[spectre] : SPEKTRUM Exhibition #11: Dark Habitats Dark Ecology, 8-11 June

[Lieke Ploeger]

You are warmly invited to:


*EXHIBITION #11: DARK HABITATS DARK ECOLOGY*
SPEKTRUM | art science community, Bürknerstr. 12, 12047, Berlin,
www.spektrumberlin.de

http://tinyurl.com/darkhabitats

/// PROGRAM

• Thursday 8 June (dayticket 7-12euro up to your offer)
18:30 | Exhibition Opening
20:30 | Walk with Smell Lab Berlin
<https://www.facebook.com/smelllabberlin/>: Collecting Smells
21:00 | Participatory performance by Jo Caimo / Marta Zapparoli

• Friday 9 June (dayticket 7-12euro up to your offer)
16:00 | Workshop on Fermentation: (on registration:
http://spektrumberlin.de/events/detail/fermentation-workshop.html)
18:30 | Exhibition opens
21:00 | Performances by Budhaditya Chattopadhyay / TBA

• Saturday 10 June (dayticket 7-12euro up to your offer)
18:30 | Exhibition opens
19:30 | SeedBombing walk-lecture
21:00 | Performances by Valery Vermeulen
<https://www.facebook.com/valery.vermeulen.9> / Mélodie Melak Fenez
<https://www.facebook.com/melodie.fenez>+Brian Kiel

• Sunday 11 June (dayticket 5-8euro up to your offer)
18:30 | Exhibition opens
20:30 | AV-performance by Nana MacLean & Lorenzo Colocci
21:00 | Closing Conference moderated by Matthias Fritsch (free-entrance)

_Program curated by Alfredo Ciannameo with the support of Matthias Fritsch.
Dark Habitats Dark Ecology is part of the series Dark Society


/// CONCEPT

Human advancements and ecology are not sharing the same nature. The planet
did not evolve all those Eras influenced only by our conceptions, and will
not do that as well when the truly post-human will follow the
post-dinosaurs. But today, the human factor is introduced in the ecological
continuum through conditions exploiting resources dictated by
geo-economical and geo-political dynamics: not privileging us above the way
we think about life, rather happening on its own way.
Dark Ecology states exactly this: the inner mechanisms of ecology are not
intimately depending by our cultural mystifications and they are based on
dimensions behind our human values, ethics, visions and so on; lying in an
ontological sphere with its own rules in which humans are not the only
relevant aspect even in a moment when their catastrophic interventions risk
the planetary collapse.
In this dark perspective, our culture about living-systems becomes one
key-role which must be discussed in order to better understand this alien
conditions of ecology. Artists share the responsibility to look into this
and tune their work on what can be defined: non-human agencies.
Human habitat, on the other hand, is the synthesis between ecology and
culture which can help us to understand how we perceive and shape the
world. In it, we participate by voicing infinite qualities of beauty and
pre-announce future directions of staying together in our even possible
environment.
Artists, in this new phase of absolute imperative of innovation for a
dramatic change, find ways to envision their experience using knowledge and
processes borrowed from research in laboratories of biology, design,
cultivation, food, health, landscape, nomadism and urbanism.

The exhibition Dark Habitats Dark Ecology challenges artists and audience
to reflect on alternative ways to look into the state of
home-sustainability and shows examples in which technology and science can
reveal our human, specific way to impress upon the idea of nature an always
beautiful but ecologically problematic sense of living.


/// WORKS

• Paul Seidler, Paul Kolling, Max Hampshire: terra0 is a prototype of a
self-owned augmented forest. It is currently being set up at 52°27'39.8"N
13°50'22.9”E – 30km in the east of Berlin. The Project emerged from
research in the fields of crypto governance, smart contracts, economics and
questions regarding representations of natural systems in the
techno-sphere. It creates a framework whereby a forest is able to sell
licenses to log its own trees through automated processes, smart contracts
and blockchain technology.
In doing so, this forest accumulates capital. A shift from valorization
through third parties to a self-utilization makes it possible for the
forest to procure its real exchange value, and eventually buy itself.

• Michael Ang: Dune Field Modulator – installation is a set of objects that
use light as an intervention to change our perception of landscape. The
modulator is designed as a nomadic technology that can be carried into the
field. As you move through the landscape an ephemeral light-space is
created between you, the modulator, and the environment. Dune Field
Modulator was designed for the Gobi desert sand dunes in Mongolia.
Even in this remote territory all landscape is mapped. By changing our
interaction with the landscape, the modulator makes it again an unknown and
exploratory place. The modulator can be seen as a tool for technological
intervention that mediates a direct spatial-body relationship between
human, object, and landscape.

• Theresa Schubert: Morphological Twists – Prints + video – condenses the
most simple organisms to highly complex philosophical questions. In the
artistic research project Growing Geometries I - tattooing mushrooms, fungi
generate their growth by processing organic material. Together with the
treatment of the mushroom with tattoo needles, their natural growth creates
a closer proximity to that of mankind than to that of plants. A natural
phenomenon is translated into a moment of critical analysis of processes of
growth with the simplest of means. Theresa Schubert's tattooed mushroom are
fruits of a deeper lying mesh whose growth can take any shape or form based
on devitalized organic material causing revitalization.

