We Make Money Not Art

The Moon barely has any atmosphere. The average temperature on Venus is 462 degrees Celsius. You can’t even breathe on Mars. And yet, space represents the new El Dorado for many nations and private companies. Asteroids mining, intergalactic trips, Moon bases, human settlement on Mars, orbital/suborbital/lunar space tourism, etc. Nothing is too bold, too expensive, too technically-challenging.

Ivan Henriques, C-DER, 2017-19  . Waag & Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen present: Supre:organism, exhibition, 2019. Photo: LNDWstudio

Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS (BY-NC-CA)

Quadrature, LGM#5, 2018. Waag & Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen present: Supre:organism, exhibition, 2019. Photo: LNDWstudio

The Supre:organism exhibition which closed recently at Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen (a Unesco World Heritage fortress near Haarlem in the Netherlands) cast a critical eye on human space ambitions, investigating the influence that space exploration has on the development of technology, life sciences and industrialisation. Even on our own identity.

Packed with fascinating information and meditations on space exploration, the exhibition could have been yet another cultural celebration of the 50th anniversary of the first humans landing on the Moon. Fortunately, it managed to stand apart from other events by presenting a multiplicity of artistic visions that “expand our perspective on human non-terrestrial becoming” and remind us that extraterrestrial colonization is motivated not only by scientific research but also by geopolitics schemes, economic exploitation, military strategies and yearning for another world.

Quick walk through some of the works exhibited:

RYBN, The Space Offshore, 2019. Waag & Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen present: Supre:organism, exhibition, 2019. Photo: LNDWstudio

One of the objects exhibited by RYBN is a book with a promising title: Guide Chambost des paradis fiscaux (Chambost Guide to Tax Havens.) At the bottom of its cover is a sentence that reminds us that “tax havens are on Earth, not on the Moon.” Luxembourg’s ambition to become a leader in asteroid mining might bring some nuances to that statement.

In early 2016 Luxembourg announced its intention to become the European hub for the mining and extraction of space resources. The program would help private companies exploit resources from the solar system’s asteroids. Gold, silver, platinum and other metals would be transported back to Earth to be refined, whilst other common group metals would be used directly for construction in space.

There’s just a tiny snag: the 1967 Outer Space Treaty that decreed that outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, “is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty”. The Grand Duchy tried to circumvent the treaty by passing a law stating that Luxembourg-based companies have the legal right to appropriate the resources they dig up in space.

SpaceResources.lu initiative

The video above, which was part of Luxembourg’s SpaceResources Initiative communication campaign, suggests a bright near future characterized by both the preservation of the resource-hungry Western lifestyle and a guilt-free solution to the climate crisis.

For some experts, the plan to mine asteroids is just another techno-chauvinist solution to the problem of the overexploitation of natural resources (mineral resources included), an irresponsible, short-term strategy to plunder what is left to be plundered. Others see it as an act of environmental protection, a responsible way to obtain the resources we need without further damaging the Earth.

However, what motivated RYBN’s artistic investigation was the desire to understand the reasons behind the microstate’s sudden entry into the space mining race alongside the United States, China and Russia. The research project is part of RYBN’s wider investigation into tax havens. The Luxembourg chapter of RYBN research has, as they write, “opened up an offshore maze, from the European district of Kirchberg in Luxembourg City to lobbies in Law Schools of Leiden, the Netherlands, and offshore companies registered in Delaware. The project sheds a crude light on the negotiations around space governance that happen today far from the eyes of the general public.”

Along with the SpaceResources Initiative video, the work exhibited included a series of documents such as agreements, posters, archive materials, books and other items that, taken together, tell the story of how a country, hit by the 2014 Lux Leaks scandal, is trying to reinvent itself and present the face of a modern nation with a diversified, forward-looking economy. All the documents and objects are laid and hung there for visitors to explore and draw their own conclusion from.

Kongo Astronauts, Postcolonial Dilemna TRACK #04, 2019

Eléonore Hellio,   Kongo Astronauts, 2013-2020. Waag & Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen present: Supre:organism, exhibition, 2019. Photo: LNDWstudio

Eléonore Hellio,   Kongo Astronauts, 2013-2020

To visit the show, i had to take a bus at 3am. When i saw the videos of the Kongo Astronauts i knew the all-nighter was worth it. The works show mysterious individuals wearing mask or a full aluminium astronaut attire wandering around Kinshasa and its surroundings, carving themselves a parallel universe, navigating their land as if it were a vast space station.

It’s poetical, rowdy, intriguing and visually seducing. The images mix together the sublime beauty of a country, its struggle to deal with the constant violence imposed on its landscape and people (since and beyond colonial times) and the chaos of urban life. There are dreams of a different future and nods to traditions. What makes the work of Kongo Astronauts particularly interesting is not just its visual power, it is also the way the artists use fiction for postcolonial criticism, for representing a country that foreign powers devastate in order to obtain the mineral resources crucial for space exploration and pretty much anything we associated with our modern, hyper-connected life.

Behind the camera of Postcolonial Dilemma Track #04 Remixed is Eléonore Hellio, an artist and the co-founder of KA. On screen is performance artist and designer Michel Ekeba (who, i read, makes his space suits with old electronic circuits full of coltan), musician, performance artist and inventor of musical instruments Bebson Elemba and artist Danniel Toya.

DSTART,   E|A|S (Evolving Asteroid Starships), 2017-ongoing  . Waag & Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen present: Supre:organism, exhibition, 2019. Photo: LNDWstudio

Traveling beyond the solar system could take astronauts on a journey that lasts for decades or even a century. Such an adventure would require an entirely new type of spaceship.

The transdisciplinary TU Delft UStarship Team (DSTART), led by Angelo Vermeulen, is working on the concept of a vessel capable of traveling over ultra long distances for ultra long periods of time.

They propose to create adaptive systems that unite the biological and technological. The large-scale animated video demonstrates how the vehicle would undergo independent, organic growth in space during its journey.

The ship would behave like a living organism that uses raw materials available in space, such as asteroids which could be mined for building materials and fuel, 3D printers would be taken on board to print any new parts necessary to repair or expand the spaceship and a growing ecosystem that would ensure human subsistance. Human waste would be broken down by bacteria and converted into nourishment and CO2 for plants, which in turn, would provide oxygen and food for the astronauts. The European Space Agency is currently developing a similar self-supporting closed loop system with the MELiSSA project.

Ivan Henriques, C-DER, 2017-19  . Waag & Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen present: Supre:organism, exhibition, 2019. Photo: LNDWstudio

Ivan Henriques, C-DER, 2017-19  

Ivan Henriques is interested in the uneasy balance between technology and nature. Most of the time, in order to create technology, we have to destroy our environment. We’ve done it time and time again on Earth. Are we going to make the same mistake on other planets we might visit and inhabit one day? What is the point of terraforming other planets when we can’t even take care of our own? Could we develop machines that would benefit from ecosystems but also give something in return?

The tiny C-DER drones are what Henriques calls bio-machines. They harvest energy through photosynthesis in micro-algae. Their purpose is to restore endangered environments on earth or to stimulate the creation of an atmosphere on other planets via an integrated system that releases seeds as the drones hop over the (terrestrial or extraterrestrial) land. The speculative project imagines that, over time, the seeding would change the atmosphere. Endangered regions on Earth would perhaps heal. Infertile ground on other planet would eventually be covered with plants.

The project is part of a broader research called Symbiotic Machines for Space Exploration that aims to create an autonomous system for enhancing terrestrial ecosystems and facilitating atmospheric formation on other planets through artificial photosynthesis.

Antti Tenetz, Perihelion/Rage/secret_lover, 2019. Waag & Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen present: Supre:organism, exhibition, 2019. Photo: LNDWstudio

As he recently explained in an interview with Rianne Riemens, Antti Tenetz uses art “to explore what it means to be human when other life forms and agencies such as AI and machine learning are needed to support us.”

Perihelion/Rage/secret_lover looks at life in space from the perspectives of biology and artificial intelligence. The artist selected bacteria that can metabolize metal as the ideal life form that could survive on the Moon. He then used a culture of these bacteria and images from space exploration to train a neural network, making emerge new learning models and visual outcomes. The result of the experiment is projected on a screen, it suggests the kind of dreams bacteria could make about their life on the Moon. We can recognize some of the images but they are modified by the bias that bacteria have transmitted to the neural system.

Perihelion/Rage/secret_lover is a puzzling project but it points to the possibility of other life forms going on a space exploration. They might have their own biases and flaws but who’s to say that they are worse than our own.

Minna Långström, Photons of Marshotons of Mars, 2019. Waag & Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen present: Supre:organism, exhibition, 2019. Photo: LNDWstudio

  Minna Långström’s multi-screen film installation project Photons of Marshotons of Mars follows workers dedicated to interplanetary research. The work particularly focuses on Vandi Verma, a space roboticist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory known for driving the Mars rovers. Verma and her colleagues will never go to Mars and the way they explore the distant landscape is completely synthetic. Because it is mediated by technology, their work invites us to what it means to observe and understand what we cannot experience directly.

The Supre:organism exhibition was a collaboration between Waag and Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen. It was curated by Miha Turšič, an artist, designer and researcher, dedicated to the development of arts and humanities in outer space.

Inside CERN. European Organization for Nuclear Research, by Andri Pol. With contributions by author Peter Stamm and Director-General of CERN Rolf Heuer.

Lars Müller Publishers write: For most people locations that hold a particular importance for the development of our society and for the advancement of science and technology often remain hidden from view. They are separate and protected, such as CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, close to the city of Geneva. CERN is best known for its giant particle accelerator. Here researchers from around the world take part in a diverse array of fundamental physical research, in the pursuit of knowledge that will perhaps one day revolutionize our understanding of the universe and life on our planet.

The Swiss photographer Andri Pol and author Peter Stamm mixed with this multicultural community of researchers and followed their work over an extended period of time. In doing so he created a unique portrait of this fascinating world. The cutting-edge research is given a human face and even if we don’t fully understand the processes at work, the pictures allow us to perceive how in this world of the tiniest particles the biggest connections are searched for. With an explanatory text and scientific-philosophical essay.

