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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.

THE ALCHEMISTS OF ART AND SCIENCE exhibition at Ars Electronica Center 2016

THE ALCHEMISTS OF ART AND SCIENCE exhibition at Ars Electronica Center

The Alchemists of Art and Science
Exhibition
08.09.2016 – 30.08.2017

The exhibition The Alchemists of Art and Science at the Ars Electroncia Center Linz presented both exciting, innovative projects at the intersection of art and science as well as the results of the various residencies within the European Digital Art and Science Network.
• Info: Exhibition in the context of the European Digital Art & Science Network.
Year of creation
2016

Urls
https://www.aec.at/center/en/ausstellungen/alchemists-of-art-and-science/

Start:
Sep 08, 2016
End:
Aug 30, 2017

Ars Electronica
Ghost Cell / Antoine Delacharlery (FR)
You’ve never seen Paris like this before. Antoine Delacharlery’s animated film isn’t just a close-up of the French metropolis; it’s as if it puts Paris under a microscope. The urban organism with its inventory of streets, buildings and open spaces as well as the people, trains and cars moving about among them comes across like a concatenation of pale cells and nerve fibers. Full of spooky, spectral scenes populated by a cast of the apparently undead, Ghost Cell seems like the hybrid spawn of a scientific documentary and an apocalyptic dream.

Credit: Antoine Delacharlery
Second Story by Aoife Van Linden Tol (IE/UK)
Photo showing Aoife Van Linden Tol's Second Story. She is the first art & science artist-in-residence hosted jointly by Ars Electronica and the European Space Agency (ESA).
Project Florence by Helene Steiner (AT / UK)
Nature has many languages. Project Florence takes advantage of the sensibility of plants to different light frequencies and uses it to trigger electrical responses by a plant and compares the similarities between plant signals and natural language processes. It approaches plants as reactive living matter which generates new perceptions towards how we interface with our natural environment. This creates a rudimentary conversation with our natural environment. In this system, the user first attempts to communicate with or influence the plant through modulated natural language. Their inputs are analyzed for sentiment and semantic content. The resulting signals are used to modulate a light source that projects onto the plant. During this, the chemical and electrical signals are measured. The resulting responses from the plant are transformations of the input, driven by linguistic trees as well as lexical paraphrases. Project Florence can be a mediator between the natural environment and our technological world.
Cosmic Bitcasting / Afroditi Psarra (GR) and Cécile Lapoire (FR)
Cosmic Bitcasting employs sensors to transform the cosmic radiation that neither the Earth’s atmosphere nor the outer layer of our own body shields us from. With light signals and vibrations, the interface reports the detected presence of every elementary particle that, as radiation from outer space, has found its way through the atmosphere to us.

Cosmic Bitcasting is on display at the Ars Electronica Center Linz.
"The Culture" series / Afroditi Psarra (GR), Dafni Papadopoulou (GR)
“The Culture” series by
Afroditi Psarra (GR), Dafni Papadopoulou (GR).
MycoTEX by Aniela Hoitink / NEFFA (NL)
The purpose of MycoTEX was to create a textile out of living material and to develop a real garment out of it. Aniela started by combining mycelia with textiles, in order to create flexible composite products. But during the research process she developed a method for retaining flexibility without using traditional textile materials, but only pure mycelia. Building the textile out of modules provided a number of relevant benefits. Repair and replacement of the garment are easy and do not interfere with the look of the fabric. The garment can be built three-dimensionally and shaped while being made, to suit the wearer’s wishes.
Implant / Eric Dyer (UK)
*Implant* is an imaginary medical device that fits into a blood vessel, neuron, etc. It is super-enlarged, making the viewer feel microscopic. With a genetic retinal disease in his family’s DNA, Dyer has closely followed developments in gene therapy, including the insertion of healthy genes into the body using viruses. With *Implant* he plays with the paradoxical threat and promise of bleeding-edge, anatomically invasive and potentially rampant medical practices. Viewers explore the cylindrical spinning sculpture with hand-held strobe lights, discovering thousands of colorful, fluffy, and sinister nanobots performing unknown tasks and a spiral of organic-synthetic gears inside the tube.
Interface I / Ralf Baecker (DE)
Interface I by Ralf Baecker investigates the boundary between two interacting systems rendered into the physical. One system is a compound of motors, twine and elastic bands arranged horizontally. Each motor is connected to its opposing motor in the facing system by a string, and to its neighbors by an elastic thread. In order to excite the system’s behavior, each motor is fed with random impulses from a Geiger-Müller tube. The mesh couples each element to its surrounding elements in order to achieve a local emergent behavior. Interface I reproduces space and time in constantly shifting configurations.
Uncanny Valley / AlteredQualia (SK), Fractal Fantasy (AT/CA)
The web experiment of AlteredQualia and Fractal Fantasy is intentionally reduced to three animated heads that react to the user’s mouse movements and thereby trigger sophisticated interplay between visual credibility and disconcerting hyperrealism. The soundtrack and mood created by the lighting contribute to the overall effect.

