Events

Event | Talk, Visit

Hacking Networks

  1. Open Studio and Artist Talk
  2. Helena Nikonole | Winter Studio Residency
2 February 2025
Meet the artist Helena Nikonoloe in her current winder studio residency at Art Laboratory Berlin. In her talk, she will explore how artistic practices can challenge centralized systems of controlIn her talk Helena Nikonole will explore how artistic practices can challenge centralized systems of control through two of her current projects, which she is continuing to develop during her winter studio residency at Art Laboratory Berlin. The first project uncovers hidden structures of power embedded in generative AI systems based on Large Language Models by probing their biases around political ideologies. This investigation reveals how these technologies reflect and amplify societal inequalities. The second project decentralizes communication networks to counteract internet shutdowns and surveillance in high-risk environments. Read more
Event | Residency, Talk, Workshop

Guerilla Wearables | Politics of LLMs

  1. Winter Studio Residency 2025
  2. Helena Nikonole
January - March 2025
Art Laboratory Berlin is pleased to announce that Helena Nikonole has joined ALB’s residency program. Nikonole is a new media artist, independent curator, researcher, and educator whose work explores the intersection of art and technology. Her fields of interest include bio-semiotics, hacktivism, and Artificial Intelligence, a subject she has been exploring since 2016, developing critical and artistic approaches to this rapidly evolving field. During her residency, Nikonole will focus on two primary projects: “Guerrilla Wearables” involves the development of political wearables designed to facilitate decentralized communication. By integrating technology into fashion, these tools provide secure, off-grid interactions in environments where internet access is restricted or blocked. With her project “Research on Large Language Models (LLMs) and Political Ideologies” Nikonole will continue her ongoing research into the biases present in AI language models as well as text-to-image and text-to-video transformers, and other AI systems built on these technologies. Read more
Event | Meet up

Get-together with Printed Matter

  2. Books and printed matter for sale, some farewells and updates about the program of 2025 and 2026
15 December 2024, 4 - 9 pm
Join us for a Get-together with warm drinks and snacks with some books and printed matter for sale. Let’s come together before the seasonal break and meet on-site at Art Laboratory Berlin for some farewells and some new announcements for the coming year. In our current challenging times, we consider it very meaningful to meet in person, support one another, and express the value of art and culture production. Come and join us with friends and colleagues – we would appreciate it a lot! Read more
Event | Seminar, Workshop

OUT OF BALANCE

  1. Bio-Art Workshop
  2. With Fara Peluso, Helena Nikonole, Karine Bonneval, Regine Rapp, and Christian de Lutz
24 November - 4 December 2024
The international 10-day BioArt workshop OUT OF BALANCE took place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, from 24 November until 4 December 2024. The Goethe-Institut in Saudi-Arabien and the Alliance française d’Arabie saoudite, together with the French Embassy, had invited Art Laboratory Berlin to develop a program and organise the first BioArt Lab in Riyadh at the Gharem Studio, a perfect ground for studying BioArt in theory and practice. Five seminar units with curator and researcher Christian de Lutz and art historian and curator Regine Rapp offered a theoretical insight into BioArt, DIY Bio Labs, and art science collaborations. Three hands-on workshops shared techniques of various artistic work with biological organisms – palm trees with artist Karine Bonneval and algae with artist and designer Fara Peluso – as well as AI tools about speculative futures with artist Helena Nikonole. Read more
Event | Panel Discussion

ZOOM IN!

  1. Current Collaborations Between Art, Biology, Music, and Anthropology
  2. Panel Discussion | With Isabel Bredenbröker, Adam Pultz, India Mansour, Sybille Neumeyer, Regine Rapp, and Christian de Lutz
@Berlin Science Week, Holzmarkt 25! 8 November 2024, 5:30 - 7:00 pm
Join us for an invited panel discussion at BERLIN SCIENCE WEEK at Holzmarkt 25 (Berlin Mitte): How do bodies sound? How can we visualize strategies for accessing environmental data from closed systems called biospheres? And how can a group of cultural belongings in an ethnological museum collection resonate in unexpected queer kin relations? Art Laboratory Berlin welcomes you to a diverse panel with cutting edge transdisciplinary research projects on current research topics: From postcolonialism over to postanthropocentrism, they nurture their knowledge production by transgressing discipline borders with a radical openness for nonhuman subjectivities. Read more
Event | Reading Club

