archeology
DISNOVATION.ORG (Nicolas Maigret, Maria Roszkowska, Clément Renaud & Hongyuan Qu) 2015-2018
3D models: Terrell Davis
Installation, collection, video, research, publication | 2015-2018

With The Support Of:
CNC Dicream, Design Trust – Hong Kong, Design Society – Shenzhen, Institut Français de Chine, Le Cube – Art3000, Watermans Art Centre

disnovation.org

Disnovation.org is a working group based in Paris, initiated by Nicolas Maigret (FR) and Maria Roszkowska (PL/FR). At the intersection
of contemporary art, research and hacking, the collective develops situations of disruption, speculation, and debate, in order to question dominant techno-positivist ideologies, and to stimulate post-growth narratives. They edited The Pirate Book, an anthology on media piracy. Their research includes artworks, curation and publications. In 2018, they received a Design Trust Grant (Hong Kong) for a research about China’s Shanzhai culture. They are currently visiting researchers at the University of California, Irvine.

Their work has been presented at numerous art centers and festivals internationally such as Centre Pompidou (Paris), Transmediale (Berlin), the Museum of Art and Design (New York), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), FILE (Sao Paulo), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Strelka Institute (Moscow), ISEA (Hong Kong), Elektra (Montréal), China Museum of Digital Arts (Beijing), and the Chaos Computer Congress (Hamburg)… Their work has been featured in Forbes, Vice, Wired, Motherboard, Libération, Die Zeit, Arte TV, Next Nature, Hyperallergic, Le Temps, Neural.it, Digicult, Gizmodo, Seattle Weekly, torrentfreak.com, and Filmmaker Magazine among others.

ANNA DUMITRIU / ALEX MAY

Meta.Morf X – Digital Wild / Trondheim kunstmuseum – Gråmølna, March 5 – May 3, 2020 / Curator: Espen Gangvik

ANNA DUMITRIU [gb] ALEX MAY [gb]

ArchaeaBot:
A Post Singularity and Post Climate Change Life-form

ArchaeaBot: A Post Singularity and Post Climate Change Life-form” takes the form of an underwater robotic installation that explores what ‘life’ might mean in a post singularity, post climate change future. The project is based on new research about archaea (the oldest life forms on Earth) combined with the latest innovations in machine learning & artificial intelligence creating the ‘ultimate’ species for the end of the world as we know it. New research is revealing the mechanisms by which ancient archaea called Sulfolobus acidocaldarius can move around to seek ‘food’ using tails known as archaella.

The archaella use cogwheel-like ‘motors’ to swim about. Our collaborator cryo-microscopist Amanda Wilson is studying the structure of these archaella to make tiny drills made of DNA which might be used to drill into cells to cure diseases, but the robotic archaella are made through 3D printing.

The work is made in collaboration with researcher/cryomicroscopist Amanda Wilson as part of the EU FET Open H2020 funded MARA project based in the Beeby Lab at Imperial College London, and with Professor Daniel Polani from the School of Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire. The project is supported through an EMAP/EMARE artists’ residency at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Spain via funding from Creative Europe and with generous support from Arts Council England. Since its completion in August 2018 the piece has been shown at Ars Electronica Festival 2018 (Linz, Austria), LABoral (Gijon, Spain), Bandits Mages (Bourges, France) and IMPAKT (Utrecht, Netherlands).

youtu.be/7g1-g3GSbiE
myrobotcompanion.tumblr.com/ArchaeaBot

Anna Dumitriu is a British artist who works with BioArt, sculpture, installation, and digital media to explore our relationship to infectious diseases, synthetic biology and robotics. She has an extensive international exhibition profile including ZKM, Ars Electronica, BOZAR, The Picasso Museum, The V & A Museum, Philadelphia Science Center, MOCA Taipei, LABoral, Art Laboratory Berlin, and The Museum of the History of Science Oxford. She was the 2018 President of the Science and the Arts section of the British Science Association and holds visiting research fellowships at the University of Hertfordshire, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, and Waag Society, as well as artist-in-residence roles with the Modernising Medical Microbiology Project at the University of Oxford, and with the National Collection of Type Cultures at Public Health England.