Credits: AlteredQualia, Fractal Fantasy
Stones / Quadrature (DE)
STONES liberates objectively assured facts - such as the existence of 40+ known planents on which water could exist - from any and all human interpretation and passes them on to coming generations in their pure form as representations for which no prerequisite cultural background is necessary for them to be grasped. Instead, they can be decoded by means of pure logic and scientific observations.
Masses / Quadrature (DE)
Photo showing MASSES at the bunker of POSTCITY.
Quadrature’s installation manifests the meaning of a Sisyphean task. The sole purpose of the machine is to maintain two large stones on a steel plate in perfect equilibrium. An endless succession of feedback effects and adjustments is necessary to prevent the incessantly threatening, imminent loss of balance.
Prima Materia by NOHlab (TR)
Alchemical authors have compared the prima materia to everything: To male and female, to the hermaphroditic monster, to heaven and earth, to body and spirit, chaos, microcosm, and the confused mass. It contains in itself all colors and potentially all metals. There is nothing more wonderful in the world, for it begets itself, conceives itself, and gives birth to itself. The stereoscopic piece by the Istanbul-based multidisciplinary Studio NOHlab will take the audience on an audiovisual journey.

Art Direction and Visuals by NOHlab
Sound Design By Giray Gürkal
NoodleFeet by Sarah Petkus (US)
NoodleFeet is the functioning robotic manifestation of an illustrated character who is built from light metals, 3D printed parts, and found objects. Noodle has been developed with mechanical and electronic systems which allow him to exhibit behaviors when stimulated by objects in his environment. His purpose is to exist freely in the world while reacting to situational encounters using self-defining methods of personal expression. Where most technology has a practical or utilitarian application meant to enhance our lives, Noodle is a unique entity who functions without regard to a human’s perception of his purpose or usefulness. My goal is that this may provoke consideration about the motivation behind humanity’s current innovations. I hope that those who interact with Noodle witness a meaningful sense of self from him that will encourage reflection in regard to the value of their own relation to the technology common in everyday life.
"Can you hear me?" by Christoph Wachter (CH) and Mathias Jud (CH)
Edward Snowden’s disclosures shined the spotlight of public attention on Berlin’s federal government district, revealing it to be the site of extremely intense surveillance and espionage by numerous intelligence agencies. This is precisely where the artists wanted to set up a temporary installation on the subject of power and powerlessness in the Digital Age. On the roofs of the Academy of Arts and the Swiss Embassy—right between the listening posts in the American and British Embassies—they set up improvised antennas and installed an independent Wifi communications network, the range of which included the Reichstag, the Office of the Federal Chancellor and the Swiss Embassy. Anyone with a Wifi-capable device could join the network and chat, send text messages and share files. Personnel of the embassies and German government agencies were cordially invited to join in too. Plus, anyone who wished could send messages to the intelligence organizations on precisely those frequencies on which the American NSA and the British GCHQ were listening in.
Future Self Mirror by Andreas Refsgaard (DK), Line Birgitte Borgersen (DK), Manu Dixit (IN) and Riccardo Cereser (IT)
Health and fitness data is being tracked everywhere these days, but can one really make sense of this data? Graphs and charts are often not enough to motivate people. So how might we visualize the available health data in a more motivating way? A mirror is the metaphor for self-reflection and is an everyday object. We prototyped a mirror that gathers data from fitness trackers like fitbits, smartwatches, and smartphones and visualizes the future health directly on a person’s body when they look in the mirror. In a way, the mirror accelerates time so you see your future self staring back at you. Today’s habits shape tomorrow’s image. Daily choices of diet, exercise, stress, smoking and more have a visible impact. This mirror augments one’s reflection with visual predictions of future health, made possible by extrapolating the health data from fitness devices and smartphones.

