HACKERS, MAKERS, THINKERS
- Collective Experiments in Social Fermenting
- International Conference (hybrid | on-site and livestream)
The project Hacking, Making, Thinking proposes that Doing it With Others (DIWO) can be a way of rebuilding and re-energizing damaged social relations after the pandemic. The international conference includes presentations by artists, currently on show at ALB, and guest speakers from the artistic and curatorial practice, design, biology and anthropology.
The talks critically elaborate on various artistic approaches towards (agri)culture, farming and social fermentation. A special emphasis will also have a viral discourse in connection with food and performance. The discussion will then evolve around the phenomenon of symbiosis, discussing cyanobacteria and bio-politics, including various approaches of hacking. Speakers additionally reflect critically on culture-political, post-colonial and sound-related phenomena related to khipu, human-computing, open AI as well as sound art and noise.
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- Soya C(o)u(l)ture. Ecoprints on Bioleather
- Workshop | Irene Agrivina
The Indonesian collective XXlab is an exclusively female staff composed of designers, artists and programmers, including Irene Agrivina. With SOYA C(O)U(L)TURE the collective want to combat water pollution and poverty in Indonesia by taking advantage of an innovative process, which takes the toxic residues and polluted water that are by-products of Indonesia’s intensive soy production and utilizes them as inputs for manufacturing edible cellulose as well as bio-fuel and biologically tanned leather.
In a do-it-yourself fashion, anyone can get busy in their kitchen at home. In the workshop Irene will talk about the process, show samples and then lead the participants in making their very own eco-prints using easily available materials such as flowers and leaves. Participants will get the opportunity to print on SOYA C(O)U(L)TURE, a bio leather derived from the by-product of soy production. This is a BYOF workshop: Bring your own flowers.
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- Khipu Dialogues
- Workshop | Constanza Piña Pardo
In the workshop, Constanza will present her artistic research on khipu that began in 2013, which resulted in a textile electromagnetic sound installation, a website, an artist book and several workshops. We will review its references as well as the relationship of the Inca khipus with other ancestral computation and writing systems such as the yupana, the tocapus, Püron/Pron mapuche and the signs of the Inca khipu in relation to the binary code.
In the second part of the workshop, we will connect the contemporary with the ancient: Coming from Constanza’s khipu project, we will visit several original khipus in the archives of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin-Dahlem. This visit can be understood as a ritual of connection with ancient technologies of South America.
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- Almost Nonhuman (Berlin)
- Workshop | Interspecifics
Interspecifics and Art Laboratory Berlin are proud to present a gathering for the collective creation of speculative post-humanist scenarios and build stories together that may assist our transition from the Anthropocene to the transversal inclusivity of the Symbiocene. For this workshop – as part of the project series Hackers, Makers, Thinkers – we have designed a hybrid design thinking strategy via a collection of narrative techniques, drawing from more-than-human theories, Speculative Fabulation, and Cyberpunk to help us reframe human-nature relationships through a non-anthropocentric envisioning of better futures. To see beyond human rationality, dissolve binary or oppositional categories that elevate ‘people’ above ‘nature’ and recognize the agencies, and dependencies, of a range of living and non-living non-human actors (Maller 2019). We invite the Berlin community of visual artists, storytellers, independent researchers, and sci-fi and DIY bio enthusiasts to combine bio sampling, microscopic photography, storytelling, and generative image programming.
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- Reading Club
- With Guest Artists Rice Brewing Sisters Club (RBSC)
Inspired by… is an event series, a hybrid format derived from reading group and artist talk formats. In each session, an invited artist will choose a specific text or excerpt from a book that was inspirational for the artist’s practice and/or a particular project that the artist will introduce.
The project follows up Tuçe Erel’s Posthumanism Reading Group, organized between 2018-2020. After co-reading and discussing plenty of seminal texts in two years, the club is transforming into a new discussion, presentation and reading program, an online and offline exchange platform in a non-hierarchical and non-institutional infrastructure in the fields of arts, science and technology.
Read moreIn Progress… | Colloquium
- Research in Art, Science and Humanities
- With Fara Peluso and James Whitehead
The Colloquium addresses an international interdisciplinary research audience to present and discuss past, present or future projects by artists and scholars, curators or editors from the fields of art, science and the humanities. The topics could refer to an art project, a book, text or chapter, a research or exhibition project, a lab experiment, a lecture series, a conference concept or other.
