The methodology adopted leaves space for risk-taking, error-making and deeper connections with science institutions while opening up the development process to other disciplines and, as the festival demonstrated, to the public
Category Archive: art in Berlin
Can the values that blockchain makes possible -such as transparency, sharing of resources and equal access to information- be applied to how the art world thinks and functions?
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
advertising
I talked to the founder of a school where students learn new skills, manipulate new tools but also get to examine the political and human dimensions of technology
A few years ago, Matsuzaka started using body waste to make personal soils in which she would grow vegetables, fruits trees and even barley for beer brewing…
Goldin+Senneby’s artworks uncover something of the shrouded relationships between art and money, while also spinning further fictions from them
social
As its name suggest, the show aimed to demonstrate that design can play an important role when it comes to engaging with today’s social, social and political concerns. Through various visual and experiential strategies, designers can make more visible and even tangible problems that are under-discussed or too abstract to be easily understood
“Every day that I was there I didn’t see anything else but the wall, and I can tell you I couldn’t stand it longer than three weeks. I was so depressed that I needed to go away,” said Koudelka about Wall, a series that documents the wall erected by the state of Israel in the West Bank as well as around Israeli settlements
The filtering capacity of flowers is a neglected area of research. However, the 3D structures of flowers make them valuable allies when it comes to regulating air quality by removing pollutants from the atmosphere. Dust Blooms juxtaposes the beauty and function of urban flora using a synthesis of artistic and scientific methods to create awareness about the every-day importance of ecosystem services in cities
The exhibition explores the enduring influence of alchemy over art. The alliance between the two fields is an intimate one: both art and alchemy are about creation, both rely on experimentation, knowledge-seeking and passion.
Taking as their central subject the self-driving car, the works in the exhibition test the limits of human knowing and machine perception, strategize modes of resistance to algorithmic regimes, and devise new myths and poetic possibilities for an age of computation
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
Prepare for a future in which the only way of making a living is to ‘lend your lung’ to filter heavily polluted air. Clean Air International Inc. is looking for suppliers for its first Organic Clean Air (TM) retail store
Greiner’s works involve buying 40 litres of maggots and bringing them to the exhibition space until they turn into flies, composing music based on the luminous skin of a squid, convincing the Director of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin to consider a fly as a living artwork, photographing portraits of algae, carefully orchestrating explosions around Berlin
The two installations are composed of identical elements, connected in a network and exchanging information through electric signals. The collective behavior of the actuators and sensors create unpredictable patterns, as though a system of living organisms with their own variable program. A moving scene emerges, where the borders between a ‘natural’ order of things and the mechanical constructions of humans are tested
A new variety of capitalism is currently taking form on the African continent. States are being remade under the pressures of rapid demographic growth, conflicts over boundaries, security demands, and the offerings of multi-lateral donors and data-processing corporations. Much of this turns to enhanced forms of state surveillance that is common to societies across the globe, but the economic and institutional forms on the African continent are unusual
Nik Nowak‘s sound objects combine the aesthetic qualities of sculpture with utility or functional objects, and explore urban or military phenomena at play in everyday life
When he is not painting murals in Latin America, creating coloring books for children living in refugee camps or stealing Berlin’s iconic and kitschy buddy bears, Avignon turns himself into “neoangin”, a performer of electronic music that doesn’t seem to take himself too seriously either.
The installation’s mechanical workings and network of strings allow us to explore the poetic potential of technology via its materiality, so that Interface I sits on the boundary between an imaginary field and an epistemological condition
The objects, books, artifacts, gadgets and artworks offer a contemplation on autonomy as a disappearing modus operandi of political action, while workshops, discussions and demos focus on the devices we use every day: How do they work? What individual data traces do they capture? Where do these go, and what kind of control can one regain?
Martin Roemers’ photographs take us to abandoned army bases and bunker complexes, military training areas, technical installations, monitoring facilities and military cemeteries
Like all Pictoplasma guests, Julian Glander creates little fellows. His have been dipped in cotton candy and other similarly sugary substances. They live a merry life, star in comic strips, music videos, short films, adverts and illustrations but they particularly shine when they get to frolic in GIFs!
