VIRAL CLOUD RELOADED

During the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 Art Laboratory Berlin and BioClub Tokyo arranged a series of 14 online meetings between hybrid artists and associates virtually connecting Berlin with Tokyo as well as other locations in East and Southeast Asia. These meetings were a forum for exchange of research, practice and solidarity in times of crises.

We are happy to present VIRAL CLOUD Reloaded together with our colleagues for an afternoon/evening of short talks and discussions:

Christian de Lutz, Regine Rapp, Tuçe Erel (Art Laboratory Berlin)
Georg Tremmel (BioClub Tokyo and metaPhorest, Tokyo)
Hideo Iwasaki (metaPhorest, BioClub Tokyo, Waseda University, Tokyo)
Henry Tan (FREAK Lab, Bangkok, metaPhorest, Japan)
Soyoon Ryu (Rice Brewing Sisters Production, South Korea)
HyungJun Park (Media Art Center Route 17, South Korea)
Elaine Regina (Fab Lab Bali, Indonesia)

Hideo Iwasaki is a biology/bioaesthetics researcher and artist. Director of metaPhorest (biological art/ bioaesthetics platform) and professor of biology, Waseda University, Tokyo. Hideo is interested in complicated boundaries among scientific, philosophical, cultural, historical and aesthetic views of life. In 2007 he founded metaPhorest, an interdisciplinary art/science platform, where both artists and biologists share a space for science and art simultaneously.  Currently vice president of the Japanese society for chronobiology, and the former president/co-founder of the Japanese society for cell synthesis research.

Georg Tremmel is an artist & researcher working on the ethical, legal and social consequences of emerging and speculative biologies within the Artistic Research Framework of BCL. Georg studied Media Art with Peter Weibel and Karel Dudesek in Vienna and Speculative Design with Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby at the RCA in London. He is a long-term artist-in-resident at metaPhorest and a Visiting Researcher at the Tokyo Arts University. Georg also started the BioClub Tokyo, an Open BioLab and BioCommunity co-located at FabCafe Tokyo.

Henry Tan is a Thai artist who lives and works in Bangkok. He is a member of metaPhorest, Japan, and Freaklab, Thailand, as well as the co-founder of Tentacles Art Space. Henry investigates the concepts of LIFE and SIMULATION through the study of technologies like synthetic biology, mixed reality, biosensing, and stimulation in his ongoing research at the nexus of sleep, consciousness, and geopolitics. He poses the question, “How does life adapt and negotiate with the changing environment such as climate, geopolitics, and geoeconomics?” in his current projects, “Hibernation&Decay, Elixir of Life, and Young Eel.”

Soyoon Ryu is a member of Rice Brewing Sisters Club, a collective which has combined artistic research with practice through a framework of “social fermentation.” Their practice of social fermentation has been hopping between fields of visual art, performance, creative writing, oral history, decolonial histories, geographical and geological observations, and auntie wisdom.

HyungJun Park is a Berlin based artist whose works are based on art and science. His interests include visual cognition, computer technology, the philosophical self and the artistic body. His work was exhibited and collected at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany (ZKM). He is the founder and director of Media Arts Center Route 17, Daejeon, South Korea.

Elaine Regina  is a designer with major interest in biodesign, synbio, sustainable systems, and regenerative futures. Her main focus is in researching radical design solutions that combine next-generation innovations with traditional sacred knowledge of the past; to foster positive impacts and changes in local communities. Elaine has presented and displayed her design work for Biodesign Challenge 2019, NYC (Symbiome), Melbourne Design Week 2020 (Orthoptera), and G20: Ocean 20 (Foldscope Outreach in Bali). Her latest illustration work is also featured in Grow: The Futures Issue by Ginkgo Bioworks.

Christian de Lutz is a curator and co-director of Art Laboratory Berlin, where he has curated over 50 exhibitions. His curatorial work focuses on the interface of art, science and technology, with special attention given to Bio Art, DIY Science and facilitating collaborations between artists and scientists. He is currently involved in collaborative projects connecting Berlin with partners in Europe and Asia, building international networks for art-science and DIWO communities.

Regine Rapp is an art historian, curator and co-director of Art Laboratory Berlin. She researches, curates, teaches and publishes on 21st century art at the interface of science and technology. She conceived several international conferences (e.g. Nonhuman Agents, 2017, or Under the Viral Shadow, 2021) and published books (e.g. Mind the Fungi, 2020) and numerous papers and articles (e.g. At the Edge. Hybrid Art and Artistic Research in Times of Ecological Mega-Crisis, 2023).

Tuçe Erel is a Berlin-based curator and art writer. Erel previously worked as a content editor, archivist and gallery assistant. She has curated internationally since 2015. In recent years, she has explored the concept of hacking as a way to unbox the concepts of bio-politics, Anthropocene, ecological crisis, artistic speculation and imagination. She has been a member of Art Laboratory Berlin since the beginning of 2020.