V2_ Knowledgebase

In the summer of 1996, Æ was initiated as an artistic research unit based on a philosophical exchange between artists Gisèle Trudel and Stéphane Claude, with the regular participation of other collaborators. Through a more anonymous framework, Æ cristallizes their interest for an ecological awareness in the use of technology, as echoed in the arts, science and shamanic traditions. Æ prepares audiovisual essays, electronic performances, databases, in-situ installations, publications, psycho-geographic walks, audio recordings to be listened in the dark... Æ is striving to reintroduce a certain figuration of the mineral/vegetal/animal world into the electronic medium, as a concrete and enlarged view of the human condition, with the objective of breaking down a generally anthropocentric societal view.

Bacterial Radio, first part of ongoing project envisioning many different kinds of electrical circuits created with bacteria. Circuits are formed from bacteria modified with genes that impart electrical qualities to cells. Bacteria cloned with variants of gene from marine sponges (Tethya aurantia) to chelate electronic circuits on growth media. Variants of Tethya gene optimized to chelate metallic conductors and semiconductors. Genetically modified bacteria and small amounts of growth media containing metal salts embedded in non-conductive materials and induced to plate electrical circuits. Bacterial Radio signifies artistic use of these materials to render music, voice and intellectual content off the air. Bacterial Radio represents safe and pollution-free alternatives to environmentally threatening practices.

Biomodd is an art project that integrates cross-cultural dialogue, ecology and technology while encouraging innovative collaboration. I and artist, scientist, and TED Fellow Angelo Vermeulen led a Biomodd workshop as part of the KIBLIX Festival and theInternational Computer Arts Festival in Maribor, Slovenia, from November 18th to the 28th, 2010. The workshop resulted in an installation piece which was exhibited at KIBLA until mid-December. Over the course of ten days, we disassembled old computers, tested computer components, installed Ubuntu (or in the case of some really old motherboards, Xubuntu) on them, designed and built different structures that incorporated plants and computers together, troubleshot algae, and met up and had long discussions with other new media artists participating in the festival.

Christien Meindertsma explores the life of products and raw materials. For her first book, Checked Baggage (2004), Christien purchased a container filled with a week's worth of objects confiscated at security checkpoints in Schiphol Airport after 9/11. She meticulously categorized all 3267 items and photographed them on a white seamless background. Christien’s second book, PIG 05049 (2007), is an extensive collection of photographic images that documents an astounding array of products that different parts of an anonymous pig called 05049 could support. With this book, Christien reveals lines that link raw materials with producers, products and consumers that have become so invisible in an increasingly globalized world.

Earth: Art of a changing world is the second annual contemporary art season at 6 Burlington Gardens. The exhibition presents new and recent work from more than 30 leading international contemporary artists, including commissions and new works from the best emerging talent. Supporter's statement: "This second year of GSK Contemporary is an important collaboration between GlaxoSmithKline and the Royal Academy that builds on our long-standing support for the arts in the UK. Creativity and innovation are critical to our business of improving health and well-being, so we want this year's topic 'Earth' to encourage debate, discussion and creative thinking and the role art can play on the relevance that climate change has on our daily lives."

Jae Rhim Lee is a visual artist, designer, and researcher whose work proposes unorthodox relationships between the mind/body/self and the built and natural environment. Jae Rhim’s work follows a research methodology which includes self-examination, transdisciplinary immersion and dialogue, and diy design, ultimately taking the form of living units, furniture, wearables, recycling systems, and personal and social interventions.

