Institute for Experimental Architecture

Since what is often referred to as the 'digital revolution' in architecture, novel materials and digital tools have significantly altered architectural ecologies. The paper compares two case study projects as part of ongoing research. Examining overlaps between the natural, the virtual, and the built environments, it explores a variety of overlaps, continuities, and interfaces. Each project operates on the threshold of what is conventionally considered the 'natural' and the 'artificial' in material, shape, and experience contexts. Informed by theory, the projects establish nuanced interfaces between the digital and the material. Both projects were fabricated using robotic 3D printing with a variety of materials. The paper describes and compares them concerning sustainability and provides an overview of the different spatial concepts of the two projects.

Although the research work of the artist is rarely as systematic as that of the scientist they both may deal with the whole of life, in terms of relationships, not of details. In fact, the artist today does so more consistently than the scientist, because with each of his works he faces the problem of the interrelated whole, while only a few theoretical scientists are allowed this luxury of a total vision. -laszlo moholy-nagy 1 Art that uses biotechnology as its means of expression is currently addressed less as art and more as a discursive and often instrumentalized form of contributing to ongoing public debates beyond the aesthetic realm. Despite the aspect described by Moholy-Nagy that artists as seismographs "may press for the sociobiological solution of problems just as energetically as the social revolutionaries do through political action," 2 art that typically operates on the level of presence of biological process rather than on its representation loses its particularity and its complexity when being grasped only through its popular agenda-setting potential. The holistic view of art that Moholy-Nagy suggests, in which "not only the conscious but also the subconscious mind absorbs social ideas," depends on the capacity of the arts to transform weltanschauung into emotional form, and "with means largely comprehensible by sensory experiences on a nonverbal level. Otherwise any problem could be successfully solved only through intellectual or verbal discourse." 3 Art involving biotechnology needs to be analyzed in its characteristic phenomenological oscillation between meaning effects and presence effects, 4 without neglecting the latter, as it is dissimilar from other forms of information-centered new media art.

Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth (BEAP) - Curatorial Statement: "Let's step back a moment and try a transhistorical thought experiment: What if we considered nowadays art that deals with biological systems as a contemporary vanitas version of yesteryears tradition of Still Life?"

Mit der zunehmenden Verfügbarkeit biotechnologischer Methoden verschieben sich die künstlerischen Inszenierungsmodalitäten von Körperlichkeit. In einer Kunst der Transformation »in vivo« und »in vitro« verlagert sich der Fokus einerseits auf die mikroskopische Kleinstebene von Molekülen, Zellen, Enzymen etc., andererseits eröffnen sich Perspektiven der Inszenierung eines Lebenskontinuums, welches das Spektrum menschlicher Handlungen um die Aktionspotentiale des Tierischen und des Pflanzlichen erweitert. Es lässt sich ein die darstellende und bildende Kunst verbindender Trend hin zu inszenierter Präsenz erkennen, von einer »Kunst der Performance« zu einer generellen »Performativität in der Kunst«, die sich als »Molekulartheater« und »Mikroperformativität«, sowie im Spezialfall als »Mikrotransplantation«, manifestiert. In: Susanne Stemmler (Hg.) Wahrnehmung, Erfahrung, Experiment, Wissen Objektivität und Subjektivität in den Künsten und den Wissenschaften 328 Seiten.

In four theoretical essays, criminologist Simon A. Cole, science historian Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, curator Jens Hauser and the artist himself reflect upon the criticism of genomics inherent in the installations of Fingerprints... from an aesthetic, political and techno-philosophical angle. The biomedia installations of Paul Vanouse challenge the codes and images of contemporary molecular biology. Employing gel electrophoresis as an artistic medium, he diverts scientific imaging techniques from their intended uses and uncovers their influence on knowledge production. How are uncritically accepted catchwords like genetic fingerprint generated? How do such metaphors conceal the technical constructedness of their alleged naturalness? Today, increasingly questionable social conclusions are derived from ontologized body fragments, such as genes, so as to reinforce clichés and prejudices.

Skin represents a place where art, science, philosophy and social culture intersect. With a growing number of bodily extensions and the continuous discovery of new areas - physical, virtual and psychological - the clear distinctive lines between individuals, countries and even species are beginning to blur. Advances in bio-medical research together with deconstructivist theories in philosophy are reflected in the work of many artists using skin, materially or metaphorically, as an interface, whose work goes beyond the descriptive surface of the skin, to explore issues of xeno-transplants, trans-species and trans-racial exchanges. In recent years, a trend towards the analysis of skin, its functions and meanings, has emerged in the practice of many artists using wet biology, bio-architecture and self-experimentation. Jens Hauser has been involved in much of the development in this area. Bound in a unique thermochromic cover (designed by artist Zane Berzina), this book provides an engaging, critical and thought-provoking approach to how current technologies are changing our perceptions of the body, the self and the interactions between bodies. Edited by one of the leading curators in (bio)technology based art and including contributions from 25 major international artists, scholars and critics in this field, this provocative art and text book examining some of the most contentious moral, aesthetical and philosophical issues of our day will complement the exhibition and encourage debate within this exponentially growing field.

