Sarah Hermanutz | ill-at-ease seep

In her lecture the artist Sarah Hermanutz discussed the relationship between humans and wetlands, which is the focus in her long-term artistic research. Wetlands are one of the most biologically diverse and important ecosystems for life on earth, but within the past century mankind has destroyed over 50% of them. The artist's work and research explore our historical and contemporary relationship with these environments, including the tropes and prejudices that have marginalised them and justified their continued draining and destruction. Engagement with the uncomfortable sensory and aesthetic experience of wetlands is proposed as essential to reintegrating humans within these ecological communities.

Photo: Tim Deussen/ Studio Deussen

Photo: Tim Deussen/ Studio Deussen

Photo: Tim Deussen/ Studio Deussen

Photo: Tim Deussen/ Studio Deussen

Photo: Tim Deussen/ Studio Deussen

Photo: Tim Deussen/ Studio Deussen

The western world associates wetlands with disease and decay, both physical and moral. Examples from art, literature, and popular culture show fear and horror of these liminal zones, and link them with corporeal "otherness" that is also mapped onto queerness, disability, alien/foreignness, and the 'monstrous-feminine'. These unruly bodies are suppressed and repressed both physically and culturally, for the sake of troubling and purist notions of cleanliness, health, stability, and optimised economically productive systems. Large-scale drainage projects have been considered great feats of human engineering, converting marginal 'wastelands' into clearly defined zones of water and land, useful for anthropocentric agricultural and urban utilization.

Photo: Tim Deussen/ Studio Deussen

Photo: Tim Deussen/ Studio Deussen

The audience was asked to reconsider the urban ecology of Berlin, as a city built on top of river floodplains and former wetlands. The sights, sounds, textures, tastes and smells of this ecology have been formally exiled to the margins of Berlin, but they continue to seep through. This lecture is an invitation to materially and sensorially engage with wetlands, and their potential to unsettle our defensive boundaries between water/land, self/other, living/nonliving, and human/nonhuman.

Photo courtesy Sarah Hermanutz

Photo courtesy Sarah Hermanutz

Photo courtesy Sarah Hermanutz

Photo courtesy Sarah Hermanutz

Sarah Hermanutz is a visual artist working at the intersections of performance, technology, and ecology. Her sculptures, installations, and performance experiments are preoccupied with wetlands, amphibious creatures, and the mysteries of social cognition. She frequently collaborates with dancers, musicians, and audiences to explore the complex and often unspoken social assumptions between the minds and bodies of audiences, performers, and 'props' (both human and nonhuman). Her artistic research takes place in Berlin at Lacuna Lab, an art and technology collective she co-founded in 2015, and in the media arts department of Bauhaus University Weimar. Her performances and projects have been presented across Europe, the USA, and Canada.
http://sarahhermanutz.com/

'Nonhuman Networks' 30 September - 26 November, 2017

Saša Spačal, Mirjan Švagelj & Anil Podgornik | Heather Barnett

Exhibition runs: 30 September - 26 November, 2017
Fri -Sun 2-6PM and by appointment
Open 27 October until 9PM
Interdisciplinary Conference. Nonhuman Agents in Art, Culture and Theory: 24-26 November, 2017
Nonhuman Networks presents an aesthetics of new forms of communication between human and nonhuman 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.

Saša Spačal, Mirjan Švagelj and Anil Podgornik combine art, biology and cybernetics to create a platform for inter species communication. In Myconnect the nervous system of a person and fungal mycelium are plugged into a biofeedback loop. By entering the capsule a person is equipped with a heartbeat sensor, headphones and vibrational motors that are placed on various parts of the body. The heartbeat of a person sets the system in motion. The signal travels through the mycelium where it is modulated in real-time. The modulated signal is transferred back to the human body via sound, light and tactile sensory impulses. The overwhelming stimuli that affect the nervous system cause an alteration of the heartbeat. A new loop begins and the circle is closed. A symbiosis of signals begins.

Myconnect is a symbiotic interspecies connector that questions the anthropocentric nature/human division. With its circuit of signals and impulses, generated and translated by biological and technological organisms, Myconnect performs an immersive experience of symbiotic interdependence. Through this experience the technological nature/human distinction can be seen as an arbitrary definition that serves particular biopolitical interests in human society.
The collective has chosen to work with fungi, one of the world's dominant life forms. Mycelium, the hidden, subterranean portion of mushrooms, can grow to huge proportions; one organism in North America may be the world's largest living being. Recent studies show a strong interconnectedness between fungi and forest trees, the so-called 'Internet of trees' which forms vast symbiotic networks. Myconnect is an artistic experiment on social, aesthetic and biological levels, exploring new possible forms of interspecies communication beyond human language.

Myconnect Interspecies Connector, Saša Spačal, Mirjan Švagelj and Anil Podgornik, 2013, Interactive installation with mycelium

Heather Barnett is an artist, researcher and educator working with natural phenomena and biological design, often in collaboration with scientists, artists, participants and organisms. Utilising living materials and imaging technologies, her practice explores how we observe, represent and understand the world around us. Projects include microbial portraiture, systems modelling, and an ongoing 'collaboration' with an intelligent slime mould, Physarum polycephalum, one of the world's largest single-celled organisms.

What makes Physarum polycephalum particularly interesting, is its skilful ability to learn and solve problems from its interactions with the environment. Scientists in Japan and the UK have been studying Physarum polycephalum's ability for spatial computation (whilst foraging for food in the most efficient way). These studies mark an interesting turn in cybernetics, which is already strong influenced by biology Here an organism is studied as both a technological artefact and agent.

Based on years of empirical research and art-science collaboration, Barnett engages the slime mould in a process of negotiated co-creation, resulting in animated films, prints and living sculptures. She has also developed a series of interactive public workshops investigating Physarum polycephalum as material, model and metaphor through collective experimentation - Swarm | Cell | City took place 23/24 September as part of the Nonhuman Agents series, devised in collaboration with the Berlin based collective plan b. This exhibition builds upon her unique combination of interdisciplinary research and participatory practice.

Video: Swarm | Cell | City, Heather Barnett and plan b (Sophia New & Daniel Belasco Rogers), 2017, documentation of workshop, Videography: Tim Deussen, Right on plinth: BioCartographies (Wedding, Berlin) Heather Barnett, 2017, Petri Dish, acrylic model, agar, Physarum polycephalum

Detail: BioCartographies (Wedding, Berlin) Heather Barnett, 2017, Petri Dish, acrylic model, agar, Physarum polycephalum

Left: Resilient Topographies #1: the peninsula of Paljassaare , Heather Barnett, 2017, film. Right: Swarm | Cell | City, Heather Barnett and plan b (Sophia New & Daniel Belasco Rogers), 2017, documentation of workshop, Videography: Tim Deussen

Motion Fields, Heather Barnett, 2017, 2 screen video