Dumitriu is a renowned speaker and has presented her work at venues including TATE Modern, Princeton University, Imperial College, La Musee de la Chasse et de la Nature, The Mendel Museum and UCLA. Her work is featured in many books including “Bio Art: Altered Realities” published by Thames and Hudson in 2016 and many other significant publications across contemporary art and science including Artforum International Magazine, Leonardo Journal, The Art Newspaper, Art Quarterly, Nature and The Lancet. Dumitriu’s work has a strong focus on the ethical implications of emerging technologies drawing threads across time, exploring future scenarios by reflecting on the past.

Alex May is a British artist creating digital technologies to challenge and augment physical and emotional human boundaries on a personal and societal level in a hyper-connected, software mediated, politically and environmentally unstable world. He works with light, code, and time; notably algorithmic photography, robotic artworks, video projection mapping installations, interactive and generative works, video sculpture, performance, and video art. Alex has exhibited internationally including at the Francis Crick Institute (permanent collection), Eden Project (permanent collection), Tate Modern, Ars Electronica (Austria), LABoral (Spain), the Victoria & Albert Museum, Royal Academy of Art, Wellcome Collection, Science Museum, Bletchley Park, One Canada Square in Canary Wharf, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas (Venezuela), the Science Gallery in Dublin, Princeton University, University of Calgary (international visiting artist 2016), Texas A&M University, and the Beall Center for Art + Technology, University of California, Irvine.

Alex is a Visiting Research Fellow: Artist in Residence with the School of Computer Science of University of Hertfordshire, and a Digital Media Arts MA sessional lecturer at the University of Brighton.

LOUIS FREHRING

Meta.Morf X – Digital Wild / Trondheim kunstmuseum – Gråmølna, March 5 – May 3, 2020 / Curator: Espen Gangvik

LOUIS FREHRING [fr]
SINGING BIRDS

“Singing birds” is a sound installation that presents computer-generated birdsongs imitating the ornithological soundscapes found in the vicinity of Trondheim. The installation tricks the listener into believing that this entirely virtual representation is describing real life. It invites us to rethink our conception of what we call “natural”, and how nature and the representation – or interpretation – in question, might be confounded.

louisfrehring.com

Louis Frehring is a French contemporary artist based in Rennes, France, who works at the intersections of media arts, sculpture and visual arts. He has studied contemporary art at École Européenne d’Art de Bretagne at Brest, and he is currently enrolled in postgraduate studies in Rennes, in collaboration with the contemporary art centre 40mcube.

His work consists of heterogenous compositions and dispositions that use technology both as a subject and as a medium; it thereby aims to inform the spectator about what technology is and how it works, as well as what it changes in nature, in society and in us.

Through his practice, Louis Frehring seeks to reveal the internal systems that are concealed in the black boxes of technology, thus helping us understand the repercussions that they have on our lives.

His work has earned him grants from several institutions, such as the French Ministry of Culture (2019) and the Swiss foundation Château Mercier (2018).
The artist’s works have recently been exhibited in France, Canada, Switzerland, Germany and USA. He also writes for magazines and works with cultural institutions, teaching and lecturing for large audiences.

Header graphics: Diana Hlevnja

KYRIAKI GONI

Meta.Morf X – Digital Wild / Trondheim kunstmuseum – Gråmølna, March 5 – May 3, 2020 / Curator: Espen Gangvik

KYRIAKI GONI [gr]
ETERNAL U. INC

In this speculative story unfolding in a near future the majority of planet’s aging population suffers from various forms of memory loss. Digital dementia is only one of the many manifestations of this modern plague, as some have described it.

Big corporations the so-called attention merchants were extensively bidding for people’s free time and attention over the past decades by creating intentionally addictive content on platforms and devices. This resulted to an addicted society with a strong tendency to boredom and procrastination, who eventually collapsed into a state of numbness and subsequently memory loss, having offered their brains as well as their data on the altar of the attention economy. No one proved capable of presenting an effective treatment or cure.

Eternal U. Inc a newly launched international company claims to have the solution by utilizing an advanced artificial neural network. The client starting from a young age permits the neural network access to all her personal digital data.
If they choose so the dataset can be extended to include dreams, biometric and sensory data. The client/user herself becomes thus the dataset for network’s training. The neural network learns from and by the client/user and as soon as she is unable to cope with everyday life the trained neural network replaces her, ensuring the conservation of her memory. The company guarantees security and secrecy, along with a high quality and performance. People went grazy with Eternal U.Inc. In less than 24hr thousands of people visited the website and bought the advanced neural networks, which were immediately set to learn everything about their owners. Eternal U.Inc was established as one of the most successful new companies on the field of affective infrastructures.

