Local Area Network (LAN)

Local Area Network (LAN) open workshop is a collective, speculative investigation of local fields/particles, and energetic exchanges, towards the hacking and re-routing of energy flows and networks at all stacked levels of local geological, environmental and technological “Umwelten”, forking into a forensic exhibition at Art Laboratory Berlin.

LAN works in the field – at sites along the Panke river – and in the lab, punctuating an ongoing exhibition of changing processes and prototypes, examining the interface of data ecologies and the non-human, through mapping, measuring and intervening within local and specific energetic transformations, entropic gradients and boundings of matters, materials and cultures.

During the first workshop day participants also built a cloud chamber, which enables the viewing of muons – here as paths of incident ionising radiation – caused by cosmic ray interactions, or particles from decay events (from the radioactive minerals). The chamber is saturated with alcohol, the bottom of the chamber is then cooled, so it forms a vapour, and the particles interact with the vapour, condensing around it, forming visible trails.

As both a two-day workshop and a forensic exhibition, LAN examines and identifies sites and places where energetic transformations intersect with human infrastructure and agents of abstraction and logic. Howse sees LAN as an intervention “with the co-existent realms of algorithmic entities, of the structures and infrastructures of computation with the non-human entities of the earth (mycelium and microbes).”