My guests at Resonance today are creative technologists Asa Calow and Rachael Turner, Hello Rachael and Asa!
Asa and Rachael are the founders of the MadLab. Madlab is the short name for Manchester Digital Laboratory, a remarkably active community space for science, technology and art located in Manchester Northern Quarters. Luckily for me, Rachael and Asa are currently in London, where they are heading a series of workshops and events as part of their residency at The Arts Catalyst
Today in the radio show Neal White from The Office of Experiments will be talking declassified materials, underground bunker housing alternative Cabinet War rooms, cold war archive footage, Atomic Weapons Establishment, sites used by the UK Nuclear peace protestors, etc. I’d tune in if i were you
A systematic theory of DIY electronic culture, drawn from a century of artists who have independently built creative technologies
Over the past few years, Vladan Joler has been collaborating with data analysts, media theorists and cyber forensic experts to bring to light some of the hidden layers of digital infrastructures
The book looks at art practices that do not conform to a Western concept of art and where the boundaries between art, design, research and activism dissolve
What make her works so compelling is that they go beyond confronting the audience with uncomfortable ethical questions about the history of museum collections. They also present new counter narratives and new strategies to examine issues of decolonisation
This guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture
What worlds are revealed when we listen to alpacas, make photographs with yeast or use biosignals to generate autonomous virtual organisms?
Artist and researcher Paul O’Neill takes Dubliners and curious tourists on guided tours of the HQs, warehouses, data centers and other infrastructures the internet relies on
I never thought i’d ever read a dictionary from A to Z but this one is witty, original and wonderfully opinionated. Plus it’s the abridged version
To celebrate her 20 years as curator in the fields of art and video games, Isabelle Arvers is about to embark on a world tour to explore the issue of diversity, with an emphasis on female, queer and decolonial practices
The artists invited by curator Katerina Gregos investigate change. In particular, how change, because of its relentless speed and much proclaimed inevitability, seems to escape robust critical scrutiny
A series of artworks in a disused biology faculty in Riga make the Anthropocene disturbingly palpable
We’ve all been following the debates around the impact that AI is having on art and on the specificity of human creativity. But does art have a voice when it comes to understanding and shaping AI?
Goldin+Senneby’s artworks uncover something of the shrouded relationships between art and money, while also spinning further fictions from them
Animals that fake their appearance to blend in their surrounding and attract their prey, people who fake a […]
For their “Forensic Fantasies” trilogy, KairUs (Linda Kronman and Andreas Zingerle) used data recovered from hard-drives dumped in Agbogbloshie, Ghana to develop works that investigate the issue of data breaches of private information and ask: What happens to our data when we send a computer, an hard disk or any kind of other storage device to the garbage?
I interviewed Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke about The 3D Additivist Manifesto and The 3D Additivist Cookbook for this year’s edition of the Digital Design Weekend 2017 in London
Do artists using biotechnological materials and scientific processes have the same obligations, rights and responsibilities as scientists? Or should they enjoy more liberties and particular prerogatives?
Joana is an artist and a researcher whose work critically explores the way post-capitalist narratives affect the alphabetization of machines, humans and ecosystems. Her main research topics include Internet materiality, surveillance, online tracking, critical interfaces and language
Kirsten Stolle examines the global influence of chemical companies on our food supply and explores the connection between corporate interests and public health. Using post-WWII America as her stage, Stolle’s collages, drawings and site-responsive installations investigate corporate propaganda, environmental politics and biotechnology
Good Luck, Archaeologists! reflects on the 10 years of OTTO-Prod‘s programme of shows, concerts, art residencies and performance in Maribor. You might have never been to Maribor, it’s Slovenia’s second-largest city, it’s charming and it’s actually not that large. And maybe you haven’t heard much about OTTO-Prod but i love what these young artists from Marseille have been doing, quietly and with far more talent than money, in Maribor and elsewhere for a decade
There is a surprising similarity in the way neural networks and analogue modular synthesizers function, in that for both, voltages are passed through components to produce data or sound. The neural interface we developed juxtaposes these two networks and in a sense creates a continuum that creates one unified network. With CellF, the musician and musical instrument become one entity to create a cybernetic musician, a rock star in a petri dish.
The mobile ecosystem has a robotic core wrapped in twelve garden modules. Whenever the lowermost plants require more sunlight, they ‘vote’ to have the sphere gently roll over. If it becomes too hot for the majority of them, they will steer the structure towards the shade
This year’s edition of the GAMERZ festival not only demonstrated that there is nothing trivial about play but it also explored how our relationship to play has changed with the advances of technology. And, more interestingly, it invited us to join artists whose work investigates how the digital age is changing man, whether we’re talking about Huizinga’s homo ludens, the working man (Homo Faber) or more generally the modern man (Homo sapiens.)