The presentations and exchange will focus on the work-in-progress. Methodological approaches – theoretical or practical – are also of great interest here. While researching, we often tend to shift between practical inquiry and theoretical research, browsing various disciplines. Following the original meaning of colloquium as “speaking together”, we want to provide a platform for exchange and embrace various kinds of work processes which are often not seen or talked about.
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- Reading Club
- With Guest Artist Cammack Lindsey
Inspired by… is an event series, a hybrid format derived from reading group and artist talk formats. In each session, an invited artist will choose a specific text or excerpt from a book that was inspirational for the artist’s practice and/or a particular project that the artist will introduce.
The project follows up Tuçe Erel’s Posthumanism Reading Group, organized between 2018-2020. After co-reading and discussing plenty of seminal texts in two years, the club is transforming into a new discussion, presentation and reading program, an online and offline exchange platform in a non-hierarchical and non-institutional infrastructure in the fields of arts, science and technology.
Read moreIn Progress… | Colloquium
- Research in Art, Science and Humanities
- With Kat Austen and Alison Sperling
The Colloquium addresses an international interdisciplinary research audience to present and discuss past, present or future projects by artists and scholars, curators or editors from the fields of art, science and the humanities. The topics could refer to an art project, a book, text or chapter, a research or exhibition project, a lab experiment, a lecture series, a conference concept or other.
The presentations and exchange will focus on the work-in-progress. Methodological approaches – theoretical or practical – are also of great interest here. While researching, we often tend to shift between practical inquiry and theoretical research, browsing various disciplines. Following the original meaning of colloquium as “speaking together”, we want to provide a platform for exchange and embrace various kinds of work processes which are often not seen or talked about.
Read moreControlling_ Connectivity
- Ten Years After
- Artists Talk | Gretta Louw, Igor Štromajer
In context of Vorspiel | transmediale 2022 Art Laboratory Berlin welcomes you to an online-conversation with artists Gretta Louw and Igor Štromajer based on Louw’s radical 10 day online performance at ALB in 2011.
In November 2011, Gretta Louw performed Controlling_Connectivity, a 240-hour durational online intervention, in which — in the blacked out, locked gallery space of Art Laboratory Berlin — she made herself available around the clock for contact via the internet. During the performance, Net art pioneer and online performance artist Igor Štromajer became involved via Twitter. It was during the course of the performance that the two artists, from different generations of digital art, began a fascinating dialogue about the nature and boundaries of online relationship-building.
This January 2022 – ten years later – we have invited Gretta and Igor to return and discuss online performance, virtual worlds and their past and current work.
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- Curators Talk
- Regine Rapp, Tuçe Erel, Christian de Lutz, Tengal Drilon
As part of Vorspiel | transmediale 2022 Art Laboratory Berlin is excited to welcome you to an online talk with the curatorial team Hackers, Makers, Thinkers as a sneak preview to our upcoming program.
Following two years of social distancing and isolation Art Laboratory Berlin will devote 2022 exploring what social possibilities can be thawed and revived. Hackers, Makers, Thinkers proposes that Doing it With Others (DIWO) can be a way of rebuilding and re-energizing damaged social relations. After a period when most of us have been reliant on corporate technologies, Open (source) knowledge will form a basis for making and thinking. Above all we are interested in an open culture based on reciprocity, cooperation and exchange on a global level. Combining Berlin based artists and venues with guest artists from Latin America and Southeast Asia this project proposes art making as a tool for social empowerment and knowledge acquisition, collaboration, and working together.
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Signs of the Times
- Artist Residency
- Karolina Żyniewicz
During her residency at ALB artist Karolina Żyniewicz will use the exhibition space for her new project “Signs of the Times”: After having collecting numerous masks in Berlin, the artists started to interview people and communicate with them about their individual mask experience.
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Under the viral shadow
- Viral Geographies
- Online Talk | Sybille Neumeyer, Karolina Żyniewicz
The event explores the biopolitics in our current age of pandemic. The online discussion welcomes artists Sybille Neumeyer and Karolina Żyniewicz to talk about their artistic research focusing on the virus in general as well as the impact of the current pandemic in their artistic practice.