Andri Pol, Inside CERN

The world of fundamental research is made of blackboards, laptops, intimidating machines, server rooms, grey corridors, cables, fans and cables, cables and piles of paper, etc. But it’s also a place where you can spot a Justin Bieber poster, ball games on the lawn, empty bottles of wine, queues at the canteen, a couple of pets here and there, a bit of ballroom dancing and someone biking along the 27 km-particle accelerator.

Andri Pol‘s Inside CERN photo series reveals the daily life of the thousands of physicists and other individuals who are involved in world-class experiments most of us can barely understand. We know that they attempt to answer questions such as “What is the origin of the matter?” and to propose a scientific take on the philosophical enquiry: “Where do we come from?” but other than that, we tend to get lost in the details of their research.

Pol’s images communicate the ordinary of the extraordinary. They don’t explain particle physics but they do a great job at bringing to light its context, atmosphere, thrill and actors. Amusingly enough the setting is every bit as shabby as the experiments are innovative. And yet you can perceive the curiosity, passion and creativity at play. Science needs books like this one, books that inspire young people to study physics or chemistry, books that make fundamental research a bit more tangible at a time when some would like us to doubt its importance and value.

One thing i’m embarrassed to admit though: there’s nothing (apart from my dog Elvis) as photogenic as a big, complicated machine.

Andri Pol, Inside CERN

I had always wanted to go to the BIO·FICTION Science Art Film Festival in Vienna. In 2011, they launched their first edition with a call for short films that explored synthetic biology from all possible angles. Synthetic biology wasn’t much discussed or even understood in mainstream culture at the time so there was something rather ground-breaking about a program that investigated the scientific field through panel discussions, art performances, workshops and film screenings. The second edition of the festival took place in 2014 and was even more ambitious. It also added a DIYBio/biohacking component to the discussion around synthetic biology.

Entrance of the Stadtkino, venue of the Bio-fiction Science Art Film Festival. Photo courtesy of Biofaction

And hurray! I finally had a closer look at this pioneering festival last month when i had the chance to be part of the jury for the short films screenings. This time however, the focus of the festival brought the spotlight on neurotechnology, another scientific field that deserves to get more scrutiny and public debate.

Frederic Plasman, The Auxiliary, 2018

Alexandra Lupashko, 2050, 2019

Moving from medical field to personal enhancement, from non-invasive methods to implanted devices, neurotechnology has the potential to radically change our brain and bodies. It is not only treating brain diseases but it is also enabling soldiers, hackers and workers to supercharge and expand their cognitive abilities.

Today, brain-computer interfaces are mainly one-directional, giving people with brain injuries the possibility to communicate and even control tools. At the horizon, however, are implants with a bi-directional capacity that could answer transhumanists’ dreams and merge the biological intelligence of the able-bodied with machine intelligence, paving the way for the rise of a new breed of “super humans.”

Beyond the incredible promises and the potential for people with disabilities, the latest advances in neurotechnology thus come with a series of dilemmas and concerns:

What if the technology could also control or alter brain activity? What if our thoughts and other brain information were controlled or hacked? In a world in which the GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft as they call them in France) and other private companies are gaining more and more insight into our lives, shouldn’t we be worried that one day they might get even more access to cognitive data?

This year the festival offered screenings of both fiction films and documentaries but also panels and a Leonardo LASER evening that anchored the event into the current state of science.

Alexandra Lupashko, 2050, 2019

Tad Ermitano, Local Unit, 2006

The list of winners is over here. And below are some of the fiction films i found most interesting. I can’t share each and every one of them, alas! as several of the best films are not publicly available online. Not even as trailers. Which is a pity because i’d have loved to feature the amazing comedy 2050 by Alexandra Lupashko or Tad Ermitano‘s 2006 haunting movie Local Unit.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s story, it will features the winning documentaries and sum up the theoretical and technical discussions we had in Vienna last month.

Sebastian Kuder, Adam and Eve Mk.II, 2019

Adam and Eve Mk. II propels the Biblical couple in a post-apocalyptic world from which humans have disappeared. Only their memories remains. They are uploaded into the artificial brain of a humanoid robot…

The short film is moving and aesthetically charming. Sebastian Kuder was inspired by the Immortality Drive – a memory device taken to the International Space Station in a Soyuz spacecraft on 12 October 2008.

The Immortality Drive contains a list of humanity’s greatest achievements but also fully digitized DNA sequences of a select group of humans (Stephen Hawking, Stephen Colbert, Lance Armstrong, etc. Mostly white guys from what i could read); with the intention to preserve human DNA in a time capsule, should some global cataclysm wipe us out one day.

Christopher Satola, Connected, 2017

Connected, a short film by student Christopher Satola, exposes the daily life of a boy living in a near future world where all emotions are tightly controlled by artificial intelligence for humanity’s own safety.

Andrew Wallace reading his story ‘The Minus Four Sequence’ at Virtual Futures’ Near-Future Fictions on the theme of Autonomous Agents, 2019

This filmed reading from a Virtual Futures Near-Future Fiction event tells the story of what could happen to any of us when our AI assistants know far more about us than we do.

Victor Alonso-Berbel, Perfectly Natural, 2018

Perfectly Natural is set in a near future in which women can both have a successful, intense carrer and follow every step of the physical, emotional and intellectual development of their child. Unsurprisingly there are downsides to extremely sophisticated virtual parenting systems….

Andrei Thutat Ungur, Reboot, 2019

Andrei Thutat Ungur on stage at the Bio-fiction Science Art Film Festival. Photo courtesy of Biofaction

The jury prize went to Reboot. The short film follows a man who, unable to live with the ghosts and sorrows of his past, decides to erase his memory and start his life from scratch.

There are many reasons why we loved that film. First, it was zero budget. Andrei Thutat wrote, directed, filmed, acted, composed the music, edited, created VFX and CGI for several scenes and green screen animations.

It also showed the more “garage” and “bio-hacking” aspects of neurotechnology and how some people might want to experiment with their brain for various reasons. Just like some are already doing today using drugs of course but also electrical brain stimulation to sharpen their mind.

Frederic Plasman, The Auxiliary, 2018 (trailer)

A woman, feeling unfairly demeaned, is determined to fight against a system she can’t see and regain some agency.

Julien Becker, Article 19-42 (trailer), 2019

Article 19-42 is a dystopian tale exploring the impact that technology has on our understanding of love and family. When machines perfectly mimic humans, will we feel the same emotions towards them as we feel towards our own flesh and bones?

Albin Glasell, In the Gap, 2017

A woman trapped inside a server room by a mysterious digital program must deal with manifestations of her past or “upload” herself to the server. I didn’t fully understand the story but still found the film immensely watchable.

Javier Ideami, Erase Love, 2010-2018

I’m cheating here. Erase Love wasn’t selected for the festival but i saw it while reviewing the entries for the jury. The film imagines a society where humans are undistinguishable from their machine counterparts.

The Bio-fiction Science Art Film Festival is organised by Biofaction, a Vienna-based research and science communication company with expertise in science communication, film production, technology assessment and the study of ethical, legal and social issues in emerging sciences and technology.

Part one of my report of the festival is over here: Bio-fiction Science Art Film Festival. Short fiction films about neurotechnology.

The Bio-fiction Science Art Film Festival. Photo courtesy of Biofaction

Panel discussion at the Bio-fiction Science Art Film Festival. Photo courtesy of Biofaction

While fiction films provided an engaging entry point to speculate about neurotechnologies and reflect upon their possible social and physical impacts, the Bio-Fiction festival also proposed debates, a very impressive Brain-Computer Interface demo by Christoph Guger from g.tec, a discussion with a documentary maker and a LASER evening at the Medical University of Vienna.

One of the reasons why the Bio Fiction team had chosen to dedicate an edition of the festival to neurotechnology is that it doesn’t get the media and public attention it deserves. The research field has the potential to deeply redefine society and our sense of self. And while university and hospital research build the technology to help individuals who suffer from brain impairment, others (mostly private companies) are either piggybacking on medical research or developing their own projects of implants and techniques that aim to “improve” and augment the human body instead of just fix disabilities.

Today already, any consumer with a desire to “boost learning” and “supercharge neural activity” can purchase nootropic supplements, headbands for on the go meditation, sessions in pressurised oxygen chambers or kits for transcranial direct-current stimulation.

However, as Markus Mooslechner’s documentary Supersapiens demonstrated, transhumanists, scientists and DIY communities who define themselves as “brain hackers” are looking beyond temporary, off-the-shelf brain stimulation…

Markus Mooslechner, Supersapiens (trailer), 2017

Supersapiens was released in 2017 and the film maker warned the Bio-Fiction audience that the content was already a bit dated, that neurology had made great progress since he first screened the documentary. Yet, the trailer and extracts he showed and commented for us were still pretty powerful.

The film attempts to investigate the consequences of a brain that would harness both the agility of the human brain and the immense capacity of artificial intelligence. If (or rather when) such super brain finally surfaces, will we all enjoy its wonders? Or will it be the preserve of an elite while the rest of us lags behind, with our sub-par IQ and our old-school cognitive skills?

While some of us might be disturbed by the prospect of machines that invade our bodies even more than they do now, Mooslechner’s film indicates that if you look closely you can already find traces of a society open to the idea of invasive technologies: Swedish citizens who get chips implanted in their hands to dispense with public transport paper tickets, young people eagerly queuing at “implant parties” (“implants are the new tattoo”, Mooslechner pointed out), body hackers who insert magnets and chips under their skins, etc. Are brain implants the next logical step?

On the one hand, i found the interviews from Supersapiens disturbing because some of the experts featured were white men convinced that humans need to be improved and that they know exactly what should be improved. On the other, the film was the ideal platform to trigger uncomfortable questions about, for example, possible threats to privacy and the necessity to start drafting new human rights that would ensure that the brain remains a refuge (the last one?) for human privacy.

