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ARS ELECTRONICA ARCHIVE - ART & SCIENCE

The basis of the „European Digital Art and Science Network“ is a big manifold network consisting of scientific mentoring institutions (ESA, CERN, ESO and Fraunhofer MEVIS), the Ars Electronica Futurelab and seven European cultural partners (Center for the promotion of science, RS – DIG Gallery, SK – Zaragoza City of Knowledge Foundation, ES – Kapelica Gallery / Kersnikova, SI – GV Art, UK – Laboral, ES – Science Gallery, IE. The EU funded project lasted from 2014 to 2017.
The Online Archive of Ars Electronica provides an overview of the individual activities of the network and also delivers information about the network itself, the residency artists and the involved project partners and the jury.

MONSTERS OF THE MACHINE exhibiton at LABoral 2016

MONSTERS OF THE MACHINE exhibiton at LABoral

LOS MONSTRUOS DE LA MÁQUINA /
MONSTERS OF THE MACHINE
Exhibition
Gijón
18.11.2016 – 31.08.2017
La Cura
• Info: An exhibition in the context of the European Digital Art & Science Network.

Year of creation

2016

Urls

http://www.laboralcentrodearte.org/en/exposiciones/monsters-of-the-machine?set_language=en

Start:

Nov 18, 2016

End:

Aug 31, 2017

LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial

Avataurror (2012-2013) by Alan Sondheim (US)

The word Avataurror is a remix combining avatar, toro, and terror. This series of 3D-printed objects are modified motion capture mappings, taken from physical dance performances and outputs. The artist is interested in distorted, wounded, problematic avatars and their relationship to states of violence and genocide. Sondheim’s works represent a kind of un-utterability, where the reality of flesh and pain dominates across any language and any form of representation. How does one act, when whole cultures are wiped out? How does one resist, when resistance is accompanied by unbelievable pain? How does one exist in war zones, how does one endure? As violence increases around the world, these questions are paramount; we must continue in spite of everything, we must learn to listen, to heal, to calm, to persevere?

La Cura: Everything (2016) by [AOS] Art is Open Source (IT)

“In September 2012, artist Salvatore Iaconesi got the diagnosis. He had a glioma (glial cell brain cancer) on the surface of his right hemisphere. Upon asking to see all the data relating to his condition, he found that all of the documents, MRI scans and so on, were in obscure, not readily used formats. This meant that if one wanted to view the data, you needed specific or corporate software.” (Patrick Lichty, 2012). The artists hacked all the files and uploaded them to the internet, looking for an open source cure. La Cura is a global participatory performance that transforms the meaning of the word “cure”—bringing it out of the separated spheres of administration and bureaucracy, back into society.

Acknowledgements: Kilowatt Bologna
Collaborators: all the participants in La Cura, all over the world

The Garden of Emoji Delights (2014) by Carla Gannis (US)

In The Garden of Emoji Delights, the artist creates a mash between popular historic and contemporary sign systems, and expands the Emoji lexicon through this process. Emoji are a contemporary glyph system, which offer shorthand for virtual expression. The pleasurable stylizations are ubiquitous worldwide and across generations. Translating iconography of an earlier era by using Emoji seems to makes perfect “nonsense sense” to her. The artist produced both a 2D print and moving image version of the “emojified garden.” The static work is a direct homage to Bosch—deeply tied in scale and physicality to the original. The moving image version allowed Gannis to be more dynamic with a hybrid visual vocabulary.

Courtesy: Carla Gannis & TRANSFER Gallery

Sauti ya wakulima (2011) by Eugenio Tiselli (Equipo Sauti ya wakulima) (MX)

Sauti ya wakulima proposes that agricultural knowledge, shared and defended as a common good, can help farmers to resist the onslaught of climate change. Since 2011, Sauti ya wakulima has invited groups of farmers who live and work in Tanzania to produce and share audiovisual records of their daily practices. By means of smartphones and a website, the participants documented and published their knowledge about techniques of adaptation to climate changes, their needs and aspirations, on the Internet. All this reinforced the mutual support networks that can help them in times of adversity.

