ABOUT THE OPENING EVENT
TYPE Exhibition + Forum and Bio·Fiction Festival movie screenings
DATE 21.01 – 01.02.2015
LOCATION ASN, Berlin
Artists
Luis dos Santos, Ethan Shaftel, Clea T. Waite, Lauren Fenton, WROcenter Group, Joanna Hoffmann & Andre Bartetzki
BIO·FICTION Movies: Ursula Damm, Sam Ireland, Shamees Aden & Sam J. Bond, Uwe Sleytr, Marie-Sarah Adenis & Hugo Kreit, Eric Schockmel, Lorenzo Oggiano, Minsu Kim, Louis Rigaud
CAPTURE THE FUTURE(S): OPENING
Capture the Future(s): Opening was organized as an inauguration act of the ASN initiative. The event comprised an exhibition and the ASN Forum. The forum, led by the ASN Chair – prof. dr hab. Joanna Hoffmann, gathered organization’s founding members and special guests. The exhibition was prepared as the presentation of the ASN selection of short films from the second BIO·FICTION Science Art & Film Festival (2014) and the additional, specially chosen artworks. Screening was a part of BIO·FICTION on Tour program. The festival was produced by Biofaction – a research and science communication company based in Vienna, Austria.
CAPTURE THE FUTURE(S): OPENING EXHIBITION
ARTWORK PRESENTED AT THE EXHIBITION
Luis dos Santos (P) | Future Now
photography
The photographic works presented herein try to motivate the viewer to depart from the standard norms in their respective area of action in order to reflect the future back into the present. In order to establish that cognitive association, the selection of photographs shown in this exhibition were captured at different architectural venues of the world as they can be seen today. However, this project forfeited a pure documentary approach in favour of an interpretation of what kind of living spaces could have been achieved, when reality is interpreted in the light of what we would like it to be. The process by which these photographs were created consists in the capture of several brackets using different exposure times and to combine them together during post-production in a single coherent image that represented the author’s vision.
Ethan Shaftel (USA) | Flesh Computer, 2013
film, 13:16
When his cybernetic pet project is put in jeopardy, the handyman of a decaying apartment building is forced to take a stand, blurring the lines between human and machine. Flesh Computer, a short film from writer and director Ethan Shaftel, explores the nature of consciousness by jumping between the perspectives of an eclectic group of characters including a young girl, a vicious bully, and a tiny housefly. Noted philosopher David Chalmers appears in the film and raises some fundamental questions of consciousness in counterpoint to the action.
Also starring Rob Kerkovich (NCIS: New Orleans), Anthony Guerino, and introducing Elle Gabriel.
Clea T. Waite (USA/DE) | The Spider Project, 2000
interspecies multi-channel video installation ©ctw 2000
Inspired by the turn of the millennium, The Spider Project is a research artwork that contemplates the basic cycles of nature: creation and death, time, the elements, and the workings of the universe. Concentrating on spirals and circles as the central motif, the images derive from the micro- and macroscopes which epitomize our time. An inter-species collaboration with three-hundred Nephila senegalensis spiders, The Spider Project is a requiem for the XX Century, from the mastery of the atom to DDT to space travel, a preparation for rebirth into the XXI Century.
Clea T. Waite (USA/DE), Lauren Fenton (USA) | MetaBook: The Book of Luna, 2014
transmedia electronic assemblade ©ctw, 2014 – documentation
MetaBook: The Book of Luna is an expanded cinema installation, an electronic Wunderkammer crossed with an illuminated manuscript that narrates a poetic essay about the Moon’s place in the historical imagination. The nature of love, madness, the unknown and our capacity for the sublime are amongst the passions that have crystallized around our only satellite. The MetaBook is an immersive experience that combines the dynamic possibilities of the digital archive with the intuitiveness of the book and the engagement of cinema inviting the reader to navigate between the lunar craters or just float between them in a constant orbit.
WROcenter Group (PL) | On the Silver Globe for Méliès and Zygmunt Rytka, 2012
installation – object with an interactive projection, photography
On the Silver Globe is an installation referring to the history of cinema and television, inspired by photographs by Zygmunt Rytka documenting the
July 21, 1969 live TV broadcast from the first manned landing on the Moon. Georges Méliès’s visionary work Voyage to the Moon (Le Voyage dan la Lune) was also used in the installation: one of the earliest films of the sci-fi genre and a classic not only in terms of the cinema, but also – or perhaps above all – in the history of human imagination and aspirations. Méliès’s film lies solicitously guarded in archives, but is at the same time widely available on the internet in countless files. One such file, downloaded from the internet, has been used in this installation as a matrix of pixels capable of generating a live 3D picture. The film is a cultural icon downloaded from the internet, but is also modified via the internet by the viewers. This installation uses excerpts from Georges Méliès’s 1902 film Le Voyage dans la Lune and Zygmunt Rytka’s 1969 photographs.