Unfortunately, Mooslechner commented, technology usually moves too fast and outpaces any efforts to legislate and protect citizens.

Bio Fiction screenings also included the films shortlisted in the documentary section. I’ll start with the “Runner Up for Documentary”:

Frédéric Schuld and Valentin Riedl, Carlotta’s Face, 2018

Carlotta suffers from prosopagnosia, or face blindness, a cognitive disorder that makes her unable to recognize familiar faces, including one’s own face, while other aspects of visual processing (e.g., object discrimination) and intellectual functioning remain intact. At school, Carlotta suffered from discrimination. No one, neither the teachers nor the other children, understood her condition.

The animation by neuroscientist and filmmaker Valentin Riedl, animated and filmed by co-director Frédéric Schuld, shows how she managed to make her own face recognisable to herself despite her disease.

Tim Grabham in collaboration with Prof Eduardo Reck Miranda, Paramusical Ensemble, 2015

Skype discussion with Prof Eduardo Reck Miranda at the Bio-fiction Science Art Film Festival. Photo courtesy of Biofaction

The documentary (winner of the Bio Fiction documentary section) follows the preparation and performance of Activating Memory by the Paramusical Ensemble which teamed up four severely motor-impaired patients with a string quartet at the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability, London, on 17 July 2015.

The parts for each instrument are generated in real-time from the electrical activity of the performers wearing a Brain-Computer Music Interfacing system which directly accesses the brain via EEG technology. A panel displays four options of musical phrases. The patients select one of them by staring at flashing lights and the system sends their choice to the string quartet to perform.

The project, spearheaded by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research (ICCMR) at Plymouth University and led by composer Eduardo Reck Miranda, explores how emerging brain-computer interface technologies can help those who are unable to walk, move or speak to communicate with others and develop their own creativity.

Christoph Guger from g.tec and a member of the public on stage at the Bio-fiction Science Art Film Festival

The technology used during the Paramusical Ensemble concert was demoed on stage at the Bio Fiction festival by Christoph Guger, CEO of g.tec, a company that develops brain-computer interfaces system for research and medical applications. He asked a member of the public to come on stage and experience how technology enables people to write just by thinking.

Since i’m on the topic of scientific presentations, i should mention Professor Oskar C. Aszmann‘s presentation during the LASER panel at Vienna Medical University:

Professor Oskar C. Aszmann performed bionic reconstruction on a patient who had lost an arm. Photo

In his fascinating talk, the Associate Professor of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery showed us several cases of patients who underwent bionic reconstruction, a technique which consists of replacing a patient’s lifeless hand or even arm by a mechatronic one. The technique combines selective nerve and muscle transfers, elective amputation (once the patient realizes he or she might be better off with less flesh and more metal) and prosthetic rehabilitation. The robotic prosthesis uses sensors that respond to electrical impulses in the muscles so the whole treatment also involves an intense mental training in order to learn how to control the mechanical limb.

Jalal Ud Din Baba, Mind Mightier Than Might, 2018

One last documentary from the Bio Fiction screenings:
Mind Mightier Than Might is not strictly about neurotechnology but it nevertheless illustrates the extraordinary power and plasticity of the human brain. The hero of the film is Aamir Hussain Lone, a man who lost his two arms in an accident at the age of eight. Yet, his determination helped him overcome his physical disability and become a world-class cricketer without arms.

If you’d like to know more about experiments, speculations and development in neurotechnology, then i’d recommend reading Human enhancement through the lens of experimental and speculative neurotechnologies. The paper investigates “existing experimental and speculative applications of neurotechnologies, with the aim to find out, if these real or diegetic prototypes could be used to better understand the paths these applications are forging.” Their study particularly focus the role of experimental implementations by neurohackers, speculative designers and artists.
The paper was written by Wessel Teunisse, Sandra Youssef and Markus Schmidt. And bonus! Anyone can access and read it for free.

The Bio-fiction Science Art Film Festival is organised by Biofaction, a Vienna-based research and science communication company with expertise in science communication, film production, technology assessment and the study of ethical, legal and social issues in emerging sciences and technology. The festival is currently touring the world. Follow them on twitter and see if they pop up in your neighbourhood.

The Drone Chronicles 2001-2016, by Rob van Leijsen. With essays by Joerg Bader, Nicolas Nova, Brice Pauset and Rob van Leijsen. Edited by Joerg Bader, Centre de la photographie Genève, distributed by Spector Books.

Graphic designer Rob van Leijsen writes: Why are drones—or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV)—so present in our daily news feed and local retail stores, but do we—despite sky-high sales numbers—hardly see them fly in our public airspace? This paradox of invisible presence lies at the basis of The Drone Chronicles, a diptych that maps the evolution and integration of drones in our society from 2001 onwards. As a drone surveilling a battlefield or crowd, the book offers a contemporary view on drones without emphasising a particular category or usage.

It discusses how this relatively new piece of technology has shifted from a commonly known aerial bombing machine to a multi-purpose and accessible tool.

A surveillance blimp flying (and crashing) over an Army base in Maryland, 2015. Photo: Jimmy May/Bloomsburg Press Enterprise/AP (via)

The Drone Chronicles 2001-2016 is a set of two books that record 15 years of drones in our lives. First, there’s a Catalogue of drones with the models appearing in chronological order with a small photo and a list of data: their release date, price, speed, flight time, dimension, function(s), colours available, weight, etc. As you turn the pages, you see how the different uses of the technology evolve along parallel tracks: the commercial, the consumer and the military; the deadly, the useful and the purely entertaining.

The accompanying Journal has a very simple format: it’s a selection of the most striking news articles involving drones in both warfare and every day life. Again in chronological order. Simple but incredibly efficient when it comes to prompting a reflection about the kind of ethical and political questions that drone usage raises.

By juxtaposing informative, technological and cultural stories, the Journal paints an ever changing portrait of a society trying to get to grips with drones. From the very mundane (spraying pesticides over crops or delivering parcels) to the techno-solutionism, the humanitarian and the artistic.

Serbia-Albania football match abandoned after stadium brawl, 14 October 2014 (via)

One of the tensions that emerge in the book is the ongoing battle between crime drones and crime-busting drones. One moment, the Argentinian police flies over a taxpayer’s property and discovers that the ultra rich scoundrel had failed to declare his swimming pool to the state. Next, prisoners and dealers are gaily smuggling drugs above walls and borders. One moment you read that pepper-spray drone are offered to South African mines for strike control. Next, pro-choice campaigners use drones to deliver abortion pills to Northern Ireland in order to raise awareness around the country’s restrictive abortion laws. There’s never a dull moment with these drones.

Unsurprisingly, the more drones become part of mainstream culture, the stranger the stories get. Along the pages, you’ll meet an artist who paid homage to his deceased cat by turning it into a flying machine (he has since worked on a cow and other animals whose corpses deserved better than to become a ghoulish attraction), Enrique Iglesias whose duet with a drone ended painfully and Barack Obama not only approving UAVs strikes that ended up killing civilians but also making poor jokes about Predator drones.

There’s a few idiotic headlines about equally idiotic projects such as the one described as “Re-planting a forest, one drone at a time.” And more promising projects like a biodegradable drone grown from mushrooms and covered in wasp spit. It’s fascinating to see how a technology born in a purely military context can find its place in every single aspect of our life.

Unlike what its title suggests, The Drone Chronicles 2001-2016 was published this year. The drone study starts in 2001, a year when military models were getting increasingly sophisticated and increasingly discussed as part of the media coverage of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Commercial drones started appearing shortly after. Since the book closes on 2016, I got in touch with Rob van Leijsen and asked him to run us through the past 3 years of drone culture and research.

“Consumer drones (the toys you find in your local electronic hardware store) are still highly popular, but we might have seen the peak of the hype,” the graphic designer told me. “I see different sales numbers in the media, but sales mainly rise in the US ever since 2016, while in Europe consumer sales seem to flatten a bit. With the exception of racing drones, they are ever surging and organised competitions arise everywhere, with sponsor contracts and price money involved. Drone racing is a huge potential entertainment business I guess. A positive aspect is that these events are regulated and supervised.

I came across a surprising article that states that Parrot, the biggest consumer drone producer from France, is pulling away from the toy drone market. This is a sign that drone producers shift their focus and energy even more towards the commercial drone market.

This has possibly to do with more strict regulation for civilian drone use, and growing economic interest in commercial sectors like agriculture, mining, mapping, etc. I think we (both manufacturers and users) start to recognise the contexts in which drones are useful to our society as a whole, and not only to the individual recreational pilot.

We simply can not fly everywhere without considering our environment and bystanders. I also sensed a certain civilian resistance to drone use in public space while speaking with visitors, which I think is very understandable and even welcome. People start to reflect on the implications of drone presence in their direct environment, and express their annoyance in private and public conversations.

As for military use of drones, there is a big run on implementing AI in drones, like for example Project Maven from the US Military, and for competitive anti-drone systems on the other hand. Obviously, the recent drone attack on a Saudi Arabian oil facility nourished the discussion of national territory protection against drone strikes once again.

Here’s an interesting article about the trends of drone use in 2019.”

More drone stories: Book review: A Theory of the Drone; Book review: Drone. Remote Control Warfare; VOLVO 240 Transformed into 4 Drones; Drones, pirates, everyday racism. An interview with graphic designer Ruben Pater; The Grey Zone. On the (il)legitimacy of targeted killing by drones; Eyes from a distance. Personal encounters with military drones; Tracking Drones, Reporting Lives; Tanks, drones, rockets and other sound machines. An interview with Nik Nowak; Drones with Desires. A machine with inbuilt human memories; Sudden Justice: America’s Secret Drone Wars; A dystopian performance for drones; A screaming comes across the sky. Drones, mass surveillance and invisible wars, etc.

