Controlling_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.
Read moreHackers, Makers, Thinkers
- 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.
Read moreSigns of the Times
- Artist Residency
- Karolina Żyniewicz
During her residency at Art Laboratory Berlin artist Karolina Żyniewicz will use the exhibition space for her new project Signs of the Times: After having collecting numerous masks in Berlin since spring 2021, the artist recently started to interview people and communicate with them about their individual particular mask experience. Their masks are part of the artistic investigation. A laboratory stage of the project is planned for the further future, as Żyniewicz plans to investigate biological remains from the collected masks.
Read moreUnder the viral shadow
- Viral Geographies
- Online Talk | Sybille Neumeyer, Karolina Żyniewicz
The event Viral Geographies is an online program on behalf of our current Under the Viral Shadow project, exploring 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.
Sybille Neumeyer will reflect on Voicing encounters – a narrative cartography of virus, developed in dialogue with experts and scientists for KOEXISTENZ, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, 2019, as part of Contagious Cities by Wellcome Trust. The artistic walk combines collective reading, non-linear narration, and psychogeographic explorations of the city. Introducing the concept of polyphonic (hi)storytelling, the artist fathoms transformative narratives, anticipatory memory, and speculative worlding. Karolina Żyniewicz will talk about how her practice and how the Coronavirus pandemic shaped during this time. It seems to be almost inappropriate still to discuss the topic of the pandemic and the Coronavirus. Everybody is already tired of the topic and wants to forget that a tiny agent, invisible to the naked eye, a virus, reminded us of our interdependence, physicality, embodiment, and vulnerability.
Read moreUnder the viral shadow
- Living with the Virus
- Online Talk | Caitlin Berrigan, WhiteFeather Hunter, Sebastian Cocioba
We continue our project Under the Viral Shadow with an online discussion exploring the biopolitics in our current age of pandemic: 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.
Living together with a virus is a lonely way of being for Caitlin Berrigan: “As my peers individuated from dependent adolescents into adulthood, my coming of age was not as a singular human subject. I was already multiple: a human carrying an alien viral load.” WhiteFeather, in return, will highlight the ways in which she adapted her research to support not only her very long recovery (after getting infected with SARS Cov-2 in March 2020), but also her ongoing critique of the inherent misogyny in biomedical research fields. Sebastian Cocioba’s work, finally, translates abstract ideas of information, communication, and relationship with the natural world into tangible visualizations of the machinery of life, often through protein synthesis. He will reflect on his work and his experiences with having been infected with SARS Cov-2.
Read morePaired 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 (running until 12 December).
In Immortality for Two they questioned the limits and understanding of their identity. Marta de Menezes and Luís Graça immortalized each other’s immune cells. This is achieved by introducing cancer-inducing genes in the cells with a viral vector. These immortal cells, although derived from two people in love. In Anti-Marta a skin transplant was exchanged between Marta and Luís (with an autologous graft as control). Anti-Marta can be seen as a pact, where the inevitable rejection of the transplant contrasts with the live-long acquisition of a new form of recognition of one another afforded by the emergence of antibodies.
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DIY Hack the Panke
- Walk & Talk
- With members of the art science collective
After an 18-month hiatus we are happy to announce the next event of the artist and scientist collective DIY Hack the Panke. The research group DIY Hack the Panke was founded in January 2018 and consists of a group of artists, art theoreticians and scientists applying artistic and scientific research at, in and around the river Panke, and promoting Citizen Science projects along the Panke River in northern and central Berlin.
On 31 October 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.
Read moreUNDER THE VIRAL SHADOW
- Networks in the Age of Technoscience and Infection
- International Conference (online/ livestream)
In the international interdisciplinary online conference we explore various networks – biological, cybernetic, and social (watch the video recording!). It includes presentations by the artists of the group exhibition Under the Viral Shadow, whose research and media are either in the life or computer sciences; as well as guest scholars from art and media theory, biophysics, and computer science, design and culture studies who explore biological, digital and social networks under the pressure of new technologies. A special keynote by Roberta Buiani discusses the multiple implications of viruses, natural and human-made in an age of technoscience and infection.
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Under the Viral Shadow
- NETworkshop
- Workshop | Sarah Grant & Danja Vasiliev
Ask anyone how the postal system works and they would give a vaguely correct description. Few however would come close to describing how email, let alone a computer network itself, actually functions. With this lack of knowledge comes a risk; we lack the practical understanding to effectively read the infrastructural and political implications of our increased dependency on this technology.
In this 3-day version of the popular NETworkshop intensive, 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.
Read moreUnder 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.
ASCII art data is transmitted in a loop between 12 networked devices and continuously printed out to a browser window once per iteration. A 13th device, a Raspberry Pi, pushes our ASCII data out to a public facing web page accessible to anyone with the link.