• Ivan Henriques: Microscope Light Machine – installation. Millions of
other living entities surround us all the time and are vital to our well
being and also for life in the natural environment. However they exist in
such a mode of being that not only many of their behaviour escape human
perception, but their presence all together.
Using optics techniques, a droplet of water becomes a lens magnifying the
biodiversity of microorganisms from an specific location. When the water
droplet is beamed by a laser, It creates a microscope-live-cinema
installation. The same magnification from the microorganisms creates a
holographic image in the transparent trapezoid.
This work is a step further in the project Microscopic Chamber#1 that
explores the huge biodiversity of microorganisms which lives in water as
phytoplankton, copepods, diatoms, algae, amongst many other lifeforms
fundamentally important for human life. The installation Microscope Light
Machine was exhibited at the Brazilian Embassy in Tokyo from 7-9 of March
2017, and was developed during the Project to Support the Nurturing of
Media Art Creators from CG-ARTS.

• Matthias Fritsch: Ecopolis – installation. The project focuses on
developing a system of an urban area that could be the habitat for most of
earth’s human population. Matthias imagines a sustainable way for a largest
number of inhabitants in order to preserve life on a steady level for an
infinite future on this planet. As the starting point of developing urban
planning he is focusing on the citizens’ sustainable daily routines and to
support those activities he develops open source tools like a living room
humus generator that will be presented in the show.

• Acci Baba: Exodus – video installation. An experimental film to explore
behaviours of an artificial system reaching the point of saturation.
Central to the work is the aesthetic combination of geometry and life,
expressed by collinear structure and living ants. The sugar water falls
from the sky, artificially creating ecosystem for ants to survive. Ants
walk along the infinite path, leaving pheromones for the others to follow.
Soon one of the ant chose to escape from the saturated system, realising
they have been walking on a infinite path. The others followed and
continued walking in to the void as they form an another circular loop.
Through the perspective of micro organism, the artwork finds the relation
between the viewers to reflect the formula emerging from the hyper reality.

• Marta Zapparoli: Intervention with Antennas, Trans-world-receivers and
Detectors. Exploring, discovering and listening below the surface of the
audible to other possibilities of what can exist in the space. Focusing on
the inaudible spectral site of the location where we are now - not to dream
or be elsewhere, but to understand that here and now happens as a sonic
reality which is constantly mutable. Catching these frequencies using tools
and devices like detectors, antennas, receivers, and sending these signals
into a vortex of information in real time. Stimulating our senses from
other sonic realities, which constantly cross our bodies, interrupting our
balance, polluting our existence. Developing and recognizing different ways
of perceiving and listening beneath the audible.

• Mélodie Melak Fenez & Brian Kiel: Condensed and falling in drops -
performance. At the intersection of a sound installation and a performance,
this duo creates a resonating territory of frequencies. Standing waves,
physical boundaries of sound that can be felt as they pass through you,
sonically materialise the space between walls, physically connecting all
present. Amidst this atmosphere, plants attached through an array of
oscillators populate, develop and emphasise the delicate stability of the
territory.

• Jo Caimo: Koorvorming is a participatory performance. The audience is
invited to sing together following a prerecorded voice, which functions as
a musical score. The score is played over an array of custom made
earpieces. Participants are blindfolded. One ear is used to listen to the
score over the earpiece, while the other is closed with a earplug, so while
singing participants are unaware of what is happening around them.
Immediately after the performance every participant receives a CD with the
audio recording of the performance and they can listen to it at home.

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay : Decomposing Landscape. To capture the essence,
if not the historical particulars, of the regions on the decay. We have
arguably entered the Anthropocene – ‘a new geologic era, defined by
unprecedented human disturbances over earth’s ecosystems’. In this era,
climatic integrity of natural, pastoral landscapes in emerging economies
like India is endangered. Diffusing the sonic elements in the spatial
practice of multi-channel moving image projection the final outcome of the
project includes an Ambisonics sound composition and a multi-channel
sound/video installation.
The works have been developed through a meticulous collection of materials
from various locations at India in extensive fieldwork (2009-2011)
supported by Prince Claus Fund Amsterdam. This collection has been forming
a digital archive to be used for realizing the work(s). The project aims to
delineate gradual transfiguration of the developing societies in the wider
public, using digital technology to mediate engendered sites in
contemporary art.

• Valery Vermeulen <https://www.facebook.com/valery.vermeulen.9>:
Mikromedas – performance is a new data-driven musical project in which
compositions are elaborated using data from space and deep space in a
radically new way. In the project compositions are produced using sampled
radio astronomical data coming from various sources e.g. data stemming from
several spacecrafts such as Voyager1 and Voyager2 or data originating from
various astrophysical objects such as pulsar stars (which might be up to
22000 years old). Other sources that are used in the composition process
include synthesized sounds as wel as data feeds from satellites turned into
sound and music using newly developed sonification techniques.