Foto/Industria in Bologna is, according to its organisers, the only photo biennial in the world devoted to industry and work. I found no reason to disagree with them. The focus of this year’s edition is the technosphere: the ecosystem of technology humans have layered over the Earth to ensure their dominion over it. It is so vast that a 2016 study from the University of Leicester Department of Geology estimated the weight of its physical structure at 30 trillion tons, a mass of more than 50 kilos for every square metre of the planet’s surface.

The biennial sounded like yet another good excuse to take a train to Bologna. Which i did. Last Thursday. I’ll write about the biennial in the coming days but right now i’d like to spend the afternoon writing about an exhibition that suggests that the technosphere has started to invade our bodies. Even though me might not always realise it.

Matthieu Gafsou, H+

Matthieu Gafsou, H+. Exhibition view at Palazzo Pepoli Campogrande. Photo: Foto/Industria

Matthieu Gafsou has spent 4 years researching transhumanism, a movement looking towards science and technology to drastically improve human cognitive, mental and physical performances. The project saw him travel the world to visit research labs, cryo-preservation facilities and meet the advocates of transhumanism and the “everyday” people whose sheer survival depends on technology.

His H+ (the abbreviation of transhumanism) series suggests that each of us is a bit of a transhumanist. Smartphones might not be embedded inside our bodies but we’re grown dependent on them. Most of us can’t imagine functioning in society without these “memory prostheses.” They have given us new powers. And stolen a few we used to have (the ability to find our way in a new city or remember friends and family’s numbers.)

H+ includes contact lenses, “superfood” bars, LED light anti-ageing face masks, orthodontic braces, pacemakers and vitamins in the panoply of the unsuspecting transhumanist. They now seem very common and prosaic. Self-implanted magnet to feel magnetic fields and nootropics, however, unquestionably slide into transhumanist territory. You don’t depend on them to be alive or healthy.

And how disturbing is -to some of us- the cryopreservation of patients? Or the quest for immortality? The exoskeleton “capable of turning a soldier into a nearly inexhaustible war machine”? Some of these go far beyond the limits of medicine, they “optimise” us, they suggest that each of us is a mass of flawed cells and functions, a machine perfectible ad infinitum.

In the exhibition, each photo, each illustration of a humanity struggling to shed its perfectible forms and mortal limits is given the same treatment. There’s no hierarchy. Some images are explained. Others are not. It’s up to you to connect the dots and decide what is “normal” and what constitutes (now) a presumptuous pursuit to sidestep the limits our human condition.

Below are some of the images of the H+ series with comments by the photographer. I’ll let you meditate on them while i’ll hunt my book shelves for a battered copy of Seneca’s De Brevitate Vitae:

Matthieu Gafsou, H+. Some people wear necklaces that blink to the rhythm of their heartbeat. Others have had devices implanted allowing them to “feel” the North. In either case, these are demonstrative gadgets that prefigure objects with more potential. External appendages, they are outward signs of participating in a project: Their function is therefore quite superficial. They are symbols, futuristic substitutes for crosses or religious medals.

Matthieu Gafsou, H+. Kriorus’s brand new facility. The vats contain cryogenized brains and whole bodies awaiting the day when science can wake them up.

Matthieu Gafsou, H+. Kriorus not only deep-freezes corpses but also trains cryogenization devotees in how to prepare them. The body fluids are drained; otherwise, deep-freezing would break the tissues’ cells, making a future reawakening less likely. Lost in the distant countryside of Moscow, the depot is the hub of their activities.

Matthieu Gafsou, H+. Businessman Igor Trapeznikov, a member of Russia’s transhumanist movement, wears several handmade experimental implants, including a device that turns sights into sounds, which could prove useful for blind or vision-impaired people. His also has various handmade microchip implants that replace his credit card and house keys, for example. Moscow, June 21, 2017

Matthieu Gafsou, H+. STIMO (Epidural Electrical Simulation with Robot-assisted Rehabilitation in Patients with Spinal Cord Injury) is a clinical study aiming to improve the motor skills of people with injured or diseased spinal cords, who have major difficulties controlling their lower limbs. It is the extension of the reWalk experiment. The study required the participation of neuroscientists, engineers, robot scientists, physicians, and physical therapists. The first human patients received this type of implant in 2017. STIMO (Epidural Electrical Simulation with Robot-assisted Rehabilitation in Patients with Spinal Cord Injury) is a clinical study aiming to improve the motor skills of people with injured or diseased spinal cords, who have major difficulties controlling their lower limbs. It is the extension of the reWalk experiment. The study required the participation of neuroscientists, engineers, robot scientists, physicians, and physical therapists. The first human patients received this type of implant in 2017.

Matthieu Gafsou, H+. Marie-Claude Baillif has suffered from myopathy since adolescence. Without her respirator, she would have died thirty years ago. Her website features eloquent articles about her special relationship to technology: “My survival depends on microprocessors and electronic cards”; “Electricity is a matter of life or death for me”; “I love my phlegm aspirator”; “A little battery is magical; it transforms my life.” Technological devices keep her alive.

Matthieu Gafsou, H+. American professor Robert Wilson Chester Ettinger, a transhumanist trailblazer, wrote The Prospect of Immortality, the bible of believers in immortality and a sort of cryogenics guidebook. He thinks “natural man” is deficient: Cryonics is the key to unlocking and making the most of his full potential.

Matthieu Gafsou, H+. Yann Minh, born 1957, is a protean artist specializing in cyberculture and persistent worlds. Here he is seen in his “Nooscaphe.” He often describes himself as a “nooconteur” (a cyberspace raconteur) or a cyberpunk exploring cyberspace and the noosphere (the sphere of human reflection and, by extension, the Internet, which connects humanity through artworks, thought, etc.). He has won several awards for his creations in the areas of contemporary art and cyberculture. His futuristic, transhumanistic world mixes eroticism and science fiction. Paris, June 16, 2016

Matthieu Gafsou, H+. Julien Deceroi self-implanted a magnet into his middle finger. He says it works like a new sense, allowing him to feel magnetic fields, including their amplitude or modulations. He also wears microchips. He is the only grinder I met in Switzerland. (Grinders are biohackers who demand total freedom for their bodies, which they enhance by operating on them themselves, often in extreme conditions.) Julien Deceroi self-implanted a magnet into his middle finger. He says it works like a new sense, allowing him to feel magnetic fields, including their amplitude or modulations. He also wears microchips. He is the only grinder I met in Switzerland. (Grinders are biohackers who demand total freedom for their bodies, which they enhance by operating on them themselves, often in extreme conditions.)

Matthieu Gafsou, H+. For years, Defymed has been working on this prototype of an artificial pancreas, Mailpan, which could revolutionize the lives of diabetics. Mailpan is an implant filled with stem cells that can secrete insulin. The technological challenge is twofold: manufacturing a membrane capable of releasing oxygen and insulin while remaining impervious to the immune system when it attacks the stem cells; and finding cells that will manufacture insulin in an optimal way. When a syringe is inserted every three to six months, two ports placed under the skin allow the stem cells that have become inactive to be removed and replaced by new ones.

Matthieu Gafsou, H+. This anti-aging light therapy mask supposedly makes whoever wears it every day for five minutes look younger. The sales pitch borrows from medical discourse, even though it is a beauty product like anti-aging cream. What makes the device symptomatic is its participation in the already dominant ideology of the perfect body while adding the cult of technology as a way to save it from decrepitude. It is a geeky, cheap, non-invasive version of plastic surgery. This anti-aging light therapy mask supposedly makes whoever wears it every day for five minutes look younger. The sales pitch borrows from medical discourse, even though it is a beauty product like anti-aging cream. What makes the device symptomatic is its participation in the already dominant ideology of the perfect body while adding the cult of technology as a way to save it from decrepitude. It is a geeky, cheap, non-invasive version of plastic surgery.

Matthieu Gafsou, H+. Exhibition view at Palazzo Pepoli Campogrande. Photo: Foto/Industria

Foto/Industria, the IVth Biennial of Photography on Industry and Work remains open until 24 November 2019 in 10 different palazzi and other interesting venues across Bologna, as well as at the MAST (Arts Manufacturing, Experimentation and Technology) Foundation, the engine behind this cultural project.

Unless you live on a small-ish island, chances are you’re just like me: you suffer from sea blindness, this disregard (or maybe we’re talking about sheer ignorance) of the crucial role that the oceans play in absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, in regulating global climate, generating oxygen or providing livelihoods for communities.

But if we don’t understand how important this vast ecosystem is for our survival on Earth, we’ll end up leaving it into the hands of private companies to colonize and pollute its surfaces and depths.

Armin Linke, Ramu NiCo Management MCC Limited, Basamuk Refinery, Madang, Papua New Guinea, 2017

Armin Linke, Prospecting Oceans. Exhibition view at Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna. Photo: Foto/Industria

Commercial deep sea mining is a case in point. Hailed as the answer to depleting mineral resources, deep sea mining -we are told- could ensure unabated economic growth, supplying silver, gold, copper, manganese, cobalt, nickel, zinc and rare earth minerals for the tech industry and even assisting the transition to a renewable energy economy. It would be profitable, ensure our techno-dependent future but the impacts on fragile (and understudied) ecosystems are potentially disastrous. It could even have knock-on effects on the wider ocean environment and threaten the global fight against climate breakdown by disrupting carbon stores in seafloor sediments, reducing the ocean’s ability to store it.

The colonisation of the seabed would be an underwater mirror to what the shipping industry has been quietly doing for years on the surface of the oceans.

Armin Linke, Sea level rise at Kulili Plantation Village, Karkar Island, Papua New Guinea, 2017

Prospecting Ocean, a body of work by the filmmaker and photographer Armin Linke currently participating to the Foto/Industria festival in Bologna, explores the challenges oceans are facing today from the perspective of legislation, science, the mining industry and local populations whose livelihood is threatened by extractive practices. Drawing upon three years of expeditions to the Pacific Ocean, interviews with experts, archive material and rare footage of the deep-sea, the exhibition scrutinizes seabed mining and other forms of extraction and the effects they might have on marine life and communities. His research makes it clear that ecological protection of our oceans is incompatible with their economic exploitation (which is not at the moment as highly lucrative and straightforward as it was hoped.) If anyone had any doubt about it.