Inspired by…

  1. Reading Club
  2. With Guest Artists Isabel Bredenbröker and Adam Pultz
5 November 2024
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. Guest Artists on 1 October 2024 Isabel Bredenbröker and Adam Pultz On 5 November 2024, Inspired by… will be an on-site session with Isabel Bredenbröker and Adam Pultz during their exhibition Queer Sonic Fingerprint. This edition of Inspired by is an ‘independent event’ at Berlin Science Week 2024 and will take place at Art Laboratory Berlin on site. Read more
Event | Colloquium

IN-PROGRESS… | COLLOQUIUM

  1. Research in Art, Science and Humanities
  2. With Ionat Zurr
15 October 2024, 8 pm CET (on-site + online)
close up of a sculpture, circles with metal mesh, yellowish cat to the photograph Trees photographed from below with a green-yellow cast to the photograph
The Colloquium (on 15 Oct it will be hybrid – both on-site and online) 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
Event | Walk & Talk

WALK & TALK

  1. Berries, berries, berries and rosehips. FERAL FIELDWORK back at Nasse Dreieck (Autumn Edition) | Artist Talk by Käthe Wenzel
6 October 2024, Walk (1 pm) and Talk (3 pm)
Art Laboratory Berlin welcomes you to a double event – a walk with the interdisciplinary research group FERAL FIELDWORK (1 – 2 pm) and an artist talk with Käthe Wenzel (3 – 4 pm). Both projects have emerged from the MATTER OF FLUX network and festival in 2023.Under the moniker “Feral Fieldwork”, Alice Cannavà, Chiara Garbellotto, and Sina Ribak invite to a walk at Nasses Dreieck communicating the dense botanical, socio-political, and toxic histories of the Stadtbrache, its life forms and their materialised traces, also involving storytelling, multispecies embodiment, and mapping, they will also share methodological reflections on how to work with multiple sensibilities and knowledges. At the last day of her exhibition “Colour Topographies”, Käthe Wenzel will reflect the artistic processes of urban foraging and ink extraction and the possibilities of natural inks and will give a short foray into urban biocolorants, techniques of inkmaking, and material cultures of colour(s). Read more
Event | Reading Club

Inspired by…

  1. Reading Club
  2. With Guest Artist Aslı Dinç
1 October 2024
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. Guest Artist Aslı Dinç is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher. Her artistic research and narrative are deeply influenced by sci-fi culture, RPGs, cybernetics, interconnected networks and power. These influences, along with gamer theory, hacker culture, and the deep sea milieu, shape her practice. Read more

Archive

Event | Course, Workshop

DIY Hack the Panke

  1. Microplastics and Coexistence | Online Workshop Discussion
  2. Kat Austen and Joana MacLean
22 April 2020

Central to the discussion is the coexistence of microplastics in the environment. Approaching the plastisphere as artists, chemists and biologists, trees and bacteria, humans and particles, we will negotiate together a plan of coexistence with microplastics on this planet.

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Event | Talk, Visit

Mind the Fungi

  1. Open Lab Night | Bioprocess Engineering
21 January 2020

Scientists will give an insight into the world of lichens and their potential for new natural products is presented. Afterwards, production tools, in particular bioreactors, that are used to reproduce the lichen cultures and their valuable materials, will be presented.

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Event | Performance

The Lumenses Project

  1. Florence Razoux
5 January 2020

Artist and scientist Florence Razoux will be presenting the Lumenses Project, a series of creative initiatives that offers a new perspective on menstruation and examine how the taboo that surrounds menstruation impacts society, and especially the biomedical research.

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Event | Course, Performance, Talk, Workshop

DIY Hack the Panke

  1. Science by Doing
  2. With students from the Gustav-Freytag Schule
February - December 2019

The project offered the pupils of the Gustav-Freytag-Schule a wide range of events about the river Panke. Through workshops and visits the art science collective DIY Hack the Panke made it possible for students to artistically explore biology, chemistry, design and ecology.