Read moreUnder the Viral Shadow
- 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 introduce participants to machine learning for artistic expression. Numerous tools exist for every creative terrain, and this workshop is open to anyone who wants to expand their creative practice: designers, illustrators, musicians, architects, journalists, filmmakers, programmers. They all can refresh their work by injecting a dose of artificial intelligence to it.
Read moreArchive
The Work of Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
- Natalia Fuchs and Helena Nikonole | Talk by Maurice Jones
Within the framework of the CTM 2019 exhibition, two events focused on current notions of Artificial Intelligence in art and society will take place at and in collaboration with Art Laboratory Berlin.
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Phytocracy in situ
- Prototyping tools for the investigation of plant governance
- Špela Petrič
As part of the inquiries into Vegetal Otherness, Špela Petrič set out to produce her own phytocracy-revealing onto-epistemological tools that are inspired by actual institutions/domains/cultural practices framing plant-people relations…
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Biosignals
- Sound Art, Narrations and Nature-based Data Streams
BioSignals is a series of site-specific sound art, narrations and nature-based data streams by human and nonhuman cultural producers in connection with the 2019 Pixelache Festival..
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NOW. A Kinetic Life
- Bidisha Das and Thomas Heidtmann
is an interactive installation that spans a visual and acoustic connection between outer space and physical spaces that surround us. It is an orchestra of movement using elements from outer space, nature and human bodies as instrumentations.
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DIY Hack the Panke
- (Un)Real Ecologies. Microplastics | Workshop
- Kat Austen and Joana MacLean
How do organisms and inhabitants of the Panke live with plastic in their habitat? In the 3-day workshop we search for visible interactions between plastics and biota in and around the Panke. We also use chemical protocol for the analysis of (micro)plastics in water samples.
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Half Life. Machines/ Organisms
- Artistic Positions in the context of Climate Change and Extinction
- Book Release Party
41 artistic positions from 15 countries provide critical and visionary views onto socio-emotional service machines – proxies and social crutches; Ersatz: Machine environments and artificial organisms; Utopia; Mediator machines and trans-species communication…
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Nonhuman Agents in art, culture and theory
- Interdisciplinary Conference
The conference takes into account recent philosophical approaches which question anthropocentrism. We will redefine intelligence (human, animal and plant intelligence), agency and sentience. Exhibiting artists as well as scholars from humanities and science will debate together.
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Nonhuman Agents
- ill-at-ease seep
- Sarah Hermanutz
In her lecture the artist Sarah Hermanutz discussed the relationship between humans and wetlands, which is the focus in her long-term artistic research. Wetlands are one of the most biologically diverse and important ecosystems for life on earth, but within the past century..
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Nonhuman Agents
- Swarm | Cell | City
- Heather Barnett + plan b (Sophia New & Daniel Belasco Rogers)
This workshop is a participatory experiment on art, performance and biology that precedes the exhibition Nonhuman Networks. The project invites the participants to view the city of Berlin by the nonhuman perspectives of the intelligent single-cell organism, the slime mould.
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Nonhuman Agents
- The forestal psyche
- Theresa Schubert
This lecture and workshop are based on the artist’s long-term artistic research project on living organisms as an artistic material and medium. For this project, Schubert dedicates herself to the potential of slime moulds, mosses and lichens from the forests around Berlin.
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Nonhuman Agents
- Anatomy of an inter-connected system
- Margherita Pevere
Starting point is the artist’s research at the junction of visual arts, theoretical inquiry and investigation of biological processes, focusing on the discourses regarding human-nature relationship in the frame of today’s environmental crisis and how artistic practices…
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Nonhuman Agents
- Gut Feelings
- Alanna Lynch
Alanna Lynch has been growing the microorganisms that produce kombucha tea. Through the process of fermentation this symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeasts (SCOBY) produces a cellulose material that is slimy and smells strongly while wet and can be dried and used as a textile.
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Cellf
- Technosphärenklänge #3
- Guy Ben-Ary
- Presse Feedback
In the work cellF human neurons living in a Petri dish perform duets with human musicians: These are grown into a culture of 100,000 living neurons. Lined with electrodes, these neurons form output via an analog synthesizer, cellF, allowing them to “jam” with human musicians.
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Guy Ben-Ary
- Artist Talk
In his talk Guy Ben-Ary will present some of the methodologies and theories that underpin his artistic practice by using as examples, four of his major projects completed over the last decade: MEART, The Silent Barrage, In-Potentia, and CellF
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DIYBio NOW
- DIYBio faire
- Biotinkering e.V.
The three-day bio-fair brings together the players in the Berlin biohacking scene for a series of hands-on workshops, talks and a special exhibition featuring unique DIY laboratory equipment.
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