Part of Linke’s research zooms in on Papua New Guinea where licences have been granted to excavate seabed for minerals, threatening ecosystems, lifestyles, health as well as economic and political self-determination.

Linke quickly made the connections between the theme of resource exploitation and the new visualisation technologies developed in the 1970s. “I became intrigued by visualisation techniques developed in the 1970s such as sonar, which allowed for the mapping of the ocean floors, the artist explained in an interview. “This type of sound measurement was then translated by cartographers and bathymetrists who drew underwater topography. Subsequently, a legal structure was established. Now, nations can extend their economic territory by making a request to the United Nations. Such geopolitical requests for the colonisation of the seabed are based on images that have legal validity. It is fascinating to see how visual media have historical consequences of this type.”

As such Linke’s Prospecting Ocean fits perfectly into the general theme of the Foto/Industria biennial: The Technosphere, the relentless technological saturation of our planet.

Armin Linke, MARUM, International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) and Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), seabed core deposit, Bremen, Germany, 2017

I could have spent hours inside the Bologna University Library scrutinising the archive material, photos, videos and other sources of information. The images are not all aesthetically stunning but the little known realities they depict are fascinating: videos filmed at United Nations assemblies, in international law conferences, at marine research centres and at sites endangered by sea-level rise and now also by seabed mining.

Please find some of them below. Some of them are commented. Most are not.

Armin Linke, Twenty-Second Session of the International Seabed Authority Assembly ISA, Kingston, Jamaica, 2016

The International Seabed Authority organises and regulates all mineral-related activities in the international seabed (outside of national waters.) According to Greenpeace, far from protecting our oceans, the UN body are selling it off to industries which only objective is to plunder ocean floors for profit. The picture they depicts is bleak. The non-governmental environmental organization accuses the ISA of consistently siding with the deep sea mining companies, of lack of transparency, of ignoring environmental concerns, of being composed mostly by members who have little biological or ecological expertise, etc.

Armin Linke, International Seabed Authority ISA, manganese nodule, Kingston, Jamaica, 2016

Armin Linke, Norwegian University of Science and Technology NTNU, technical test for remotely operated underwater vehicles, Trondheim, Norway, 2016 in collaboration with Giulia Bruno

Remote-controlled underwater vehicles (ROVs) document life on the seabed as well as the impact of our exploitation of the Earth’s resources. The ROVs can reach a depth of up to 5,000 meters where water pressure it too strong for the human body to handle. The contrast between the mysterious, quiet seabed with the machinery used to extract specimen for research is unsettling. Especially when we think that soon heavy machines for excavation might also be roaming and ruining these ecosystems.

Armin Linke, Norwegian University of Science and Technology NTNU, Department of Marine Technology Trondheim Norway, 2016

Armin Linke, The University of Texas at Austin. Ocean currents modelling room ath teh Institute for Computational ENgineering and Sciences (ICES) Computational Research in Ice and Oceans Group (CRIOS), Austin, Texas, USA, 2018

Armin Linke, Prospecting Oceans. Exhibition view at Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna. Photo: Foto/Industria

Foto/Industria, the IVth Biennial of Photography on Industry and Work remains open until 24 November 2019 in 10 different palazzi and other interesting venues across Bologna, as well as at the MAST (Arts Manufacturing, Experimentation and Technology) Foundation, the engine behind this cultural project.

Previously: H+. We are all transhumanists now.

I could try and sum up Tim Shaw‘s practice by saying that it focuses on the relationship between sound, site and technology. But that would be unfair and depressingly unexciting. His musical performances, installations and site-responsive interventions use sound to investigate under-explored aspects of technology and invite the public to experience the surrounding world with a different, more attentive ear.

In 2017, the artist asked the public to send him photos of darkness and recordings of silence. He turned the results of his unusual request into an installation called Radio Television for a festival being held in a dark forest without internet access or phone signal. In a collaboration with Sébastien Piquemal, he played a concert through the audience’s smartphones, using the devices as speakers he controlled live. A few years ago, he transmitted Morse Code into the North Sea and used DIY Hydrophones to pick up the “aqua-augmented” sound.

Tim has presented his performances and installations all over the world, he works as a lecturer in Digital Media at Culture Lab, Newcastle University and has been selected to be one of the 2019 artists of SHAPE, a platform for innovative music and audiovisual art from Europe.

Tim Shaw, Transmit/Receive from Tynemouth (Morse Code being transmitted into the North Sea and DIY Hydrophones picking it back up again), 2015

Tim Shaw, Transmit/Receive, 2015

Hi Tim! Your profile page states “Tim’s practice is concerned with the many ways people listen” but do you feel like people are still listening nowadays? Our culture is very visual. There doesn’t seem to be much dialogue either. Cultural and political experts keep on saying that we’ve even lost the ability to listen to each other. How do you get people to pause, forget about their smartphones and listen?

Well I am as addicted to my smart phone as the next person who owns a smart phone, so I don’t think of myself as any different to anyone else living in our digital culture. I do think we often tune out of the aural world and I am interested in finding ways of attending to it. I am interested in listening as a musical or artistic practice. So in my own work I am making primary decisions through listening. In presentations of my work I try to create a space which encourages listening, through sound walks, performances and installations. I think there are many ways to achieve this. Sound walks can be really effective (I do walks with and without technology) as a way of opening up an awareness to our sonic environments whilst moving through them.

Darkness is another way, if we reduce or play with light in connection to sound it can bring out another way to experience sound.

Tim Shaw, Ring Network

I am very curious about Ring Network. Three bells in a gallery space. When they ring, the sound is recorded on the local computer and then sent to servers in Korea, Iceland and the USA. Once the files reach the remote servers, they are sent back to the exhibition space and played through a speaker at the time it took to travel around the world and back. Is the latency very significant and does it reflect the geographical distance between the exhibition space and the data centres where the servers are located? I always imagined that digital information traveled so fast through optic cables and that sometimes the route they adopt to reach their destination is so reliable that in the end it doesn’t matter where the servers are located.

My understanding of this is very different. I believe there are servers placed in all the buildings around the New York Stock Exchange to speed up server transactions, I believe they call it high frequency trading. When there is that much money involved smaller then milliseconds count. The geographical consequences of network culture is super interesting to me. We sometimes think of the internet as this immaterial thing but its really not, it has a very material consequence, a lot of early net art explores this. In Ring Network the latency is really variable, it is dependant on a whole bunch of different factors; the time of day, the server traffic in the country the server is hosted, how many people are on the gallery Wi-Fi etc.

The time stretching of the recorded bells is noticeably different each time a transaction happens. As listeners we can hear the geospatial consequence of networked communication, which is fascinating to me at least.

You turned the Ring Network installation into a series of performance. How did you adapt it to performances?

Generally I am interested in the ambiguity between installation and performance. I have presented lots of versions of this piece, each time its very different. I usually set the bells ringing and then improvise with the incoming and outgoing sound files. I also try to approach the performance spatially, spreading the bells across the space for sonic complexity. Bells, speakers, sirens, motors, light bulbs and other miscellaneous devices are things I like to use in performances.

Tim Shaw, Ambulation. Various venues worldwide, since 2015

In your interview with Lucia Udvardyova from the SHAPE platform, you mention that recording and communication devices have the ability to change the way we experience the world. Could you give a few examples of that?

Being able to record and broadcast audio changes our sonic world. Listening through microphones, which is something I do a lot, amplifies environmental sound and allows us to perceive it
differently. There are lots of microphones which enable us to extend our ears. Listening devices can let us hear underwater, to electromagnetic energy, to the earth turning, to lighting strikes and meteorites, to insects and animals communicating outside of our hearing spectrum (the list goes on and on). Also with every development in communication technology (or media) a whole new way of experiencing the world emerges. For example with the early gramophone recordings, or radio broadcasts, people would believe they could hear ghosts or the voices of the dead, a common thought was that the record would act as a carrier for spiritual voices from another world.

Tim Shaw, “DIY EM pump”. Photo by Sara Lana

You have even worked with esoteric listening devices. Could you tell us about these experiments? Is there anything special or even paranormal about these instruments? In the kind of sound they create or maybe what they pick or the way they are manipulated? Or maybe the way they look?

This is connected to the last answer, listening technologies allow us to hear things we wouldn’t be able to perceive otherwise. Even with a ‘standard’ audio recording, made on your phone for example, you can play the sound over and over again, louder and quieter, boost the background noise, etc. This is also the basis of some esoteric listening practices.

In my own work I started thinking about other ways of listening to the world and started researching early paranormal experiments (it’s easy to go down a rabbit hole on the internet). I built a Raudive receiver, a really simple circuit which basically receives a soft white noise from the world, you can then listen back to it and (maybe) hear voices from the paranormal, the idea is that the noise acts as a shared medium between two different worlds. I have also experimented with electromagnetic pumps which pump electromagnetic energy into a space (I do this quite a lot in performances). What you hear is electromagnetic energy, but it’s interesting to work with space and sound in this way. I don’t actually believe that this equipment enables us to hear ghosts, but I do like to explore how technology extends perceptual possibilities, and I like the ambiguity.

Tim Shaw, Radio Television, 2017

For the 2017 edition of the Sanctuary festival, you asked the public to document darkness, record remoteness and send silence. These sound like 3 mythical creatures. Unobtainable, vanished, romantic. What kind of material did you receive from the public? Could you give us a few examples?

The basic idea around this project was to explore a work which was made up of online contributions from the public, using the provocations you mentioned above. Then presenting them in a space which is completely disconnected from the internet. Just using those simple statements I got a huge variety of different contributions. People could send images, sounds or text, and each of these were appropriated and displayed outdoors on the Sanctuary festival site.