Joanna Hoffmann (USA/DE), Andre Bartetzky (DE) | Proteo, 2015
hologram-like animation
Work prepared for the [micro]biologies II: πρωτεο / proteo exhibition at Art Laboratory Berlin (opening on January 23, 2015), presented i.a. at the exhibition Not invented by nature at BioQuant DKFZ Heidelberg and BIO·FICTION Festival in Vienna. Proteo is an animation in which a cloud of particles creates a mini-universe folded in the form of Calabi-Yau space. It gives birth to a convoluted protein molecule and its dynamic molecular dance of life, in a poetic way brings to mind a question about the relations between the energy, matter and form. The animation creates an effect of a hologram inside a transparent pyramid. It is a kind of virtual incubator, in which the process continues to develop and repeat itself.
PROTEO AT ART LABORATORY BERLIN
JOANNA HOFFMAN’S WEBSITE
ANDRE BARTETZKI’S WEBSITE
BIO·FICTION AT ASN
BIO·FICTION @ Berlin 2015 presented ASN selection of short films from the second 2014 edition of BIO·FICTION Science Art & Film Festival. BIO·FICTION explores the emerging field of synthetic biology from different disciplinary angles including science and engineering, social science, cultural studies, amateur biology, film makers, artists and designers. It comprises presentations, panel discussions, do-it-yourself biology demos, performances, art work and of course film screenings.
Selected movies:
Ursula Damm (DE) | The Outline of Paradise, 2012
film, 04:06
What would our cities look like if advertising messages are produced not from artificial lighting but from swarming midges, glowing like fireflies? Instead of being electronically controlled, ads could be flown and danced by swarms who have undergone special flight training. The Outline of Paradise explores the promises and capabilities of technoscience. This film explores the concept of sustainable luminosity – a new way of providing natural and sustainable light to our urban centers.
Sam Ireland (UK) | Bacteria to the Future, 2014
film, 03:59
What if artificially intelligent bacteria could be connected to build communicating populations? Could we make bacterial computers? In this charming animation, Brian the Bacterium provides a possible answer.
Shamees Aden, Sam J. Bond (UK) | Protocell Technology, 2012
film, 01:49
The study of protocells could dramatically change our understanding of the nature of materials. Protocells blur the gap between the non-living and the living, and can, therefore, when used as material, integrate the dynamic properties that living.
Uwe Sleytr (AT) | A new way in Evolution, 2014
film, 03:41
Whereas retracing the evolution of life forms by using fossils has become increasingly possible, predicting the future development of living organisms is hardly conceivable, even more with the capacities synthetic biology brings towards the creation of entirely new species. This clip is an experimental piece, which explores an evolution that is sped up by synthetic biology, by utilizing sculptures which are presented as fossils from the future.
Marie-Sarah Adenis & Hugo Kreit (FR) | Chlorotherapy, 2014
film, 03:58
Chlorotherapy explores a new type of utopian medicine based on a realistic technology: DNA transistors. Because access to care will become a major issue in the future, easy to access biotechnologies become highly interesting. Plants, historically related to the medical world, will be the ideal support of this exploration. Through genetic modifications, plants become able to diagnose diseases and to deliver appropriate therapeutic substances.
Eric Schockmel (UK) | Macrostructure, 2013
film, 04:58
Inspired by science and video games, Macrostructure is the first episode in a micro-series entitled What If You Created Artificial Life And It Started Worshipping You. We are taken on a 3D animated journey through a world inhabited by synthetic life forms and the self-aware machines who manufacture, control and recycle them.
Lorenzo Oggiano (UK) | Quasi-Objects/ Cinematic Environment #8, 2012
film, 04:32
Quasi-Objects is an on-going art project consisting of 3D generated videos and prints, a practice of organic re-design that aims to contribute to the debate of an up-coming postnatural ecosystem: life as something that is not exclusively located within a body, but rather immanent in any complex system, human or non-human.
Minsu Kim (UK) | Living Food, 2013
film, 00:55
What if food were consumed alive, as a fictional character? What if food was able to play with our cutlery or create hyper-sensations in our mouth? In this film, dishes are living, moving, created things, beautiful and stomach-churning at the same time.
Louis Rigaud (FR) | Copy & Clone, 2010
film, 03:15
The development of biotechnologies will also lead to a fundamental change in industrial production. Copy and Clone discusses an extremely serious subject with a side order of humour: the animation displays the e ects of biotechnologies on animal food industries through the window of a computer. What happens when the “copy and paste” commands of our devices step into real life?
There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why… I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?
Robert F. Kennedy – 1968 Presidential Campaign
CAPTURE THE FUTURE(S): OPENING FORUM
ASN provides a place for a debate and an open discussion over the numerous visions foreseen for our future. During the Opening event hosts, guests and public were discussing the special values of the synergy that can occur in the creative meetings of the researchers, artists and the public.
Special Guest & Participants of the Forum:
Rob La Frenais, Dr
Curator, The Arts Catalysts, London, UK
Ingeborg Fullep, Ass. Prof.
Founder/Dir. of Media Scape
University of Rijeka, Academy of Applied Art (APU)
University of Applied Sciences, Berlin (HTW)
Artur Jarmołowski, Prof. Dr hab.
Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, Faculty of Biology, UAM Poznań (PL)
Ralf Schäfer, Dr
Head of Image Processing & Interactive Media,
Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, Berlin (DE)
Zofia Szweykowska-Kulińska, Prof. Dr hab.
Head the National Leading Science Centre, Poznan RNA Consotrium, PL
Head of the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, Faculty of Biology, UAM Poznań (PL)