A video apparently attributed to one of these artificial assistants appears online some years later in 2062 and questions arise regarding the safety of the provided service and its possible consequences both for humans and machines.

Note: This work has as its starting point a love story in my family. My grandmother suffers from Alzheimer’s disease almost ten years now. I witnessed her gradual memory loss, her difficulty to remember words at the beginning and then eventually syllables, and her long silences due
to the lack of the right words. Ηer caregiver was her 65 years long partner, my late grandfather.

It was extremely tough for him to accept her condition as well as the subsequent periods of silence between them which were getting longer and longer. In the face of all these problems he remained by her side until his last minute.

Eternal U.Inc begun as an artistic research for possible support for family caregivers to cope with the lack of communication in this kind of situations. In the process the emphasis shifted onto the surveillance society and the relationship between humans and machines. I am not sure that my grandfather would approve this idea though, I didn’t ask him on time. But I am pretty sure about his answer. Love does not need substitutes.

LORENZO OGGIANO

Meta.Morf X – Digital Wild / Trondheim kunstmuseum – Gråmølna, March 5 – May 3, 2020 / Curator: Espen Gangvik

LORENZO OGGIANO [it]
ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING SYSTEM /
QUASI-OBJECTS /
SOFT BODIES

ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING SYSTEM

“Environmental Monitoring System”, 4-channel AV installation, full-HD Pal, color, stereo, 06:00 mins each, infinite synchronous loop, ed. of 4+1 AP, 2016, courtesy the artist.

Environmental Monitoring System (2016) is a four-channel AV installation – accompanied by two sets of limited edition prints – conceived as a simulation of a multi-camera monitoring system aimed to document the real time dynamics of four complex ecosystems.

Produced with 3D modeling / animation software and digital sound generation tools, the project aims to be a further reflection on the relationships between ecosphere, technosphere, and biological / sensorial / cognitive mutations; more precisely it takes back and reelaborates the path I have undertaken with the “Quasi-Objects” cycle (2003 / on-going) and, more recently, with the “Polymorphic Systems Studies” (2012, 2014 / 2015), concerning the progressive relativization of the life-forms – and of the concept of life itself – as notable consequence of techno-biological evolution.

In “Quasi-Objects” I worked on redesigning organisms and ecosystems, exploiting the synthetic and combinatory genesis of the CGI as an operative advantage that – subordinating the classical theory of representation (its “optical-discursive apparatus”) to an aesthetics of process in which the sensorial outcome refers to the anoptical procedures that made it available – led to state the opportunity of thinking the living being as a dynamic topology of relationships between processes, as an abstract and transitory product of an organizational dynamic independent by any physical, material component.

Toward the same direction with the “Polymorphic Systems Studies” I introduced the concept of polymorphism – seminally investigated between 2001 and 2003 with the 20 photographic panels belonging to the “Sample-Kit” series. Looking at the overcoming of the mutationselection balance model as leading cause of the evolution process, in favour of a pluralistic /non-gradualistic point of view, that interpret the evolutionary discontinuity as product of the complex iteration between different systems, between geological and ecological hierarchies, and by means of processes of hybridization with alterity (symbiosis, co-evolution, biomachinic contamination, …), other figures of subjectivity, as mobile / recombinant assemblage of heterogeneous entities, have been proposed.

In “Environmental Monitoring System” I took back and re-developed the previously mentioned issues, working at the same time on the spatial- temporal dimension (with interventions on the simulation syntax) and on the architecture, the dynamics, the morphologies of the ecosystems and of the actualized synth-organisms. On the one hand the simulation of an environmental monitoring system, in addition to influences “quantitatively” the device operational capabilities – that works in an iterative mode, since what is simulated are both the system itself and the virtually monitored space-time portions – regulates “qualitatively”its semantic value, referring to a specific instrumental practice of documentation / control of reality (optic, “objective and objectifying”); on the other, actors and synthetic sceneries are shaped and articulated (animated, soundtracked) in order to reinforce the connoted perspective and, overall, to optimize potentials sense paths.