Recordings of silence were very interesting, it’s fascinating how people interpret this term. I had some recordings which were really loud but taken in nature, away from human ’noise’. Others were so quiet you could only hear the recorder, which is also not silence. I guess I was attempting to get people to record things they wouldn’t usually think of, the hope was that this would engage them in acts of attentiveness. It was surprising the variety of results I got.

And how did you translate what you had received into a work called Radio/Television? I’m particularly interested to hear about the kind of natural interference and interruption that distorted the images.

So these messages which were received through an online portal were then retransmitted in the offline space. I used radio to transmit the messages across the festival site using a transmission and reception tower. As radio is inherently noisy there was a lot of signal loss, also, perhaps most interestingly, changes in the environment effected how the pictures turned out. Variations in temperature and humidity created distortions on the images which you could see in real time.

The work starts with silence and darkness and yet you end up calling it Radio/Television, a reference to two now relatively dated media. Is there some sarcasm in that title and the technology you chose?

Haha, maybe subconsciously. Also maybe I have a problem with naming works in general. Radio/Television was really quite a straight forward way of explaining what was happening. I was using radio to transmit images, in radio this is called Slow Scan Television (SSTV).

Tim Shaw, Jarrow Slake, 2019

I was listening to Jarrow Slake today. There’s something very ‘satisfying’, very rich and multidimensional about it. What is happening in the recording? We hear water. Insects? Birds? How did you get so much life and so many layers in one take? What makes the location so special?

Jarrow Slake (the site the track is named after) is close to where I live in the north of England. Its a crazy, post industrial place frequented by fishermen, drug dealers and a field-recordist (me). I am very lucky to be able to travel and listen to environmental sounds all around the world but sometimes the most interesting sounds end up being really close to your house! And Jarrow Slake also has a super interesting history (readers can google that if they like). I went there and by chance dipped some hydrophones (underwater microphones) into the mudbanks of the river that runs through the site. I heard these amazing underwater creatures. I kept going back and the sound changed so much depending on the time of day, the tide (it’s a tidal river) and the other activities happening around the space (boats for example). The recording you hear is a single take using 4 hydrophones placed in the river at dusk, just before the sunset. It was premiered in a multi channel listening space at Fri-Art in Fribourg in Switzerland last year.

Tim Shaw, Murmurate at Mining Institute – Newcastle, UK. Photo by Ben Jeans Houghton

Tim Shaw, with John Richards and Tetsuya Umeda (Dirty Electronics), Sacrificial Floors, 2018

Could you tell us something about your perception and experience of the sound art scene? It sometimes feel to me that music and sound experimentations are a bit marginalised. They have their own festivals while the rest of the art work feels very visual. But that’s just my impression as an outsider, what is yours?

To be honest I don’t really know. I studied music and don’t really know the visual art scene. Also I don’t think I am really part of a sound art scene, or I guess I don’t distinguish scenes in that way. Sound art has always had a contentious relationship to music. I think sound has certainly been a thing in the visual art world for a while now. Sometimes the presentation of sound in visual art can be a little disappointing, it’s a difficult medium to work with and doesn’t conform to the same rules as visual media.

Tim Shaw in the Brazilian rainforest. Photo by Sara Lana

You are currently in the rainforest in Brazil, making new work for the experimental music festival Novas Frequencias in December. Now that sounds exciting! Do you already know what the final work will be like?

Yes. I am currently working in an abandoned casino in the rainforest developing some new performance work. I have decided, in solo performances, to work without field recordings and a laptop and to try to work with the space using sound objects, light and found materials. This is more satisfying for me as a performer at the moment.

The environmental sounds around here are amazing, (an intense frog chorus evening, loud nocturnal insects and hundreds of different birds). It’s a really complex listening environment. I guess I want to reflect that in my performance by building a listening space made with a mixture of materials and devices, some of which I find and make here and others which I bring with me. Also I am trying to approach performance spatially, placing stuff around the space and avoid just performing from behind a table. I will perform it here, in the casino and then at the Modern Art Museum for Novas Frequencias in Rio de Janeiro.

I’m also curious about how it feels to be over there. Each time the rainforest in mentioned in Europe, it’s associated with news related to deforestation, fires, persecutions of indigenous populations, drastic loss of biodiversity, monocultures and i could go on for hours. How is the general mood over there? Do you manage to put the newspaper headlines at the back of your head and just enjoy the experience and your work?

Yes. I had this impression before I came, a lot of people I have met a really politically disenfranchised at the moment but I think that is a common feeling across most of the world right now (especially the UK).

I am working close to a national park near Rio de Janeiro, the fires are not a problem which directly effects this place as it’s pretty mountainous. People here have told me that the rainforest is always burning, both naturally and for industrial agriculture but recently there have been many illegal fires in important places in the rainforest. It is a bad moment for Brazilian politics (that’s my impression) but I am really happy to come here and talk to people
directly, rather then remotely receiving media headlines.

Thank you Tim!

Face. A Visual Odyssey, by designer, artist and writer Jessica Helfand.

Publisher MIT Press writes: By turns alarming and awe-inspiring, Face offers up an elaborately illustrated A to Z—from the didactic anthropometry of the late-nineteenth century to the selfie-obsessed zeitgeist of the twenty-first.

Jessica Helfand looks at the cultural significance of the face through a critical lens, both as social currency and as palimpsest of history. Investigating everything from historical mugshots to Instagram posts, she examines how the face has been perceived and represented over time; how it has been instrumentalized by others; and how we have reclaimed it for our own purposes. From vintage advertisements for a “nose adjuster” to contemporary artists who reconsider the visual construction of race, Face delivers an intimate yet kaleidoscopic adventure while posing universal questions about identity.

Scold’s bridle, 1550-1775 (An Iron ‘scold’s bridle’ or ‘branks’ mask used to publicly humiliate and punish, mainly women, for speaking out against authority. Brussels, Belgium.) Wellcome Images

Jessica Helfand’s book reminds the reader that their face is a territory of both power and vulnerability. It is the first port of call to judge, categorise, diagnose, mock, shame, bully, legitimise, recognise, monitor. It can be doctored, discriminated against, adorned, hidden.

Technology further complicates the picture. We are horrified by the idea that our face might one day fall victim of some distasteful deepfake. And yet we are immensely entertained by apps like FaceApp, Doppelgänger, Facetune, Gradient. They play with our faces as well while we prefer to ignore that they too have their own dark sides.

Is the appropriation of our face by algorithms unavoidable? Should we just accept it because it’s “going to happen anyway”, because it “protects the legitimate rights and interest of citizens in cyberspace” and because privacy is dead?

Howie Woo, Crochet face wear for thwarting surveillance cameras that use face recognition technology, 2018

Side view of photographers posing together for a photograph on the roof of Marceau’s Studio, while Joseph Byron holds one side of the camera with his right hand and Ben Falk holds the other side with his left hand. (Joseph Byron/Byron Company/Museum of the City of New York)

Helfand’s book unravels the face as data dilemma and many other contradictions embedded in a selfie-addicted society where individuals want to be different and yet blend in. It takes the reader on a adventurous journey through history and culture, gaily jumping from anecdotes to theory, from Lombroso physiognomony to the predatory use of the photography by health professionals, from the racially biased imperial gaze to contemporary charities calling for “facial equality”.

The Twilight Zone, Eye of the Beholder (Short Clip), 1959

Face. A Visual Odyssey is as profound and complex as the theme it covers but it is also fun with its plethora of images, ideas and artworks. That’s probably why it took me weeks to read it. One moment i was reminded how good The Twilight Zone (the original show) is and i spent hours watching episode after episode online. Next, i was searching for more information about artist Nancy Burson‘s pioneering morphing machines which inspired the computer graphics industry and even the FBI.

I’ll close this enthusiastic review with some works i discovered in the book. Starting with the ones Wendy Red Star and Güney Soykan. They are among the most exciting artworks i’ve read about this year:

Wendy Red Star, Déaxitchish / Pretty Eagle, from Medicine Crow & The 1880 Crow Peace Delegation, 2018

In 1880, six Crow chiefs traveled from Montana Territory to Washington, D.C. to talk with US government officials in a bid to preserve their hunting territory from a railroad project. Wendy Red Star researchedthe narratives behind elements of the portraits of the members of the Crow Peace Delegation. She then annotated reproductions of photographs (taken by Charles Milton) with notes on cultural details in red ink, restoring context and humanity to these portraits, questioning the visual stereotypes of Native Americans and demonstrating the inability of a photograph to tell a complete (or at least impartial) story.

Güney Soykan, Face of a Nation (Italy), 2016

Güney Soykan created portraits of nations based on the most iconic portraits of their leaders of the last 50 years. He spliced the photos up and assembled them chronologically to create a composite portrait of countries like Turkey, US, Italy, Cuba, Russia, South Africa or North Korea.

Mat Collishaw, Narcissus, 1990

John Heartfield, Whoever Reads Bourgeois Newspapers Becomes Blind and Deaf, 1930

Visitor having forward growth of face measured by a senior anthropometrist, 1953. Photo: Temple University Libraries

Anna Coleman Ladd and the Facial Prosthetics of World War I

Zach Lieberman, Más Que la Cara, 2016

RealDoll, Oral Simulator, 2019

A trailer for Jessica Helfand’s book, FACE (directed by Lake Buckley & Daveion Thompson)

Image on the homepage: Wendy Red Star, Peelatchiwaaxpáash / Medicine Crow (Raven.) Artist-manipulated digitally reproduced photograph by Charles Milton Bell, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

A couple of weeks ago i found myself gaily walking through the former factory complex of Areal Böhler for the third edition of Art Düsseldorf.

Art Düsseldorf 2019. Sies + Höke. Photo: Sebastian Drüen

Art Düsseldorf is not among the biggest art fairs. It is neither cosmopolitan nor experimental but it did present a few exciting galleries and artworks:

Isaac Chong Wai, Rehearsal of the Futures: Police Training Exercises, 2018

The most impressive work i saw at the fair was Isaac Chong Wai’s take on police training. The young artist spent hours going through videos and manuals of police academies from around the world. He was particularly interested the tactics, actions and gestures deployed in case of street protests. The result of his research is a performance and video titled Rehearsal of the Futures: Police Training Exercises.

