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LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial

Description

Materia Prima
Exhibition
14.11.2015 – 08.05.2016

The exhibition focuses on new alliances between art and science, and the materia prima that their protagonists work with: computer code.

The core of the exhibition consists of a set of interactive visitor labs. Education and communication are not a side program but the central component in this exploration of art and science. The labs are surrounded by exploratory displays featuring outstanding artistic works as well as R&D prototypes—atelier and laboratory meld together here. Between these areas, we find references to the rich history of the liaison of art and science. To quote Merriam-Webster dictionary, a laboratory is “a place providing opportunity for experimentation, observation, or practice in a field of study.” Although in our common understanding of laboratories, we tend to see them as places where highly secret experiments are conducted and high-cost equipment is used. Places where access is only granted to those who have a good relationship to the people working there or a mandate to enter them. They are where processes take place that have a direct impact on knowledge.

Exhibition setting focused on laboratory

MATERIA PRIMA is an exhibition concentrating on artistic/scientific processes and the generation of knowledge in art. Rather than presenting objects, this exhibition focuses on bringing those processes to the surface that confront artists (and sometimes even scientists). The participating artists were asked to work on adapting these processes for presentation within an exhibition context. And in order to underline their process-oriented approaches, it was clear from the beginning that we, as curators, should try to leave a so-called classical contemporary presentation of artworks behind us and create an exhibition setting that focused on laboratory structure. But not only the systematic processes inherent in the artworks were to be explored in this way: more importantly, the laboratory—as site of experimentation, observation and practice— was to be brought into the exhibition space and made accessible to visitors. Of course this approach is not new and Ars Electronica Center Linz has been testing this kind of laboratory structure since January 2009. For seven years now we have been displaying, discussing, and making practices accessible that are the focus of artists, scientists, and technologists. It goes without saying that a citizen’s lab cannot, for example, include the entire diversity of existing laboratories or their high-end equipment. Nor can it meet the requirements of sophisticated scientific research. However, we can make experiments visible, discuss observations, and enable participants to gain some practice with the machines and processes on display: these are the parameters that we set and that guided us in our approach to establishing a laboratory structure within an exhibition context. In shifting through the diversity of artistic practice to be presented in the MATERIA PRIMA exhibition, the works were divided into six labs, based on the phenomena which the artists had chosen to focus on. Each lab represents a selection of the artworks on display, and showcases them via images and texts that are related to the central topic of the lab.

(Source: The Practice of Art and Science, p. 236)

Exhibition Credits

Curated by Gerfried Stocker, Ars Electronica Center Linz