A CIID Project.
Pelares by CIID (DK)
PELARS stands for Practice-based Experiential Learning Analytics Research and Support. The very title of CIID’s research project is indicative of the fact that not only the mind comes into play in the learning process; haptic input and sensory experience also play key roles. Accordingly, a scholarly alliance under the direction of CIID is performing research on how people learning science, technology, and mathematics go beyond the purely intellectual and thereby employ not only their mind but also their hands. How can learning environments be equipped with digital and electronic technologies so that, when students perform manual work, the data pertaining to these activities can immediately be gathered and used for analytical purposes? This is the matter under investigation. In going about answering it, the project participants are drawing inspiration from, among others, the do-it-yourself movement, hacker culture, and the electronics hobbyists of our day.

A CIID Project.
Spiritum by Sharon Hsienpu Chen and James Zho
No matter how environmentally friendly our lifestyle is, our very existence—literally every breath we take—contributes to emitting CO2 into the atmosphere. Spiritum is a concept for a wearable filter that’s designed to be our constant companion in everyday life and to help us reduce our CO2 emissions. It captures the air we exhale and withdraws the carbon dioxide from it before it escapes into the atmosphere. Spiritum exists in a society where reducing our carbon footprint is a necessity. Carbon conscious individuals can choose to filter the carbon dioxide from their breath before releasing it into the air.

A CIID Project.
Window to the World by CIID Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (DK) and TME Toyota Motor Europe (EU)
An automobile’s windshield only had to be transparent and shatterproof heretofore. But now, “Window to the World” manifests a futuristic vision of mobility in which the glass front panel separating the passenger compartment from the world extends an invitation to a new form of interaction between inside and outside. The pane becomes an interface that moves driving beyond transportation and makes the car a vehicle for entertainment, play, and information. Toyota Motor Europe (TME) and CIID collaboratively developed a speculative concept in which the safety glass becomes a touchscreen, and Augmented Reality gives the outside world a voice. Window to the World informs passengers about things worth seeing and knowing about their immediate surroundings, and thus interrelates those inside with the outside. Plus, you can create drawings on the glass’ interior surface that then react to the scenery rushing past and thus develop a life of their own.

Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID), Toyota Motor Europe (TME)
Obscurity by Paolo Cirio (IT)
This artwork is composed of over fifteen million mugshots of people arrested in the US. It obscured the criminal records of mugshot websites by cloning them. The mugshots have been blurred to make the faces unrecognizable while their names have been shuffled by an algorithm that samples data based on common age, race, location, and charges, all of which are kept accurate in order to provide social context on the actual arrests. A participatory feature lets people judge the arrested individual by deciding to keep or remove their data from the mugshot websites. Obscurity explores the emotional underpinning of unflattering personal information exposed on the Internet. Beyond the use of criminal records for the social experiment and the performative hack, the project promotes a legal Right to Remove personal information from search engines in US. The Obscurity artwork deployed strategies that are oriented on problem-solving as a form of Internet social art practice.
Ciphering - Beyond Prototyping / Jussi Ängeslevä (FI)
"Ciphering" is part of "Beyond Prototyping", a research project led by Jussi Ängeslevä.

Credit: Michael Burk
Artist Biographies - The Alchemists of Art and Science / Ars Electronica