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Event | Talk

Symbiosis in intra-flux of the Anthropocene

  1. Project Presentation
  2. Saša Spačal
29 November 2019

For the month of November 2019 bio media artist Saša Spačal undertook artistic research at the Rillig Group, Ecology of Plants, Institute of Biology, FU Berlin, addressing pressing societal and environmental issues such as climate crisis and plastic pollution.

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Event | Walk & Talk

Mind the Fungi

  1. Walk & Talks
  2. Theresa Schubert and TU Berlin
Autumn 2018 and 2019

In the Walk & Talks artist Theresa Schubert and biotechnologists from TU Berlin explore with public groups the potential of sustainable biomaterials from fungi in the forests of Berlin and Brandenburg. After collecting tree fungi, the public is invited to the TUB lab to cultivate them.

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Event | Course

Mind the Fungi

  1. Mushroom Cultivation Courses | TOP Lab
Spring 2019 and Autumn 2019

TOP Lab will host a mushroom cultivation course where the participants will learn how to isolate and grow mushrooms for different purposes, such as packaging materials, furniture, building materials and even leather. The course will show how to set up a culture to grow edible mushrooms.

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Event | Workshop

Local Area Network (LAN)

  1. Part of the project: Invisible Forces
  2. Martin Howse
13 October 2019

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…

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Event | Performance, Workshop

DIY Hack the Panke

  1. Wasserpank | Workshop & Jam Session
  2. Kat Austen and Nenad Popov
5 October 2019

Artist and chemist Kat Austen together with sound and new media artist Nenad Popov take the Panke river and its water as a starting point for this exciting workshop on sound experimentation from water and the environment, experimenting with hydrophone recordings.

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Event | Performance

DIY Hack the Panke

  1. Pankquelle
  2. Sarah Hermanutz and Nenad Popov
5 October 2019

The artists perform a new work based on their involvement in the art science collective DIY Hack the Panke. The two artists’ previous collaboration have mixed Hermanutz’s artistic research into wetland ecologies with Popov’s sound and programming-based work.

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Event | Walk & Talk

DIY Hack the Panke

  1. Summer Walk & Talk #2
  2. India Mansour | Nenad Popov | James Whitehead
22 September 2019

For the last day of summer, sound and new media artist Nenad Popov and biologists India Mansour and James Whitehead walk along the Panke and give a series of short talks interwoven with participatory inter/actions between visible and invisible ecological layers.

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Event | Walk & Talk

DIY Hack the Panke

  1. Summer Walk & Talk #1
  2. Eliot Morrison and Daniel Lammel
13 July 2019

During the event we will discuss the interaction of water, soil and atmosphere from the molecular level and how this effects and is affected by organisms up to the larger ecological level and how water, plants and soil take part in cycles of carbon and nitrogen that support life.

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Event | Conference

The Artist-Silkworm Interface

  1. The Agricultural Treatise as Source and Scrutiny for Creating an Artist Book
  2. Vivan Xu | Lisa Onaga | Dagmar Schäfer | Regine Rapp | Anna Grasskamp | Yubin Shen
4 July 2019

This one-day symposium discusses how the lens of contemporary art can engage with the genre of the agricultural treatises and manuals that have long attracted the attention of scholars in the history of science.

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Event | Talk

Conversations in Silk

  1. Artist and scholar talk
  2. Vivian Xu and Lisa Onaga
30 June 2019

“Conversations in Silk” presents a dialogue between historian of biology Lisa Onaga and artist and designer Vivian Xu reflecting on the intermingled topics of silk, sericulture, and specultations of the future of the silkworm-human relations within a technoscience framework.

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Event | Workshop

THE SILKWORM PROJECT Workshop

  1. Vivian Xu
8 June 2019

The Silkworm Project Workshop gives insight into the artistic research and practice by Vivian Xu and offers a hands-on part, based on the artist’s at ALB of the same name. Participants were each given silkworms to take home and raise, hand-reared by the artist in Berlin.

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