The Microbiome Security Agency investigates the future of microbiome privacy issues and prepares citizens for a future where our personal information is at risk through our biological datasets
The conference (ridiculously interesting and accompanied by an exhibition i wish i could see all over again but more about all that next week) looked at how practitioners redefine the documentary genre in the digital age. In his presentation, artist James George presented artistic projects that demonstrate how fast computational photography is evolving and how innovations are changing our relation to the image
Revolutionary advances in genetics and molecular biology have given us new insights into how carbon based life on our planet originates and functions. In more recent years the development of synthetic biology has dramatically expanded our ability to design and modify life forms. At the same time, disruptive developments in computing technologies have led to the possibility of generating digitally-based artificial life. And outside traditional institutions, emerging DIY, bio-hacking and citizen science movements have begun to appropriate laboratory technologies, challenging ideas about the governance of the life sciences
Behind its menacing aspect, SPPS considers selectively permeable structures under lenses that range from the molecular level to the macro scale.It explores the (xenophobic) history of immigration in Australia and more generally current infrastructures that define socio-political boundaries. It also looks at the history of biowarfare, from Antique Chinese gunpowder rockets carrying poisonous material to virus injected into chicken eggs
A discussion with Rasa Smite about “Biotricity No.5”, a project that experiments with “green energy” technologies and sonifies the process of generating electricity from bacteria living in water
An interview with Haseeb Ahmed, one of the winners bio-art contest DA4GA, about his project to erect a hybrid building made of the bones of fish altered after exposition to toxins. Can mutation be generative of new forms instead of considered to be simply dangerous?
Often both playful and critical, Benjamin Gaulon’s projects involve printing messages on walls using a PaintBall Gun, collecting video streams from wireless surveillance cameras, turning your videos into animated GIFs, developing radio controlled cars that physically react to messages sent on Twitter, giving an architectural dimension to the 1970s game PONG, circuit-bending, hacking, deconstructing and re-purposing “obsolete” electronic devices
One of the current interests of the Office involves an ‘overt research’ that attempts to build up an alternative and experimental knowledge source about the UK’s “Dark Places”, the labs and facilities of advanced technological development which are often (purposefully or not) concealed, secret or inaccessible to the public
The culture of green tech is a timely publication. 2009 saw plethora of festivals, exhibitions and conferences dedicated to sustainability, ‘greener planet’ and ecology. I attended so many of them i ended up turning into a cynical eco-phobic. The following year, culture moved to other issues but the relevance of an artistic reflection on green tech is as high as ever. The magzine proposes an intelligent, critical view that goes beyond the monolithic ‘green is beautiful’ moto and looks into the dilemma and contradictions of green tech
The exhibition is divided into 4 sections that sometimes intertwine and overlap. I’ve already explored the chapter about artists in the laboratory. Here’s my notes on the artists who leave the lab to explore nature and on those who are looking for alternative uses of existing technology
As curator Steve Dietz has observed, new media art is like contemporary art–but different. New media art involves interactivity, networks, and computation and is often about process rather than objects. New media artworks, difficult to classify according to the traditional art museum categories determined by medium, geography, and chronology. These works present the curator with novel challenges involving interpretation, exhibition, and dissemination. This book views these challenges as opportunities to rethink curatorial practice
Ever wondered how to turn a simple webcam into a microscope, safely cultivate GFP bacteria, hack DVD burners to make your own nano and bio experiments, or how to use other cheap, easy to come by material in order to build an hydrometer (instrument to measure the relative density of a liquid), an incubator or even a bat detector? Then you should check out the DIY pages on Hackteria’s wiki or enroll in one of their workshops
Rapidly growing mega-cities and shrinking cities call for new ideas and models for dealing with urban nature. Artists and landscape architects present concepts for the alternative use of vacant city lots and old industrial areas, design parasitical gardens in the middle of the city, or utopian visions for a future symbiotic networking of culture and nature
Arctic Perspective uses media art and the research of artists to investigate the complicated, global, cultural, and ecological interrelations in the Arctic, and to develop concepts for constructing tactical communications systems and a mobile, eco-friendly research station, which will support interdisciplinary and intercultural collaborations
Designer Maurizio Montalti is teaming up with the Kluyver Centre for Genomics of Industrial Fermentation in The Netherlands to work on an alternative to fossil fuels. He aims to build a transparent bioreactor in which one fungus breaks down plastic and the other fungus makes bio-ethanol out of it