“Environmental Monitoring System” is therefore intended as a contribution to a reflection on the epistemic statute of synthetic imagery opening up to wider questions regarding the relationships between sensorial orders, levels of rationality, figures of subjectivity, cosmologies.

My invitation is to reconsider the weight and implications of a scenery in which the “informatic image” can be seen as an unstable intermediation area between convergent systems. Not only immaterial abstractions of increasing complex- ity and plausibility which finds in technology their theoretical development limit, but liquid interfaces of connection / conversion between domains of (co)existence, between “realities” whose distance (difference) gets progressively blurred, contributing to reveal the impracticability and inadequacy of those anthropocentric cosmologies that, for a long time, are relentlessly deconstructing themselves in the relationships with sciences, technologies and everyday experience.

In this direction, the abandonment of the classical epistemological framework – based on a mechanistic-representationist model – in favour of a systemic-constructivist approach through which to leave the complexity reduction apparatuses that still dominate the different disciplines and the common thought, opening up to perspectives that are alternatives to any teleology of modernity, it’s a prerequisite for the practices of a techno-social ecology that allows our species a conscious coexistence with alterity.

It’s not (only) a matter of putting the human within a complex and heterogeneous net of fluxes and relations but, rather – assuming the reciprocally constitutive relationship between observing and observed systems, the erosion of the boundaries between subject and object, the combinatory role played by technologies – to finally distract him from its own epistemological, ontological, ethical supremacy, bringing him back to the same side of the other living beings, and of the “objects without soul”, as terminal of a constructed and pluriversable multiverse, not embraceable with a single gaze.

QUASI-OBJECTS

“Quasi-Objects / C-Study #59”, Lambda print, ed. of 5, 2008, courtesy the artist.

Quasi-Objects (2003– ) is an ongoing cycle of works generated with 3D modeling and animation software, actually made of by ten videos / video installations and over onehundred prints and preparatory studies.
The given title – borrowed from “Nous n’avons jamais été modernes” by Bruno Latour (which in turn refers to some reflections advanced by Michel Serres in “Le Parasite” and “Statues”) – reflected my intention to do precise reference to that “regime of ontological undecidability” that remodeled (progressively and definitively, at least from the second half of the last century) the order of “men and things”, our relationship with nature, looking for a nondialectical way of reconciliation with alterity, beyond any stable representation that preserves the proliferation of difference.

In earlier works my interest had been directed at the process of complexification of the contemporary universes of sense, focusing the attention on the semantic shifts intervened in the subjects/objects relationships through its “pre-figurations” in multiversal forms of existence as output of a process of bio-machinic contamination (“Sample-Kit”, 2002–2003) or in a multilayered vision of body geographies achieved by means of the plastic coexistence of object based and project based instances (“Operative Systems”, 2003). “Quasi-Objects” followed the same research path processing its “synthetic combinatory genesis as an operative advantage within a practice of organic re-design intended to stimulate thought about the progressive relativization of natural forms of life as result of techno-biological evolution.

As entities coming from numerical procedures – through which the signification process is given in the non-existence of ontological referents – synthetic images, by shifting attention from the “image” itself to its embodied “knowledge-quota” (from output to process) contributes to make us aware of our relationship with the “reality”, looking at the meaning of life in terms of a real and autonomous process disjoint from any specific material manifestation, a generative grammar independent from the holding (s)object. “Quasi-Objects” concerns data actualization, the production of biologically a-functional (biopolitically dysfunctional) occurrences, dealing about life without regard to the outcomes it recognizes, transient outputs of an operative practice: aesthetics of process.

SOFT BODIES

“Soft Body #02”, digital C-type print, ed. of 3+1 AP, 2016, courtesy the artist.

Soft Bodies (2016– ) is an ongoing series of digital c-type prints coming from some hi-poly 3D modeling studies I made from 2015 onwards.
The aim of the project is to continue / deepen my research on synth-organic morphologies by generating a set of detailed, hi-res prints digitally colorized during the post-production phase to achieve a better photorealistic effect.

From the beginning of this year I started the production – still in an experimental phase – of 3D printed sculptures “in-formed” by some of the series’ 3D modeling files.

lorenzooggiano.net

Lorenzo Oggiano (b. 1964, Padua) is an italian interdisciplinary artist working in new media, video, video installation, photography, assemblage, sculpture.