• Benjamin Graf: Seedbomb.city When activism turns business – Benjamin Graf
uses the tactics of seed bombing and guerrilla gardening for his business
model. He says: One seedbomb might not have an impact, but 1 billion do!
Seedbomb City brings more green into the city. Equipped with seedbombs and
seedpills they make guerrilla gardens on the way and beautify loose grounds
and bleak roadsides. Guerrilla gardening is also about reclaiming the city
and actively shaping it. A true "Green Revolution"!

• Margherita Pevere: Placenta is a living sculpture with a hybrid body. A
bacterial colony grows on technological relics thanks to a pump that feeds
nutrients and moisture. This apparently functional system produces an
excrescence of microbial cellulose that progressively envelops the relics.
The ambiguous aesthetics of cellulose - recalling skin and body matter -
and its leaking materiality counter the engineered structure of
technological artifacts. A camera placed inside the excrescence streams
live images of the exhibition space and the audience as seen through the
layer of cellulose: at the beginning of the exhibition images are clear,
but become blurred as the cellulose thickens. Yet, because cellulose is a
translucent material, shades and lights are still perceivable. The work
critically reflects on the inter-depedence between living systems, namely
how non-human identities radically inhabit and reappropriate man-made
habitats.

• Nana MacLean: Silenscape – AVperformance. By manipulating and interfering
with earth’s metabolism, new bio-geological niches and ecosystems are being
created by humans in a dramatic way that never existed before in earth
history. Soil profiles contain layers of fragmented, preserved plastics,
concentrations of chemicals and radioactive isotopes that are unique and
characterizing of our times. A fantastic playground for the evolutionary
potential of an actual dystopian man-created landscape is performed live in
a mixed media set up in which image and sound are opening a dialogue
between a speculative future and actual scientific data.

• Smell Lab Berlin Smell Walk – Collected Smells. Smell is something that
we use on a daily basis but whose meaning and significance often evades our
'enlightened' human nature. Our reactions to smells are just that:
reactions. To smell something remains still an act of injesting and
incorporating the source into our bodies, and to that we remain decidedly
sensitive. With this smell walk, we will wander through the neighbourhood
with our noses open, to sensitize ourselves to an aspect of our minds which
we may not be conscious of and to see the highly urbanized human-scape of
Neukölln through a perspective picturing our habitat in a new light.

• Fermentation Workshop by Denkwerkstatt NAHrungswandel (on registration:
http://spektrumberlin.de/events/detail/fermentation-workshop.html
<https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fspektrumberlin.de%2Fevents%2Fdetail%2Ffermentation-workshop.html&h=ATNVLwTTd0AoTcJ5xLN8bA-z_A7qgd1XithYElEB15S9BtqTQ918WcXpRc0cTROucLfssLaTgF_ttzZA3nzHG44Pd4xGw7YNUudubXF6MbeXqRRK0ZgrRArv-eYoS6lrig&enc=AZM-aZ8oKrarhA57mKw0Pu1SFgBp4DhiXGIwYwtIp9F8JJ_BKtre6hOeWHlmqXbUaxE&s=1>).
Discover the rich and diverse possibilities of this old conservation
technic and start experimenting yourself. We will give you a brief
introduction into the world of fermentation and its potential for health,
sustainability seasonal and regional food consumption. In the second part
we will show you how easy and rich food fermentation is. In the end of the
workshop you will have your own self made jars of fermented organic
vegetables.

• Maria-Leena Räihälä & Manuel Bonik: Morgenvogel Real Estate /
intervention. The relationship between birds, architecture and art is the
subject of Morgenvogel Real Estate, an artistic real estate company in
Berlin that enthusiastically brokers birdhouses. Whether the builders admit
it or not, new Berlin architecture is hostile to birds. Wherever you look,
you'll find smooth surfaces where no robin can find a home. Still they have
established themselves in the diverse facades of Berlin, and want to keep
doing so, since it’s become more and more difficult in other places. The
countryside – so-called "nature" – is covered with monocultures. If one
wants to become a lucky bird, he’d better go to the city. Berlin, you
should be happy that such immigrants are still perched in your city!


/// CLOSING CONFERENCE moderated by Matthias Fritsch:

moderated by Matthias Fritsch: Artists are invited to discuss further their
work as well as their current research offering an inside of the
constellation of artistic approaches on the topic of the exhibition.

• Ivan Henriques: Hybrid-forms of Symbiosis between Tech and Nature
• Andrew Müller: Eat insects to Save Capitalism?
• Morgenvogel: Birds and Architecture / intervention & lecture
• Smell Lab: Smell-mapping in urban-scape
• Matthias Fritsch: Daily routines for a sustainable City


Best regards, Lieke Ploeger

-- 
SPEKTRUM | art science community
Bürknerstr. 12
U8 Schönleinstrasse
12047  Berlin
www.spektrumberlin.de
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