Bits and Pieces transforms the gallery into a space of poetic performance through the choreographic movements of ordinary objects. The organic rhythms of the sculpture allow for a new language to emerge that influences how we come to understand the functions of everyday, disregarded objects
In 2011, Mr Bingo started mailing insulting postcards to total strangers. All you had to do was ask and pay 50 pounds for the service. Probably because his hand-drawn messages had more foolishness than bile, people queued to be mocked and abused. If you’ve missed the Hate Mail brouhaha, you might have encountered his work in austere newspapers, dandy magazines, or on cans of beer, restaurant walls and skateboards
The four sculptures are derived from 3D models of popular cartoon characters that the artist found online and remixed in order to obtain a new version of these pop icons: Every Mickey, Merge Simpson, Gogogogogoku, and Spongebool are new forms of the popular cartoon characters
Next week, NOME, one of those too rare galleries exploring art, politics, and technology, is going to open Jacob Appelbaum’s first solo show in Germany. There will be stuffed pandas, portraits of political dissidents and far too many secrets
Fire and Forget is military jargon for a type of missile guidance that can hit its target without the launcher being in line-of-sight. The expression is symptomatic of a new type of warfare in which the people firing, killing and destroying are emancipated from the fear for one’s own life and the direct physical -or sometimes even visual- contact with the victim(s) of their shooting
James Bridle’s exhibition presents a series of works that use computer code, investigative journalism, and visualization to explore hidden spaces and classified information
With his public intervention Overexposed, artist Paolo Cirio disseminates unauthorized pictures of high-ranking U.S. intelligence officials throughout major cities. Cirio obtained snapshots of NSA, CIA, and FBI officers through social media hacks. Then, using his HD Stencils graffiti technique, he spray-paints high-resolution reproductions of the misappropriated photos onto public walls
The talks from the panel Tracking Drones, Reporting Lives zoomed out from the personal perspective and brought together a data journalist, a documentary director and an artist whose work examines the drone issue
Two of the speakers of the DNL Drone event have or used to have a direct, daily experience of drones.
Asma al-Ghul is a journalist and author from Gaza who writes about human rights, social issues and is never afraid to openly criticize Palestinian ruling authorities. She spoke about everyday life under drone surveillance and sometimes attacks.
The other speaker was Brandon Bryant, a former U.S. Air Force pilot who joined the Predator drone Program in 2006 and left in 2011 when he started questioning the ethics of the program and his own role as a soldier
The practice of targeted killing by drones raises many questions: “How many civilians have been killed as collateral damage during these strikes?” “And even if we’re talking about militants, how can the killings be justified when there has been judicial supervision? “If these drones can reach their targets anywhere, then how is the battlefield defined?” “Right now, only 3 countries use drones for targeted killings: the U.S., Israel and the UK. Where will this stop?” “And if these targeted killings are illegal, why does Europe keep silent?”
Christoph Wachter & Mathias Jud have installed WLAN / WiFi mesh network with can antennas on the roofs of the Academy of Arts and the Swiss Embassy, both located in the heart of “NSA’s Secret Spy Hub in Berlin.” The particularity of the network is that it is open and at the disposal of passersby to communicate anonymously and even send messages to operatives of the NSA and GCHQ intelligence who might lurk inside the nearby British Embassy and Embassy of the United States
The lack of Corporate and Governmental transparency has been a topic of much controversy in recent years, yet our only tool for encouraging greater openness is the slow, tedious process of policy reform.
Presented in the form of a Soviet F1 Hand Grenade, the Transparency Grenade is an iconic cure for these frustrations, making the process of leaking information from closed meetings as easy as pulling a pin
A couple of years ago, Nils Völker built a robot out of Lego parts that replicates the way we look. The resulting large scale images demonstrate how differently the same objects have been perceived. The robot was the one work that attracted me to Nils Völker’s portfolio but it’s his creative path that started with communication design and moved to the use of physical computing in contexts as different as advertising and art exhibitions that kept my attention
Back to Berlin where a few weeks ago i was visiting the DMY design festival. As i explained the other day, the most exciting part of the exhibition was the MakerLab where visitors could discover, discuss and handle new technologies, materials, tools, open-source ideas and concepts. In the middle of this happy creative feast, a group of young smiling girls were introducing visitors to the joys of mushroom cultivation. All ‘in the comfort of their own home’
Bartaku aka Bart Vandeput was at Berlin’s design festival to lead Temporary photoElectric Digestopians (Fusing Cooking and Solar Tech with Design), a lab where participants were invited to discover the relation between light, food, body and electric energy and then work with edible materials to create ‘e-tapas’ that were to be ta(e)sted on the heliotropic tongue
Sausage machine, chair-manufacturing robot, technology-free photobooth and scanner, tableware cast from bull testicles and so many lamps
None of the panelists could (or rather would) answer Marcus Fair’s request to give a clear-cut definition of open design. The practice, said Evers, is not fixed, it is in constant flux. Open design is more about a mentality than a strict definition. The book is indeed about what open design can be and what you can do with it, it is only the starting point of a discussion
An exhibition at the German Historical Museum in Berlin marks the 50th anniversary of start of the construction of the Wall. Thomas Hoepker’s work is particularly striking. Hoepker was the first West German photographer to receive an official authorization to live and report from East Berlin when the city was still divided by a wall. He was followed by the constant gaze of East Germany’s secret police but his worked was uncensored