He holds an MA cum laude in Visual Arts from the University of Bologna / D.A.M.S., with a dissertation on the relationship between arts and new technologies. Since the early 1990s Lorenzo Oggiano dedicated his artistic and theoretical research on the concepts of nature and life, questioning relationships between technologies, registers of rationality, production of subjectivity, cosmologies, focusing on the morphology and dynamics of organisms and ecosystems, on the concept of space and on space-time interrelations.

Oggiano’s work has been presented — among others — at Pratt Manhattan Gallery (New York, USA), National Museum / WRO Art Center (Wroclav, PL), Ars Electronica Center (Linz, AT), Cinémathèque Française (Paris, FR), Eyebeam Art+Technology Center (New York, USA), Naturhistorisches Museum (Wien, AT), Kyoto University (Kyoto, JP), Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci (Prato, IT), Kunsthaus Dresden (Dresden, DE), Palazzo dei Congressi (Rome, IT), CCCB (Barcelona, ES), Art-Science Node (Berlin, DE), MAN_Museo d’arte della provincia di Nuoro (Nuoro, IT), Traffic Gallery (Bergamo, IT), FilmBase (Dublin, IRL), Museo Nacional Reina Sofia (Madrid, ES), Museo Nazionale del Cinema (Turin, IT), Röda Sten Konsthall (Göteborg, SE), Directors Lounge (Berlin, DE), DAS Dispositivo Arti Sperimentali (Bologna, IT), The Cleveland Institute of Art (Cleveland, USA), Cartes Centre of Art and Technology (Espoo, FI), Rebecca Container Gallery (Genoa, IT), Protein Gallery (London, UK), Hong Kong Space Museum (Hong-Kong, CN), Technopolis (Athens – GR), Rialto Sant’Ambrogio (Rome, IT), Le Cube (Issy-les-Moulineaux, FR) — and can be found in several public and private collections.

Interviews, articles and reviews about his work has been featured on Flash Art, Vice, Rhizome, Digicult, Computer Arts, Viewpoint Magazine, Arch2O, Arte, Kult Magazine, Digital Photography+Design Magazine, Trend Hunter, DataIsNature, 3dwasp, Anti-Utopias, Journal du Design, Nova 24, TheCreatorsProject, Il Fotografo, Espoarte, Random Magazine — and in several catalogues, essays, publications.

Since 1998 he lives and works in Sassari (Italy).

Sabine Bors: Aberrant Environments: Speculative Matters in Lorenzo Oggiano’s “Environmental Monitoring

KELLY RICHARDSON

Meta.Morf X – Digital Wild / Trondheim kunstmuseum – Gråmølna, March 5 – May 3, 2020 / Curator: Espen Gangvik

KELLY RICHARDSON [ca]
ORION TIDE

Quiet stillness and spectacular drama, mesmerising beauty and unnerving strangeness, hard science and creative fiction: artist Kelly Richardson brings these dualities together in works of calculated tension and ambiguity. Her immersive video installations offer imaginative views of the future that are plausible enough to prompt careful consideration of the present.

In making her artwork, Richardson takes cues from 19th-century painting, 20th-century cinema and 21st-century scientific inquiry. One can compare her evocative use of colour and light to that of romantic landscape painters J.M.W. Turner and Albert Bierstadt. Her slow, eerie scenes recall moments in popular films just before or after alien attacks, nuclear battles or apocalyptic storms. Hyper-realistic details in her videos reveal the work of a meticulous researcher, interested in both natural phenomenon and human invention. Much of the artwork that Richardson creates could be labeled science fiction. She acknowledges that she sees the genre as “one of the best tools we have to visualise and experience, to some degree, what life might be like.” And she argues that, “given the predicted fallout of the climate crisis, there has never been a more important time to visualise our potential futures.”

In her video installation Orion Tide, what are those sudden eruptions of light and smoke? Missiles? Rockets? At whom or what are they being launched? Who or what are they carrying? Is this the departure of explorers, off to bravely pioneer a new world? Or, is this the escape of refugees – a mass exodus of humanity? The artist deliberately leaves these questions unanswered.

kellyrichardson.net

Kelly Richardson is recognised as one of the leading representatives of a generation of artists working with digital technologies to create hyper-real, highly charged landscapes, Kelly Richardson has been widely acclaimed in North America, Asia and Europe. Recent one person exhibitions include Dundee Contemporary Arts, SMoCA, CAG Vancouver, VOID Derry,  Naturhistorisches Museum Wien and a major survey at the Albright-Knox. Her work was selected for the Beijing, Busan, Canadian, Gwangju and Montréal biennales, and major moving image exhibitions including the The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, USA). Her video installations have been included in the Toronto International Film Festival as part of Future Projections (2012), Sundance Film Festival in New Frontier (2011 and 2009) and in 2009, she was honoured as the featured artist at the Americans for the Arts National Arts Awards.