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Under the viral shadow
- Living with the Virus
- Online Talk | Caitlin Berrigan, WhiteFeather Hunter, Sebastian Cocioba
As we face the prospect of the SarsCov-2 virus becoming endemic for the foreseeable future we ask what does “Living with the Virus” mean for us and individuals and as a society. We have asked three artists working at the borders of art and the life sciences to talk about how viral infection, contagion and potential cure has affected their lives and work.
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Paired Immunity
- Art & Science Talk | Marta de Menezes & Luís Graça
In the talk the artist Marta de Menezes and the scientist Luís Graça will give insights into their collaborative art-science projects, currently on show at Art Laboratory Berlin in the exhibition “Paired Immunity”. In “Immortality for Two”, they questioned the limits and understanding of their identity. In “Anti-Marta” a skin transplant was exchanged between them.
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DIY Hack the Panke
- Walk & Talk
- With members of the art science collective
Members of the collective will meet for a walk along the Panke river, together with the public, to talk about their previous research on the river, its flora, fauna and ecologies. We will also give a preview of our upcoming DIY/ DIWO program for 2022.
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UNDER THE VIRAL SHADOW
- Networks in the Age of Technoscience and Infection
- International Conference (online with livestream)
The online conference (with livestream) explores various networks – biological, cybernetic, and social. It will include presentations by the artists, currently on show at ALB, and guest scholars from art and media theory, biophysics, and computer science, design and culture studies.
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Under the Viral Shadow
- NETworkshop
- Workshop | Sarah Grant & Danja Vasiliev
In this 3-day workshop participants learn low-level networking using only command-line tools and network hardware. In doing so they not only grasp how to create and manipulate computer networks, but how they can be used to manipulate us.
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Under the Viral Shadow
- Plant-to-Plant Protocols
- Workshop | Sarah Grant
The workshop is an unstable network of radios and IR sensor pairs attached to plants. It is a meditation on the aesthetics of data transmission and network disruptions caused by the natural movement of plants in response to light, wind, and other natural conditions.
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Under the Viral Shadow
- AI for Artists
- Workshop | Gene Kogan
AI for Artists Workshop | Gene Kogan Gene Kogan is an artist and a programmer who is interested in generative systems, computer science, and software for creativity and self-expression. He is a collaborator within numerous open-source software projects, and gives workshops and lectures on topics at the intersection of code and art. The workshop will…
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Swarms, Robots and Postnature
- Artist Talk | Sofia Crespo
The exhibition project presents research based artistic positions on swarm behaviour, questioning the traditional concept of “nature” and explores the interface of the biological and the machine. As part of our online program the exhibiting artist Sofia Crespo will give an insight in her artistic research and practice.
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Swarms, Robots and Postnature
- Artist Talk | Käthe Wenzel
The exhibition project presents research based artistic positions on swarm behaviour, questioning the traditional concept of “nature” and explores the interface of the biological and the machine. Exhibiting artist Käthe Wenzel will give an insight in her artistic research and practice.
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Swarms, Robots and Postnature
- Artist Talk | So Kanno
The exhibition project presents research based artistic positions on swarm behaviour, questioning the traditional concept of “nature” and explores the interface of the biological and the machine. As part of our online program the exhibiting artist So Kanno gives an insight in his artistic research and practice.
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VIRAL CLOUD | Berlin Tokyo
- Hybrid Arts and DIY Bio Cultures
- Hideo Iwasaki and Matthias Rillig
Since spring 2020 ALB and BioClub Tokyo have been arranging online meetings between hybrid artists and associates in our respective cities. In our Meeting #13 two scientists talk about art and science collaborations.
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Mind Blind Pathetic Sublime
- Online Performance Lecture
- Sarah Hermanutz
Five years since she presented the lecture-performance “Mind Blind: Therapeutic Interventions for Human/NonHuman Communications” for Transmediale | Vorspiel 2016, artist Sarah Hermanutz revisits the problems of social cognition in this time of isolation and multiple intersecting crises.
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VIRAL CLOUD | Berlin Tokyo
- Hybrid Arts and DIY Bio Cultures
- Fara Peluso and Sachiko Hirosue
Since spring 2020 Art Laboratory Berlin and BioClub Tokyo have been arranging online meetings between hybrid artists and associates in our respective cities and beyond. In our 12th meeting we feature presentations by designer and bioartist Fara Peluso and Bioengineer Sachiko Hirosue
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