Agnes Meyer-Brandis’s poetic-scientific investigations weave fact, imagination, storytelling and myth, past, present and future. Here she develops an ongoing narrative based on The Man in the Moone, by bishop Francis Godwin, in which the protagonist flies to the Moon in a chariot towed by ‘moon geese’. Meyer-Brandis has actualised this concept by raising eleven moon geese, giving them astronauts’ names, imprinting them on herself as goose-mother, training them to fly and taking them on expeditions and housing them in a remote Moon analogue habitat. An analogue is a rehearsal for living in space. At various remote facilities around the world astronauts are practising for the phsychological challenges humans can face living away from earth. Meyer-Brandis` remote analogue habitat simulates the conditions of the Moon and will be accessed and operated from Meyer-Brandis’s control room installation within the gallery, where instructional videos, photographs and vitrines of the geese’s egg shells and footprints will be displayed. The viewer can see and interact with the geese here in the control room in real time while the artist encourages you to explore the margins of reality, in that liminal space where scientific data becomes elegiac data. Meyer-Brandis develops the contested history of Godwin’s original fiction – posthumously and pseudonymously published in 1603 as if the genuine account of the travels of Domingo Gonsales. She weaves a narrative that explores the observer’s understanding of the fictitious and the factual, with a nod to notions of the believably absurd.

Perdita Phillips is an Australian artist with a wide-ranging and experimental conceptual practice. She works in mixed media installation, environmental projects, sound, sculpture, photography and drawing. Whilst materially diverse, underlying themes of ecological processes and a commitment to a resensitisation to the physical environment, are apparent.

The beauty and wonder of nature have provided inspiration for artists and architects for centuries. Since the 1960s, the increasingly evident degradation of the natural world and the effects of climate change have brought a new urgency to their responses. Radical Nature is the first exhibition to bring together key figures across different generations who have created utopian works and inspiring solutions for our ever-changing planet. Radical Nature draws on ideas that have emerged out of Land Art, environmental activism, experimental architecture and utopianism. The exhibition is designed as one fantastical landscape, with each piece introducing into the gallery space a dramatic portion of nature. Work by pioneering figures such as the architectural collective Ant Farm and visionary architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, artists Joseph Beuys, Agnes Denes, Hans Haacke and Robert Smithson are shown alongside pieces by a younger generation of practitioners.

The RSA Arts and Ecology Centre is an organisation whose role is to catalyse, publicise, challenge and support artists who are responding to the unprecedented environmental challenges of our era. Using their inspirations, RSA Arts and Ecology aims to create a positive discussion about the causes and the human impact of climate change through commissioning, debate, interdisciplinary discourse and a high-profile website. The RSA Arts and Ecology Centre was set up by the RSA in 2005.The centre's head, Michaela Crimmin, says "Artists have always had a powerful relationship with the natural environment. Equally artists continually question and re-examine society's notions of progress. We need their unique perspective on the enormous challenges ahead - on the relationship between environmental issues, and not least climate change, and people."

SymbioticA is the first research laboratory of its kind, enabling artists and researchers to engage in wet biology practices in a biological science department. It also hosts residents, workshops, exhibitions and symposiums. With an emphasis on experiential practice, SymbioticA encourages better understanding and articulation of cultural ideas around scientific knowledge and informed critique of the ethical and cultural issues of life manipulation. The Centre offers a new means of artistic inquiry where artists actively use the tools and technologies of science, not just to comment about them but also to explore their possibilities.

The Tissue Culture & Art Project (TC&A;) was set to explore the use of tissue technologies as a medium for artistic expression. We are investigating our relationships with the different gradients of life through the construction/growth of a new class of object/being - that of the Semi-Living. These are parts of complex organisms which are sustained alive outside of the body and coerced to grow in predetermined shapes. These evocative objects are a tangible example that brings into question deep rooted perceptions of life and identity, concept of self, and the position of the human in regard to other living beings and the environment. We are interested in the new discourses and new ethics/epistemologies that surround issues of partial life and the contestable future scenarios they are offering us.

The "Tropospheric Laboratory" allows insights into cloud cores and other matter of the apogee. The installation narrates the synthesis of clouds and shows varying conditions and combinations of art and science in the absence of weight. The "laboratory" is the gravimetric document of "Cloud Core Scanner" - an experiment and artistic project by Agnes Meyer-Brandis, carried out on board a German Aerospace Center research plane. It reflects an iridescent world, between controlled and unleashed states: artistic research on the quest for a degree of reality within constructions.