Chong Wai choreographed dancers to recreate the typical agressive postures but slowed down until the moves get gentle, the bodies soft, the blow harmless and the confrontation almost comforting. The full frontal physical violence subsides but the work also suggests other forms of violence that are institutionalised and less visible.

The video invites the viewer to question the intended use of police anti-riot manoeuvres: “are they meant as a first line of defence or a last resort?”

The video is a recording of a performance that took place back in 2018 but, when watching these images, it is difficult not to think about recent police violence against protesters in France, Hong Kong and elsewhere in the world.

I’m not surprised the artist won the Blooom Award by Warsteiner 2019 at Art Düsseldorf.

Elmas Deniz, Raven Portraits, 2018. Zilberman gallery. Photo credit: Ridvan Bayrakoglu

Our anthropocentrism prevents us from seeing animals as individuals different from each other. Elmas Deniz appropriated photos by Jana Mueller to paint portraits of members of the corvid family, highlighting their character and distinctiveness.

Elmas Deniz, Ravens have a Theory of Mind, Say Scientists, 2018. Zilberman gallery. Photo credit: Ridvan Bayrakoglu

The portraits are accompanied by Ravens have a Theory of Mind, Say Scientists, a collection of headlines from various magazines and newspapers that further demonstrates that humans are not as singularly exceptional as they think. The catchy headlines summed up a scientific research on the cognitive abilities of corvids. Experiments demonstrated that these birds routinely hide food to eat later if they believe rivals might steal their snacks. They are even able to select gifts for their partners based on what they thinks the latter will like.

Crows and jays have thus a theory of mind, an “ability to attribute mental states — beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc. — to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives that are different from one’s own.”

The series also alludes to our mediated experience of “nature”. We don’t have any immediate relation with other wild, living entities anymore. Everything we know about them is filtered through science which in turn, is mediated by the media channels that digest, edit and simplify scientific researches (and thus wildlife) for us.

Simon Speiser, In a Young World of Resplendent Glitter, 2018

I discovered the work of Simon Speiser while attending the very interesting programme of talks curated by Ute Weingarten. The series of panels and discussions zoomed in on how the digital is shaping and unsettling the art world. That’s where i learnt that ten percent of all art sales are now handled online (usually following a first contact at fairs or galleries) and heard time and time again that contemporary art is one of the few spaces where most actors are still intent on resisting any digital influence for as long as possible.

Speiser was participating to a panel about new forms of collaboration in the art world. I was especially intrigued by a photo of one of the tapestries he showed during his intervention. The tapestry accompanies his “In a Young World of Resplendent Glitter“ VR work. The weaving of the textile work makes reference to Ada Lovelace, the visionary mathematician who saw the potential of computers beyond pure calculation and who published the first algorithm intended to be carried out by such machines. She found inspiration in the textile machinery that used punchcards to direct the weaving of patterns. This reference creates an arch from textile mechanisation to contemporary digital technology.

Wu Tsang, Wildness (trailer), 2012. Excerpt over here

Julia Stoscheck Collection, a private collection specialising in time-based art, presented a selection of works that explore current socio-cultural and sociopolitical issues.

There were four videos in the space the collection occupied at the fair. The one that kept me glued to the screen was Wildness, a film that traces the story of the nightclub Silver Platter, a safe space and entertainment venue to the Latinx transgender community in Los Angeles since the early 1960s. Silver Platter is also the bar film maker Wu Tsang and DJs NGUZUNGUZU & Total Freedom chose to host a weekly performance art party titled Wildness. The film tells both the history of the underground venue and its community and the disturbance that the arrival of the new group of young, queer artists of colour caused.

The interviews in Wildness are poignant and full of humour, the film combines fiction and documentary, poetry and activism. It talks about tolerance, immigration, invisibility and finding a sanctuary and a family during the night. I wish it were possible to see this film outside of art venues.

Tobias Zielony, Maskirovka, 2017

Maskirovka is a term used to designate Russian covert warfare and military deception. The word reemerges regularly, most recently in the context of the strategy adopted by Russia toward Ukraine since the Maidan uprising. Masks, however, also played an important role in protecting the Maidan protesters from tear gas and from identification by the authorities. In a stop-motion animation called Maskirovka (also presented by the Julia Stoscheck Collection), Tobias Zielony draws parallels between these strategies and the subversive methods of masking practised by young members of the LGBTQI and techno scene in Kiev.

More works and artists discovered at Art Düsseldorf:

Andrzej Steinbach, Untitled (from the series Der Apparat), 2019. CONRADI, Hamburg

Jürgen Klauke, Bodysounds, 2017. Galerie Hans Mayer

Thorsten Brinkmann, Misstallica, 2019. Pablo’s Birthday gallery

Wim Wenders, ‘Safeway’, Corpus Christi, Texas, 1983. Galerie Bastian, Berlin | London

Hun Kyu Kim, Winner winner chicken dinner, 2018. CHOI&LAGER gallery

Thomas Feuerstein, IUTURNA, 2016. Courtesy the Artist and SEXAUER

Eva Grubinger, Untitled (Problem No. 6), 2019. Galerie Tobias Naehring Leipzig/Berlin

Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa, The House at Kawinal. Mendes Wood DM, Sies + Höke, Proyectos Ultravioleta

Art Düsseldorf 2019. Photo: Sebastian Drüen

There’s nothing more uplifting than visiting a solo show, being genuinely captivated by it and then discovering over the course of a conversation with another visitor that the artist is one of your heroes and you hadn’t even realised it. That’s exactly what happened to me a couple of weeks ago when i visited Heba Amin‘s exhibition at The Center for Persecuted Art in Solingen, Germany.

Amin is one of the artists who, together with Caram Kapp and Don Karl a.k.a Stone, countered with mischief and wit the stereotypes about Arab Muslim communities and individuals that U.S. tv series Homeland was churning out with each new season. Hired in 2015 by the producers to dress a set for a Syrian refugee camp with a bit of “street art” and “authenticity”, the trio used the assignment as a platform to mock the series for being the most bigoted show on television. They delivered the street art requested. Only no one else on the set realised the sentences in arabic they had spray painted said: “This show does not represent the views of the artists,” “Homeland is a watermelon” (slang for “a sham”), #BlackLivesMatter, “Homeland is racist”, etc.

The Arabian Street Artists // Heba Amin, Caram Kapp and Don Karl a.k.a Stone, Homeland is racist

Opening of Fruit from Saturn, Surveying German landscapes by night. Photo: Markus Rack © Zentrum für verfolgte Künste

Heba Amin‘s solo show at the Zentrum für verfolgte Künste (Center for Persecuted Arts) at Solingen, near Düsseldorf, bears the intriguing title of Fruit from Saturn. Room after room, the exhibition peels off some of the many layers of North Africa’s history to reveal protagonists who might have been forgotten by most but whose ghosts linger in the landscape.

The artist weaves sometimes uncomfortable threads between the past and the present. With fearlessness and humour, her works explore how issues such as territory, social structures and the exercise of power are mediated by technologies.

The centre piece of the exhibition the replica of a memorial. A memorial that might well be one of the kitschiest memorials i’ve ever seen but that hides a fascinating story:

Opening Fruit from Saturn, The Devil’s Garden: Part I (Pyramid), 2019. Photo: Markus Rack © Zentrum für verfolgte Künste

Heba Y. Amin, Marseille’s Pyramid, 2019 (replica of Hans Joachim Marseille’s pyramid in northern Egypt)

During WWII, the North African desert became the scene of European armies’ scramble for power over colonies. One of the actors of this fight was Hans-Joachim Marseille, a Luftwaffe fighter pilot nicknamed The Star of Africa for his many “successes” during the aerial battles of the Nazi North African Campaign. He shot down more Allies aircraft than anyone else but was killed in a flying accident.

Marseille is remembered through both a film and a memorial. The movie is Der Stern von Afrika (“The Star of Africa”), a 1957 German war film which drew criticisms at the time for its romanticisation of Marseille’s combat career and its avoidance of any honest confrontation with the past. As for the monument, it is a pyramid erected by German soldiers at the location in El Alamein where Marseille’ body was found after his plane accident.

Amin erected a 1:1 replica of the desert memorial in one of rooms of the Center for Persecuted Arts. The small commemorative pyramid is not the only souvenir Europeans left in the region. El Alamein was the site of a decisive victory for the Allies in North Africa. Sadly, it was also a region that German general Erwin Rommel nicknamed The Devil’s Garden. Right before the Second Battle of El Alamein in late 1942, the Axis buried an estimated 3 million mines to protect their defensive positions. Most of these mines, bombs, mortars and artillery shells were left behind and are still maiming and killing local populations today. Some have even been illegally excavated today and sold to civil war zones in North Africa.

Both the landmines and the “hero’s” memorial are part of the toxic legacy that Western ideas of modernity and progress have left on the ground. Amin brings their story on Germany soil to open up a dialogue about a European war that still claims victims today in North Africa, among a population that never saw these conflicts as theirs.

The work is accompanied by an interview with Cuban-German celebrity Roberto Blanco whose career as an actor kicked off with the film Der Stern von Afrika. Blanco played the part of Marseille’s ever-cheerful butler. The real person behind the character was Mathew Letuku, a prisoner of war from South Africa fighting for the British army. Letuku’s reports, unsurprisingly, depict a reality miles away from the one presented in the film. His experience, and that of thousands of other South African prisoners of war in Germany and Italy, were written out of the story.

Heba Y. Amin, Portrait of Woman with Theodolite I, 2019

Heba Y. Amin, Survey of German Landscapes by Night (New Morgenthau Plan) I, 2019

A series of photos shows the at night using a theodolite, a tool often used for land surveying. In this case, the surveyor is a young woman from North Africa scrutinising the German territory.

