Events

Event | Residency, Talk

Echoes from Waterlands

  1. Presentation of Winter Studio Residencies
  2. Fara Peluso | Sarah Hermanutz
27 - 29 January 2023
In connection with their winter studio residencies at Art Laboratory Berlin, artist designer Fara Peluso and artist Sarah Hermanutz will invite the public to learn more about their current artistic practices from 27 to 29 January 2023, with a public conversation on 29 January 2023. Fara Peluso will share an in-progress prototype for her latest project Tecuitlatl, a collaboration with sound artist Hüma Utku. Tecuitlatl is a hybrid algae sound installation which focuses on how living machines can tell stories of the destruction caused by the current pace of industrialisation around water ecosystems, like the algae bloom that causes aquatic life forms to suffer. Sarah Hermanutz will share notes, sketches, writings, and material fragments of her artistic practice, as well as documentations of past experimentations with water as potent source of movement, life, awe, and deep unease. Read more
Event | Colloquium, Reading Club

In Progress… and Inspired by…

  1. Colloquium + Reading Group
  2. A look back at 2022
6 December 2022
The Colloquium In Progress… 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 Reading Club 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. Read more
Event | Workshop

PANKE INTERVENTIONS

  1. Koji Workshop
  2. Workshop | ink Agop
26 - 27 November 2022
The Koji workshop by ink Agop introduces the symbiotic relationship between microorganisms and human cultural activities by demonstrating the connection between Koji mould and food culture in Japan. Participants make rice koji using koji mould. We will examine the process of cultivating Koji on rice and learn about how time, temperature and humidity control its growth. In the process of fermentation, they will learn how the enzymes produced by Koji decompose carbohydrates into sugar. We will experience the multiple parallel fermentation processes using koji, yeast and lactic acid bacteria. Read more
Event | Talk

TERRA XENOBIOTICA OR HOW TO BELONG

  1. Artist Talk | Saša Spačal
25 November 2022
Art Laboratory Berlin welcomes you to an Artist Talk with bio media artist Saša Spačal where she will speak about her currently evolving new artistic research project. During the months of October and November 2022 the artist undertakes artistic research for her new project Terra Xenobiotica or How to Belong at the lab of the Rillig Group | Ecology of Plants, Institute of Biology, Freie Universtität Berlin and at Art Laboratory Berlin. “Terra Xenobiotica is an exploration into a dark alterity of soil ecology, an umwelt of its own, where mineral and organic agents entangle as strangers, but decompose into oneness of the ground that carries biological life in the Zone. During the residency temporal aspects of xenobiotic substances and metabolisms will be sampled, researched and observed in the vicinity of airports. On the nodes of planetary aviation networks, traces of human grounding and ungrounding will be materially examined to reveal how foreign substances perform gradual belonging.” (Saša Spačal) Read more
Event | Reading Club

Inspired by…

  1. Reading Club
  2. With Guest Artists Interspecifics
22 November 2022
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 more
Event | Talk

PANKE INTERVENTIONS

  1. Notes on Somatodelia
  2. Artist Talk | Tad Ermitaño
20 November 2022
As a self-described “refugee from the sciences” artist Tad Ermitaño creates in his films and artworks an uneasy field in which a facility with technology collides with a kind of postcolonial guilt slamming its head against the limits of empiricism. Radyo Somatodelia: Experiments in Sonic Animism (Tagalog of “radio”) recasts the act of looking and listening as ways of reconstructing an animist orientation towards the world. In this artist talk with curator Tengal Drilon, Ermitaño will discuss the methodologies behind his recent works, shown at Art Laboratory Berlin earlier this year. Read more
Event | Workshop

PANKE INTERVENTIONS

  1. Algature Workshop
  2. Workshop | Fara Peluso
12 November 2022
Can daily spaces be designed to house living machines, as an action to merge and connect different ecosystems by reducing the distance between the human and nonhuman spheres? The workshop supports this action connecting practices of DIY biology with art and design, encouraging participants to learn about science and discovering how powerful the transdisciplinary approach can be. Through a participatory format, the audience from different backgrounds are involved in an immersive experience with algae’s ecology, a DIY photo-bioreactor prototyping and a discussion on speculative practice focused on raising more awarenesse about daily habits. By considering a new way of approaching living organisms Algature will question how closeness to them can give economic, political and artistic contributions. The introduction to the speculative design combined with the DIY methodology will be an occasion to study some objects and, by stimulating critical issues, it will help to define a new possible generation of tools. Read more
Event | Colloquium

IN-PROGRESS… | COLLOQUIUM

  1. Research in Art, Science and Humanities
  2. With Saša Spačal and Joana MacLean
8 November 2022
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 more

Archive

Event | Performance, Talk

NOW. A Kinetic Life

  1. Bidisha Das and Thomas Heidtmann
3 - 5 August 2018

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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Event | Workshop, Workshop

DIY Hack the Panke

  1. (Un)Real Ecologies. Microplastics | Workshop
  2. Kat Austen and Joana MacLean
6 - 8 July 2018

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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Event | Book Release Party

Half Life. Machines/ Organisms

  1. Artistic Positions in the context of Climate Change and Extinction
  2. Book Release Party
6 July 2018

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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Event | Conference

Nonhuman Agents in art, culture and theory

  1. Interdisciplinary Conference
24 - 26 November 2017

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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Event | Talk

Nonhuman Agents

  1. ill-at-ease seep
  2. Sarah Hermanutz
28 October 2017

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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Event | Workshop

Nonhuman Agents

  1. Swarm | Cell | City
  2. Heather Barnett + plan b (Sophia New & Daniel Belasco Rogers)
23 - 24 September 2017

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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Event | Walk & Talk

Nonhuman Agents

  1. The forestal psyche
  2. Theresa Schubert
25 - 26 August 2017

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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Event | Performance, Talk, Workshop

Nonhuman Agents

  1. Anatomy of an inter-connected system
  2. Margherita Pevere
15 July 2017

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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Event | Performance, Talk, Workshop

Nonhuman Agents

  1. Gut Feelings
  2. Alanna Lynch
18 June 2017

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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Event | Performance, Talk

Cellf

  1. Technosphärenklänge #3
  2. Guy Ben-Ary
  3. Presse Feedback
12 - 13 May 2017

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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Event | Talk

Guy Ben-Ary

  1. Artist Talk
5 May 2017

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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Event | Talk, Workshop

DIYBio NOW

  1. DIYBio faire
  2. Biotinkering e.V.
17 - 19 February 2017

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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Event | Talk

SciArt Café

  1. with BIOMOD and iGEM Team Berlin
29 January 2017

The iGEM Berlin team (http://igem.berlin/) presents their fifth SciArt Café. Under the main theme of “Synthetic Biology – a toolkit for solving humanity’s problems” we will hear scientists and artists working with bioscience and afterwards discuss topics of synthetic biology.

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Event | Conference, Talk

Nonhuman Subjectivities

  1. Living Systems | Aquatic Systems
  2. Robertina Šebjanič, Kat Austen, Regine Rapp and Christian de Lutz
18 September 2016

In this seminar we want to invite you to theoretically explore these and other aspects about artistic and scientific methodologies on interspecies empathy and human-nonhuman companionship.

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Event | Course, Meet up, Talk, Workshop

Bio & Beers

  1. with Biotinkering e.V.
  2. Dr. Mirela Alister, Rüdiger Trojok, Alessandro Volpato and Biotinkering e.V.
25 August 2016 - 20 April 2017

The Bio & Beers format is for everyone: we start with a 20 minutes presentation, followed by discussions while having beers. In addition there will be occasional DIY workshops!

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