Richardson’s work has been acquired into significant museum collections across the USA, UK and Canada, from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, SMoCA and Albright-Knox Art Gallery to the National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Arts Council Collection (England) and the Towner.

Kelly Richardson was born in Burlington, Ontario, Canada in 1972. She currently lives and works as a visitor on the traditional territory of the WSANEC peoples of the Coast Salish Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada. She is Associate Professor in Visual Arts at the University of Victoria.

DANIEL SLÅTTNES

Meta.Morf X – Digital Wild / Trondheim kunstmuseum – Gråmølna, March 5 – May 3, 2020 / Curator: Espen Gangvik

DANIEL SLÅTTNES [no]
PLANT CYBORGS (2015-d.d.)

In 2015 I started off an artistic collaboration with a houseplant. The plant, an ordinary baby rubber plant (P. obtusifolia) happened to sit on my desk when I asked What is life? Personally I think life is what happens in the connections in-between with other beings. I have connections with people, animals, even a mountain or place. I wondered how much I could grow a connection with this plant.

I started simply by spending time with the houseplant. We sat together for long periods and I meditated on what we have in common, its characteristics, my impressions of it. I visualized my breath through my lungs and the same air going through the plant’s stomata. This grew a bodily connection. I discovered that we have another commonality in the biosignals going through our bodies. By amplifying the electrical signals via electrodes on my scalp and on the plant’s leaves, we could listen to each other’s vibrations.

During the experiments on the plant’s electrophysiology, I wondered if the plant could be taught to move a robotic prosthesis. It would help the collaboration tremendously if we could be on the same time scale. After a lot of work with programmers, data scientists and electrical engineers we managed to give the plant a prosthesis that reacted to its bio-signals with the help of machine learning.

It’s a challenge to try to communicate with a being so far from oneself. On the other hand, we communicate with signals all the time both consciously and mechanically. Now we discover that other species also communicate with discrete signals. Can we learn to make the signals of Others, like plants, give resonance in us?

slaattnes.com

Daniel Slåttnes (b. 1986) lives and works in Oslo (NO) and Västra Ämtervik (SE). He holds a degree in Master of Fine Arts from the Oslo Academy of the Arts (2014). The graduation project “Meditations over form” is an archive that dealt with strategies for sculpting with subconscious choices. Recent exhibitions include Vegetal Connections at Atelier Nord in Oslo, “Anthro-botanical investigations from the studio” at Gallery Hans in Ørland, Consciousness in the Time of Kairos at Kurant in Tromsø (in collaboration with Sara Rönnbäck and Hans Edward Hammonds), Conversation Between Bodies (together with Sara Rönnbäck) at the Art Museum of Nord-Trøndelag and Aldea Center for Contemporary Art in Bergen; Seances with Materials at Podium in Oslo and Hotel Pro Forma in Copenhagen and Platform 1-12 in Slovakia. Upcoming exhibitions at RAM Gallery in Oslo, Oppland Art Center, Arteriet in Kristiansand, and “Tree Talks” curated by LATERNA in collaboration with Black Box Theater in Oslo.

In recent years, Slåttnes has worked with physical and emotional connections to other people, non-humans and sculptures, with an interest in understanding oneself in relation to the outside world. His interest in communicating with things may stem from the feeling that even humans are basically strangers to each other. He explores in several of his works various possibilities to establish a kind of communication with the materials he works with. The meeting between plant and machine is a distinct focus as they are both on the outskirts of what we perceive as conscious life, beyond human recollection. Since 2015 he has explored plant consciousness in collaboration with a houseplant. Vegetal Connections (2018) at Atelier Nord revolved around the biosignals of three houseplants from his studio. For the past four years he has also worked on the idea of material consciousness in collaboration with Sara Rönnbäck through the project “Conversation between bodies”.

Member of NBK, UKS, BONO

https://slaattnes.com