A Ritual for Floral, Cybernetic and Neuronal Intelligences

A live audiovisual performance that builds a temporary direct interspecies communication bridge between beings from the plantae, cybernetic and human kingdoms. By embedding  a cybernetic Machine Intelligence to mediate the biosensory readings of a succulenta plant via the Pulsum Plantae circuit developed by Interspecifics and the artist’s own neuronal EEG readings; this ritual will speculate on a world where the distinction between natural and artificial intelligences are blurred.

ℌEXOℜℭℑSMOS (born Moisés Horta Valenzuela)

(México/USA,  1988) is an electronic musician, composer and sound artist currently based in Berlin. Taking inspiration from the binational socio-cultural context of growing up in borderland Tijuana (MX/USA) and being part of a generation exposed to the consumption of information via the Internet, his work deals with the ways in which the mind is continuously transformed by the flow between the virtual/physical dichotomy. His sound works and compositions are also characterized by exploring the aesthetic tensions arising from the juxtaposition of opposing concepts such as cultural tradition and global hypermodernity, dystopia and utopia, low resolution and high definition confronted from a critical post-colonial historical context and crafted using new technologies for electronic music and arts, both software and hardware.

http://moiseshorta.audio

“An artistic exploration into the world of analog computation and analog pattern generation, a world that is governed by self-organization, emergence, chaos and pattern formation. Randomness comes for free in this world and is integrated into any process. The artists use the unpredictable as raw material framed into stable emergent patterns. These patterns are oscillations that are made audible and visualized by tracing temporal activations. In this laboratory, the artists not only work with strange attractors but also with strange sounds and visuals that are highly autonomous and out of control, but open to modulation. Analog computation is characterized by an openness towards subtle changes. For example, historical analog computers might compute different results at different temperatures. While in technological applications this was seen as a drawback, from an artistic point of view this renders analog computation extremely interesting, because it exactly allows autonomous processes to be modulated and played with. These are modulatory networks of analog circuits that will produce an ever-changing ensemble of oscillations.”

Christian Faubel
In his work, he is interested in what enables autonomous behavior and how complex autonomous behavior may result from the interaction of very simple units and from the dynamics of interaction between such units. In his artworks and performances, he tries to convey insights about theoretical concepts such as emergency or embodiment along an aesthetic dimension. He considers his artworks, workshops and performances to be in the tradition of philosophical toys as they combine the mediation of scientific concepts with pleasure and amusement.

Wolfgang Spahn
is an Austrian-German visual artist based in Berlin. His work includes interactive installations, miniature-slide-paintings and performances of light & sound. His art explores the field of analog and digital media and focusses on both their contradiction and their correlation. Thus he is also specialized in re-appropriated and re-purposed electronic technologies. He teaches at the Professional Association of Visual Artists in Berlin (BBK-Berlin) and is associated lecturer at the University of Paderborn, Department of media studies as well as at the University of Oldenburg, Department of art and visual culture.

Wombs

“The project Wombs looks at my own female body, whose leaky materiality and fleshy becoming confront myself with fears, desires, and negotiation regarding sexuality and pregnancy.
The artwork comprises a series of organ-like laboratory glassware hosting enclosed ecosystems: a bacterial culture produces flesh-like microbial biofilm in an environment polluted by hormones metabolites and residues extracted from my own urine.
Wombs explores the absence of maternity as a physical and political experience. The possibility of pregnancy is part of my everyday experience through simple gestures, such as taking oral contraceptives and gynaecological controls. These gestures accompany my own sexuality, as well as the desires and fears behind it. Moreover, these gestures inscribe my experience into a biopolitical sphere, for, once released into the ecosystem through urine, hormonal contraceptives can become pollutant. By doing so, the project prompts a critical re-thinking of the discourses on pregnancy and contraception as a female-only, human-only experience enclosed in one’s own body.”

With a visceral fascination for organic processes, Margherita Pevere is an artist and researcher investigating leakiness and transformation of biological and technological matter. Her practice employs a unique constellation of visual works, performances, collections of plant and animal relics, workshops, and collaborations with bacterial cultures. Based between Berlin and Helsinki, Pevere is PhD candidate (Artistic Research) at Aalto University, Helsinki. She is founder member of the Berlin advocacy group AG21c and member of the Finnish Bioart Society. Most recent exhibitions include ArtSci Salon | Emergent Form, the Fields Institute, Toronto (CA); Non-human agents, Art Laboratory Berlin.

www.margheritapevere.com

wesen / being, entity

“ i was concerned as an artist particularly with models of post-evolutionary organisms and my vision of “active” evolution, that is, evolution controlled by humans. my motivation for modelling biological bodies and creating prototypes of future organisms stems from the conviction that the rapid advances in the modern life sciences will have dramatic consequences for the process of biological evolution, as well as for art.

as a non scientific artist-scientist i created organic sculptures and proposed “future lifeforms”. they are made of soft plasticine. the material is used to keep the sculptures changeable all the time. they serve the purpose of a model. scientists and parts of the society are ment to discuss the design of these future lifeforms. the sculptures can only work like this because the material never hardens. thus the process of deciding about strategies and shapes may start whenever life science is advanced enought to make these proposals become real. ”

Reiner Maria Matysik is a Berlin based artist and Professor at the University of Art and Design in Halle (Burg Giebichenstein) for three-dimensional design.
He studied fine arts at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Braunschweig and at the Ateliers Arnhem. He works in manifold ways with concepts for future landscapes and organisms, like postevolutionary life forms. Through the specific adoption of object, installation and video he developed a dynamic scenario of future landscapes and organisms. In this way he creates an area of conflict between promise and failure in a potential future. Both the visual implementation and their linguistic form can be recognised here as the essential artistic strategies which he uses as his own interface between the worlds of scientific research and pseudo-scientific fiction.

In 2004 he directed the artistic development project Institute of Biological Sculpture at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Braunschweig. He was a lecturer at the Institute of Visual Arts, Faculty of Architecture, Technical University Braunschweig; 2008–2009 visiting professor of sculpture at the Fachhochschule Kunst Arnstadt. He has exhibited his artworks in institutions such as the Gerhard-Marcks-Haus, Bremen; Centre Pasquart, Biel, Switzerland; Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin; Projektraum deutscher Künstlerbund, laboratoria moskau; Museum Koenig, Bonn; Georg Kolbe Museum and Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden; Fondación Cesar Manrique, Lanzarote; Kunstverein Hannover; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland. He is the recipient of grants from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, Kunstfonds e.V., DAAD, KfW Bank, Stiftung NORD/LB Öffentliche, and the Berlin Senate.

Dust Blooms investigates the ability of flowers to not only provide beauty but to help filter atmospheric particulate matter (PM), otherwise known as dust, from natural sources such as pollen and anthropogenic sources such as industrial and vehicular emissions and tire abrasion. PM presents a huge threat to human health, especially in cities where there is relatively more pollution and less vegetation to filter it. Dust Blooms juxtaposes the beauty and function of urban flora using a synthesis of artistic and scientific methods to create awareness about the every-day importance of ecosystem services in cities.

Alexandra R. Toland develops research narratives in artistic ecology. She is a visual artist and environmental planner with a doctorate degree from the TU-Berlin Institute for Ecology.