Not only the question What is Life? but its logical extension What is Artificial Life? has been a recurrent inquiry in cultural history in our attempt to understand-philosophically, scientifically, and artistically-and to recreate what actually constitutes aliveness. In our efforts to comprehend the intrinsic features that make living things essentially alive, reconstruction and recreation, synthesis out of analysis, appear to be a consistent human drive.

We have chosen to center the SLSAeu Conference 2018 on the theme of GREEN, providing a resolutely cross-disciplinary platform to explore one of the most pervasive and broadest tropes of our times. How to define and understand greenness is an urgent political, societal, philosophical and economic question far beyond academia – yet there is much confusion about its meanings. The conference program reveals how much green has become pervasive across a broad range of disciplines. But far from having universal meaning, it marks a dramatic knowledge gap prone to systematic misunderstandings. The submitted proposals demonstrate a large spectral field of provocatively un-green and prismatic contributions from the most diverse academic disciplines and professional fields. Engineers may brand ‘green technologies’ as ecologically benign, but climate researchers point to the ‘greening of the earth’ itself as the alarming effect of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. ‘Green growth’ aims to reconcile economic and ecologically sustainable development, while in philosophy ‘prismatic ecology’ rebukes the use of green to represent binary ideas of the other-than-human world as an idealized nature. More concept than color, green is often being reduced to a mere metaphor stripped of its material, epistemological and historical referents. This confusion increasingly obstructs an interdisciplinary dialogue between the humanities and the natural sciences – a dialogue which is urgently required considering anthropogenic effects on climate and biodiversity. The umbrella term ‘green’ opens up perspectives to interdisciplinary approaches that entangle fields such as philosophy, art theory & history, literature & poetry, political & social sciences, environmental & medical humanities, color theory, per- ception and cognition, anthropology & ethnography, biology, biodiversity management and landscape architecture.

A morbid odour clings to the charm of the pervasive trope of greening everything, from mundane ‘green burials’  to transcendental ‘greening of the gods’ , and even ‘green warfare’ , taught in Military Studies. Despite its, at first sight, positive connotations of aliveness and naturalness, the term ‘green’ incrementally serves the uncritical, fetishistic desire to metaphorically hyper-compensate for a systemic necropolitics that has variously taken the form of the increasing technical manipulation of living systems, ecologies, the biosphere, and of very ‘un-green’ mechanisation which, according to Sigfried Giedion, has ‘taken command’ of life and death . This resonates with Achille Mbembe’s definition of necropolitics as the ‘power and […] capacity to dictate who may live and who must die’; Mbembe also draws attention to the less overt tendencies that concern ‘the generalized instrumentalization of human existence’ and ‘the material destruction’ of human and other-than-human populations, and the environment at large . Paradoxically, green is both the most anthropocentric of all colours and, at the same time, the one that figures human’s otherness. As such, it plays a central role in human evolution and self-understanding – as colour, percept, medium, material biological agency, semantic construct, and ideology. In its inherent ambiguity, between alleged naturalness and artificiality, employed to reconcile humans with otherness as such, greenness urgently needs to be disentangled from terms—both putatively non-technological—such as ‘life’ and ‘nature’.

The printed book and the e-book are available via:
https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781786606853/The-Aesthetics-of-Necropolitics

Performance-Kunst heute inszeniert im Zeitalter von biotechnischer Manipulation und Klimawandel nicht nur den menschlichen Körper, sondern erweitert das Spektrum unserer Handlungen um die Aktionspotentiale von Materie, Molekülen, Bakterien, Zellen des Tierischen und des Pflanzlichen. Mikro-Performance zeigt Makro-Effekte auf und fordert ökologisches Bewusstsein jenseits des verheerend grassierenden Anthropozentrismus – dem übertrieben Drang des Menschen, sich selbst stets als den Mittelpunkt der weltlichen Realität zu sehen. Transformationen in vivo und in vitro auf der mikroskopischen Kleinstebene lassen neue Hybride entstehen, bei denen der mensch- liche Körper nur einer von vielen ist. Bei {un][split} ist der Mensch nicht das Maß aller Dinge. Es zeigt künstlerische Positionen des Digitalen und des Analogen, vom Virtuellen zum Materiellen, als Prozess des fortwährenden Spaltens und Zusammenfügens meist übersehener Akteure: tanzende Mehlwürmer gegen die Plastik-Pest, Eukalyptus-Moleküle auf globalem Eroberungszug, Biobricks als lebende Währung und Spekulationsobjekt, Gensequenzen als nationale Identität, kollektive Intelligenz von Ameisen, Photonen, Blasen und exoplanetarische Phänomene, Organismen als Schlachtfeld digitaler Steuerung, und soziale Verantwortung inszeniert als sensibles Zusammen- spiel von unmerklicher Muskelspannung, maschineller Abstraktion und kollektivem Austarieren von pro und contra.

Exhibition Catalogue from the Museum of Natural History Vienna (14.5.-26.6.2011). Curator: Jens Hauser;  Producer and scientific concept: Dr. Markus Schmidt.
Exhibition Website: https://www.biofaction.com/portfolio/synth-ethic-art-exhibition/