Maja Smrekar awarded Golden Nica for 'K-9 Typologies'

Art Laboratory Berlin congratulates Maja Smrekar and her many collaborators (especially Byron and Ada)  for winning this year's Golden Nica for Hybrid Arts

Installation view K-9 Typologies from On Animals. Cognitions, Senses, Play in 2016

Parts of her K-9 Typologies series were included in last year's exhibition at Art Laboratory Berlin On Animals. Cognition, Senses, Play as part of our ongoing Nonhuman Subjectivities programme.

cellF

Additionally we would like to congratulate the other winners that include Honorable Mentions to Guy Ben-Ary and his team for cellF, which Art Laboratory Berlin recently worked on presenting at HKW in cooperation with CTM and HKW.

Alexandra Toland, Mapping the Grind Mill from [macro]biologies I. the biosphere in 2014

And special congratulations to Alexandra Toland, with whom we have worked on several project over the past few years, for an Honorable Mention for her work Dust Blooms: a research narrative in artistic ecology

Art Laboratory Berlin Awarded Prize

We are very pleased to announce that Art Laboratory Berlin has for the second time been awarded the "Prize for Berlin Project Spaces and Initiatives". We thank this year’s jury and the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe for this great honour.

We consider the award as a validation of our hard work over the last years with exhibitions, seminars, workshops and conferences on current topics in art & science. We are especially thankful to the artists we have worked with, as well as our colleagues and supporters, with whom we were and will be able to realise our projects.

More information: https://www.berlin.de/sen/kultur/en/funding/funding-programmes/visual-arts/artikel.230096.en.php

Upcoming Programme 2017: Nonhuman Agents in Arts & Culture

Nonhuman Agents takes into account recent philosophical approaches which question anthropocentrism. These discourses emphasize the non-human perspectives through object-oriented ontology (Harman and Meillasoux); discuss nonhuman / human encounters (Haraway); postulate a 'posthumanism' (Braidotti); and examine various posthuman performative strategies such as intra-acting (Barad). A new 'de-centring' lets us draw our attention to a reality that can no longer be described in purely anthropocentric parameters.



Workshops & Lectures
Through workshops and lectures, four international artists, living in Berlin, invite the public to think about the non-human by means of selected artistic, performative and scientific methods. Mushrooms, mosses, lichens and bacterial processes, as well as Berlin wetlands, play a central role.

Alanna Lynch | Gut feelings
18 June, 2017

Margherita Pevere | Anatomy of an inter-connected system
15 July, 2017

Theresa Schubert | The forestal psyche
26 & 27 August, 2017

Sarah Hermanutz | ill-at-ease seep
28 October 2017


2-day-Workshop
Heather Barnett + plan b (Sophia New & Daniel Belasco Rogers) | Swarm | Cell | City
23 & 24 September, 2017

This 2-day workhop is a participatory experiment on art, performance and biology that precedes the exhibition Nonhuman Networks. The project invites the participants to view the city of Berlin by the nonhuman perspectives of the intelligent single-cell organism Physarum polycephalum and GPS tracking.

Exhibition
Nonhuman Networks
Heather Barnett| Saša Spačal with Mirjan Švagelj & Anil Podgornik
Opening: 29 September, 2017 | Exhibition runs: 30 September - 26 November, 2017


Saša Spačal, Mirjan Švagelj und Anil Podgornik, Myconnect, Installation, 2014
The exhibition presents an aesthetics of new forms of communication between human and non-human actors. How does the world's largest single celled creature function as a computer? Can we tap into the so-called 'Internet of trees'? Performative works act as enablers for the audience to engage in non-linguistic forms of awareness and contact with several deceptively simple life forms.


Interdisciplinary Conference
Nonhuman Agents in Art, Culture and Theory
24-26 November, 2017

Finally, an interdisciplinary conference will bring together international artists, scholars, and natural scientists from different disciplines to discuss artistic, philosophical, ethical and scientific approaches to nonhuman agents. The previous positions from the Nonhuman Subjectivities series will also be taken into account.

With the generous support of:

and the Slovenian Cultural Center in Berlin

Artist Talk with Guy Ben-Ary
May 5, 2017, 8PM
Entry 5€/3€

Guy Ben-Ary is an artist and a researcher at Symbiotica (University of Western Australia, Perth) an artistic laboratory dedicated to the research, learning and hands-on engagement with the life sciences. Recognised internationally as a major artist and innovator working across science and media arts, Guy specialises in biotechnological artwork, which aims to enrich our understanding of what it means to be alive. Guy's work focuses on tissue engineering, microscopy and biological imaging. His research explores a number of fundamental themes that underpin the intersection of art and science; namely life and death, cybernetics, and artificial life. Much of Ben-Ary's work is inspired by science and nature. His artworks utilise motion and growth and biological data to investigate technological aspects of today's culture and the re-use of biological materials and technologies.

In his talk Guy Ben-Ary will present some of the methodologies and theories that underpin his artistic practice by using as examples, four of his major projects completed over the last decade: MEART, The Silent Barrage, In-Potentia, and CellF (see below). He will discuss issues related to terminology, ethics and robotic embodiment as an artistic strategy and his artistic attempt to match bio-engineered neural networks to artistic, robotic bodies.




CellF, a neural synthesizer, in performance with Schneider TM (12 May) and Stine Janvin (13 May) as part of Technosphärenklänge #3 at HKW
12-13 May, 2017

The third edition of the Technosphärenklänge series, produced by the HKW in collaboration with CTM Festival, will present musical projects operating at the border of art and science. Three projects – the world’s first neural synthesizer that performs with human musicians; water droplets levitated and shaped by sound waves; and the interconnection of spatial sound and high-energy lasers – make current notions of materiality tangible and fundamentally re-think the relationship between nature, technology and human consciousness. All three projects require intensive research and constant collaboration between the artists, natural scientists and technologists. The following day, lectures and talks hosted together with Art Laboratory Berlin will explain the research and science behind the performances, and discuss the works’ social implications.
More information

Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10, 10557 Berlin
12.5.2017 - CONCERTS
19:00 CELLF in performance with Schneider TM
20:00 FORCE FIELD by Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand
21:00 LUMIÈRE III by Robert Henke
Tickets 22/18€ reduced

13.5.2017 – TALKS & CONCERTS
15:00–18:00 LECTURES & DISCUSSION with Guy Ben-Ary. Nathan Thompson, Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand, Robert Henke. Moderated by Christian de Lutz (Art Laboratory Berlin)
18:00 CELLF in performance with Stíne Janvin
Free entrance

A project of the HKW and CTM Festival in cooperation with Art Laboratory Berlin