Original participants: Abdallah Jumanne, Mwinyimvua Mohamedi, Fatuma Ngomero, Rehema Maganga, Haeshi Shabani, Renada Msaki, Hamisi Rajabu, Ali Isha Salum, Imani Mlooka, Sina Rafael
Coordinator: Hamza Suleyman
Scientific counsel: Angelika Hilbeck (ETH Zurich), Flora Ismail (University of Dar es Salaam)
Direction & programming: Eugenio Tisselli

The Brain of the Planet (2016) by Fernando Gutiérrez (ES)

The Brain of the Planet presents an army of dysfunctional bionic creatures within a retrofuturist, dystopic aesthetic. The project offers a romantic, B-movie paleofuture, the future that was imagined in the past, which is playful, ironic, and profoundly emotional. The project is based on the Weird Menace aesthetic of pulp fiction classics from the early decades of the twentieth century, when the pioneers of science fiction—the heirs of Mary Shelley—expressed fears that machines would rebel against their creators and imagined lost lands and remote worlds. The piece explores the relationship between man and machine and asks questions about the problems of our identity in relation to current bio-technological experiments and genetically malleable machines.

Produced by: LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial

The Brain of the Planet (2016) by Fernando Gutiérrez (ES)

Animacules (2009) by Genetic Moo (UK)

Animacules was inspired by the 19th century sea life illustrations of Ernst Haeckel and the work of the 17th century Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek who invented one of the earliest microscopes. Leeuwenhoek was the first to describe what we now know to be micro-organisms as living molecules, which he christened “animalcules.” Genetic Moo presents a swarm of fanciful small creatures whose body shapes recall the microscopic life of the sea, ponds, and saliva. This interactive installation belongs to a series of works that explores the theme of an imagined future involving human evolution and it playfully considers alternative propositions of body and mini-molecule combinations to the cerebro-centric norm.

Colonise the Cloud (2016) by Gretta Louw (AU/DE)

This series of animated GIFs unpacks the incredibly cynical, manipulative marketing around the so-called “cloud”; the way that the language and images used to describe the service imply an ethereal data-heaven disembodied, pure, and safe. The reality is everything that its depiction is not. In this series, the jellyfish—one of the few sea creatures that seems to benefit from the pollution that human industry spreads through the oceans—becomes symbolic of the amorphous, inscrutable network, the cloud that seems to be one thing but reveals itself, upon closer inspection, to be another.

Future Present Desert (2016) by Gretta Louw (AU/DE) & Warnayaka Art Centre

This work is a new single channel video installation, including physical elements, made on location in Lajamanu, a Warlpiri community in central Australia. The piece is a surreal, dystopian blend of “reality”, traditional ghost and dreamtime stories, personal experiences of the Warlpiri artists, and science fiction. There is an investigation of the ways in which culture and technology intertwine and how technology is appropriated by marginalized communities and used for their own purposes.

Coproduced: LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial & Warnayaka Art Centre
Acknowledgements: the Lajamanu community and Lajamanu elders, the traditional land owners, the Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation

A quiet desert failure (2015) by Guido Segni (IT)

This is an ongoing, online, real-time, algorithmic performance by Guido Segni, started in 2013. In its own way, it’s a monumental piece about internet contents, emptiness, time, storage, memory, oblivion, and—ultimately—failure. The artist programmed an Internet bot, a program that simulates a human activity, to traverse the data-scape of Google Maps in order to fill a Tumblr blog and its data centers with a remapped representation of the whole Sahara Desert, one post at a time, every 30 minutes. The project is part of Data fillings, a series of conceptual web-based works exploring the idea of filling both the surface and the physical references (the data centers) of the Internet with (apparently?) worthless information.

Courtesy: Guido Segni
Collaborators: Fabio Angeli, Lorenzo Del Grande

A quiet desert failure (2015) by Guido Segni (IT)

The Virtual Watchers (2016) by Joana Moll (ES) & Cédric Parizot (FR)

The Virtual Watchers is an on-going research project existing at the intersection of art, research and technology. It questions the dynamics of crowdsourcing, national security and border control, through social media. It focuses on the exchanges that occurred within a Facebook group that gathered American volunteers ready to monitor US-Mexico border through an online platform that displayed live screenings of CCTV cameras, in real-time. The declared aim of this operation was to get American citizens to participate in reducing border crime and block the entrance of illegal immigration to the US by means of crowdsourcing.

The Virtual Watchers (2016) by Joana Moll (ES) & Cédric Parizot (FR)

Medusa FPS (2016) by Karolina Sobecka (PL)

A First Person Shooter game in which the gun is a AI-aided robotic weapon that helps to determine when to shoot, fires automatically on its field of view, and guides the player’s hand to aim more effectively. The player cannot drop the weapon or stop it from firing, but he/she can obstruct it (and the gun’s) vision. The object of the game is to shoot as few people as possible. This game is a reflection on the intelligent robotic weapon systems the military is using in order to distribute agency between a team of men, the algorithm, and the machine, Thus, the remains scattered across a complex concatenation of human and non-human actors.

Medusa FPS (2016) by Karolina Sobecka (PL)

A First Person Shooter game in which the gun is a AI-aided robotic weapon that helps to determine when to shoot, fires automatically on its field of view, and guides the player’s hand to aim more effectively. The player cannot drop the weapon or stop it from firing, but he/she can obstruct it (and the gun’s) vision. The object of the game is to shoot as few people as possible. This game is a reflection on the intelligent robotic weapon systems the military is using in order to distribute agency between a team of men, the algorithm, and the machine, Thus, the accountability remains scattered across a complex concatenation of human and non-human actors.

Infinity Engine (2013-2014) by Lynn Hershman Leeson (US)

Lynn Hershman Leeson asks us to “imagine a world in which there is a blurring between the soul and the chip, a world where artificially implanted DNA is genetically bred to create enlightened and self-replicating intelligent machines, which perhaps use a body as a vehicle for mobility.”
(Hershman Leeson, Lynn, Civic Radar, 2016, Hatje Cantz, p. 331)

Infinity Engine examines these critical issues which cross between reality, fear, and fantasy. Through the wallpaper, the installation replicates some of the paraphernalia found in genetics labs, as well as hybrid animals and plants whose patent is legally owned by bio-companies involving genetic engineering. This installation is part of a project that has been exhibited around the world. It was (partially) commissioned by ZKM, Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, and it questions the ethics of the biotechnology industry.

Loan: ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe

Infinity Engine (2013-2014) by Lynn Hershman Leeson (US)

Help me Know the Truth (2016) by Mary Flanagan (US)

Help me Know the Truth is a participatory artwork in which visitors to the exhibition become a part of the work across the gallery. Participants first snap a digital portrait at a small photo booth at the entrance to the show. In front of the installation, they can choose between two slightly altered portraits to match the text label shown on the screen. By selecting the slight variations of images over time, differing facial features emerge that reveal larger unconscious beliefs about facial features or tendencies related to culture and identity. The intent behind the work is to both utilize and question how computational techniques can uncover the categorizing systems of the mind, and how they are therefore subject to socially constructed fears and values.

Courtesy: Mary Flanagan
Acknowledgements: Jared Segal

Help me Know the Truth (2016) by Mary Flanagan (US)

Una historia nunca contada desde abajo (2016) by Regina de Miguel (ES)

The starting point is one of the most radical and unusual cases in the recent history of communication technologies, the project Cybersyn or Synco. This project, which was directed by the cybernetic visionary, Stafford Beer, was set up in Chile between 1971 and 1973 during the government of President Salvador Allende. It came to an abrupt end as a result of the coup led by Augusto Pinochet. Based on the story of the Freedom Machine, which proposed to “deliver the tools of science to the people,” and other paradigmatic scenarios linked to the notion of disappearance and buried knowledge, the result is a filmic narrative, divided into acts, combining elements of the historical documentary, science/political fiction, and psychological portrait.

Film produced thanks to the Grants for Video Art Creation of Fundación BBVA

Una historia nunca contada desde abajo (2016) by Regina de Miguel (ES)

UKI viral love (2013) by Shu Lea Cheang (CN)

UKI viral love is the sequel to Cheang’s acclaimed cyberpunk movie I.K.U. conceived in two parts—a viral performance and a viral game. The story is about coders dispatched by the Internet porn enterprise GENOM Corp, to collect human, orgasm data, for consumption via a mobile phone plug-in. Deprived of data in a post-net crash era, these coders are suddenly dumped in an e-trashscape environment where hackers and coders are forced to scavenge through techno-waste. These defunct replicants also seek parts and codes to resurrect themselves.

Performers: Radie Manssour, Maria Llopis
Photo: Rocio Campana
UKI viral love is part of the UK project developed with collaborations and residencies at: Hangar media lab (Barcelona), Medialab Prado (Madrid), LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial [Plataforma Cero] (Gijón,), Imaginarium (Tourcoing)
Installation in Gijón in collaboration with: EMULSA, Gijón

UKI viral love (2013) by Shu Lea Cheang (CN)

Stutterer (2014) by Thomson & Craighead (UK)

Stutterer is a poetry machine that uses the human genome like a music score to play back a self-assembling video montage spanning the 13 years it took the Human Genome Project to complete the first documented human DNA sequence. The four nucleotide bases of a DNA strand are represented by letters and Stutterer plays (or would play—if it were to run continuously for more than 80 years) all 3.2 billion letters representing the human genome. Stutterer is a human monument of sorts, which seeks to connect our biological fabric with our unique linguistic abilities.

Programming: Matt Jarvis
Commissioned by LifeSpace Science Art Research Gallery with support from The Wellcome Trust
On loan: University of Dundee Museum Services

Artist Biographies - Monsters of the Machine / Laboral