If the first image might seem innocent, the one titled Survey of German Landscapes by Night (New Morgenthau Plan) I leaves no space for ambiguity. Morgenthau Plan was a proposal by the Allied occupation of Germany to eliminate the country’s arms industry and other key businesses which might have enabled Germany to regain some military strength after WWII.

She uses the invasive gaze of optical tools to turn the table on imperialist predatory views of landscape and illustrate the key role that technologies played in the colonial strategies of the 19th and 20th centuries and the part they still play today in ensuring the continuing surveillance and exploitation of the resources of the Global South.

Heba Y. Amin, Optics Sculpture A Rectilinear Propagation of Thought, 2018. Photo: CHROMA

Heba Y. Amin, Optics Sculpture Vision is One of the Senses, 2016

The structure of the human eye according to Ibn al-Haytham. Note the depiction of the optic chiasm. —Manuscript copy of his Kitāb al-Manāẓir (MS Fatih 3212, vol. 1, fol. 81b, Süleymaniye Mosque Library, Istanbul)

Heba Y. Amin, Optics Sculpture Asfara, 2016. Photo: Kayhan Kaygusuz

Amin’s series of iron wall sculptures evoke the optical schemes illustrated by 11th century polymath and “father of modern optics” Ibn al-Haytham.

The Arab scholar established a key element of modern scientific methods when he insisted on the necessity to carry out repeatable experiments in order to test what was written in books rather than blindly accepting it as true. One of the earliest scientists to study the characteristics of light and the mechanism/process of vision, Ibn al-Haytham also proposed that, contradicting the beliefs of Ptolemy and Euclid, the eyes receive light reflected from objects, rather than emanating light themselves.

His combination of rigorous experimental methods and rational arguments had a great influence on English philosopher Roger Bacon and on German astronomer Johannes Kepler in particular.

Colonial powers erased Ibn Haytham’s legacy from dominant scientific narratives. Amin’s sculptures follows the medieval scholar’s questioning of vision and perception and critique our narrow ways of seeing the history and legacy of science.

Heba Y. Amin, Project Speak2Tweet The Gecko, Video Still, 2014

Heba Y. Amin, Project Speak2Tweet: My Love For You, Egypt, Increases by the Day

Opening Fruit from Saturn. Project Speak2Tweet, 2011 – ongoing, video installation. Photo: Markus Rack © Zentrum für verfolgte Künste

Project Speak2Tweet brings us back to the 21st century…

On 27 January 2011 Egyptian authorities shut down the country’s international Internet access points in response to growing protests. Over one weekend, a group of programmers developed Speak2Tweet, a service that allowed Egyptians to leave a voice message on Twitter by calling specific international telephone numbers. Over time, the messages grew into a unique archive of the collective psyche.

Project Speak2Tweet is a research project and an archive of experimental films that uses Speak2Tweet audio messages prior to the fall of the Hosni Mubarak regime as the soundtrack of images that show abandoned buildings. The juxtaposition visualizes the long-lasting effects of a corrupt dictatorship on citizens and infrastructures. It also brings to light the double-edged nature of communication technologies that herald new forms of democratic expression while enabling the powerful to repress it.

Opening Fruit from Saturn. Roberto Blanco, Heba Y. Amin, Jürgen Kaumkötter. Photo: Christian Baier © Zentrum für verfolgte Künste

Opening Fruit from Saturn, Fruit from Saturn, Poem from Yvan Goll. Photo: Christian Baier © Zentrum für verfolgte Künste

Fruit from Saturn, Amin’s solo show at the Center for Persecuter Arts, borrows its title from Yvan Goll’s 1946 book of poems by the same name. Its opening poem, “Atom Elegy” reflected the early 1940’s enthusiasm for the scientific wonders and comforts that the “atomic age” would bring. The writer later modified his poem in response to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Goll’s original unpublished manuscript of “Atom Elegy” is part of the Center’s collection and is shown for the first time as part of the exhibition.

Heba Y. Amin‘s solo show Fruit from Saturn is at the Zentrum für verfolgte Künste (Center for persecuted arts), a museum that displays the works of artists who were censored or oppressed by the the Nazis and later on by the communist East German regime. The exhibition remains on view until 2 February 2020 in Solingen, near Düsseldorf in Germany.

Guido van der Werve. Number eight, nine, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, seventeen. With texts by Michael Maizels, Jenny Johnson, Isabel de Sena in conversation with Guido van der Werve.

Publisher Kerber Verlag writes: On the occasion of Fluentum collection’s inaugural exhibition, Number eight, nine, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, seventeen presents six performance-based works by Dutch artist Guido van der Werve. After having studied industrial design, archaeology, and composition, since 2000 he has created elegiac, and stunning films, videos, and artist’s books that evoke existential feelings and, at times, deadpan humor. The comprehensive book situates his artistic practice within the context of athleticism, visual art, and musical composition, conveying poetic meaning even under the most extreme conditions.

Guido van de Werve, Still from Nummer veertien, home, 2012

Guido van de Werve, Still from Number zeventien, killing time attempt 1, 2015

Setting himself on fire, walking serenely in front of an icebreaker while the frozen water cracks behind him, going on a 1600 km triathlon from Warsaw to Paris as an homage to Chopin, pantomiming the ascent of Mount Everest from his bed for 10 hours or standing (almost) still and alone on the North Pole for 24 hours. Guido van der Werve’s performances are always breath-taking but never in a way that would distract the viewer from their poetry, melancholy and a romantic sense of the sublime. Each time i saw his works in exhibitions, i was drawn in by the description of their recklessness, by the extreme physical and emotional endurance they documented but it’s the meditative atmosphere and subtle humour of the videos that kept me glued to the spot.

Guido van der Werve. Number eight, nine, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, seventeen is the catalogue of an exhibition at Fluentum in Berlin which i haven’t seen but since there barely is any video of the artist’s work available online, i thought the book might be a good substitute for the films. I’m glad i got a copy.

If you’re wondering (as i did) why the titles of his films always start with a number, it’s because they echo the opus number of musical compositions. Van der Werve trained as a classical pianist and is a talented composer but he also studied industrial design and Russian literature and is an avid runner and triathlete. Somehow he manages to convey most of these aspects of his life into his works.

Here’s a quick illustration of what that means. With the number eight, nine, twelve, thirteen, fourteen and seventeen. In no particular order:

Guido van de Werve, Extract from Nummer veertien, home, 2012

Guido van de Werve, Still from Nummer veertien, home, 2012

Nummer veertien: home pays tribute to Frédéric Chopin. van de Werve swam, cycled and ran from Warsaw, where Chopin grew up and where his pickled heart is preserved (smuggled by his sister at the request of the composer), to the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where his body is buried.

The images of the triathlon alternate with scenes based on his childhood memories and references to Alexander the Great. The film structure is guided by the 12 sections of the requiem Van der Werve composed for it, performed by an orchestra and choir that pop up at various locations throughout the film.

Guido van de Werve, Still from Nummer negen: The day I didn’t turn with the world, 2007

Nummer negen: The day I didn’t turn with the world documents 24 hours during which the artist didn’t “turn with the world” but let the Earth rotate around him. The artist stood alone and in almost complete immobility on the axis of the world at the geographic North Pole. His only movements consisted in turning slowly clockwise as the planet under his feet turned counterclockwise.

Guido van de Werve, Still from Nummer acht, everything is going to be alright, 2007

The artist is walking steadily across the frozen waters. Right behind him, an icebreaker smashes through the ice. The powerful vessel looks menacing. And yet, without the massive ship, without this icon of the capitalist conquest of a territory that is literally melting, van der Werve would never have reached this inhospitable part of the world. Everything is going to be alright, right?

Guido van de Werve, Still from Nummer dertien, emotional poverty in three effugium (Effugio c, you’re always only half a day away), 2011

In Nummer dertien (number 13), the artist runs for 12 hours around his holiday home in Finland. There’s no prize, no destination, just endurance and pure exhaustion.

Guido van de Werve, Still from Nummer twaalf, variations on a theme (and why a piano can’t be tuned, or waiting for an earthquake), 2009

Psychologist Paul Ekman spent decades boiling down the fullness of the human feeling to six universal emotions. He then developed a method to identify micro-expressions of the face and map them on to corresponding emotions. Some of his theories ended up seeping into other areas of live, most famously influencing the training of Behavior Detection Officers who scanned the faces of incoming passengers for signs of deception at U.S. airports. Unsurprisingly, the theory and is applications not only drew criticisms, they also showed disturbing flaws. Facial expressions, his critics argue, are not innate, they depend on context, culture and experience.

Ekman has since modified his theory (albeit not drastically) but his idea of an universality of emotions has nevertheless been adopted by some tech companies to train algorithms aimed at detecting emotions from facial expressions. Experts studying the science of emotion are concerned that these algorithms, now used to assess mental health, employability, deceit and other key determinants of our lives, make critical decisions about our lives based on problematic science.

Training Humans at Osservatorio Fondazione Prada. Photo Marco Cappelletti

FERET Dataset, 1993, 1996, National Institute of Standards, Dataset funded by the United States military’s Counterdrug Technology Program for use in facial recognition research

Takeo Kanade, Jeffrey F. Cohn, Yung-Li Tian, Cohn-Kanade AU-Coded Expression Database, 2000. Courtesy Fondazione Prada

I discovered the work of Ekman and his critics in Training Humans, an exhibition conceived by AI researcher Kate Crawford and artist and researcher Trevor Paglen for the Fondazione Prada in Milan. The show charts and examines the photos and systems used by scientists since the 1960s to teach AI systems how to “see” and categorise human beings.

Training Humans explores how we are represented and codified through training datasets, and how technological systems harvest, label and use this material. Often with biases and weaknesses that become more visible as these classifications gain ground and influence. Within computer vision and AI systems, forms of measurement turn into moral judgments. Could these judgements in turn influence our own behaviour, our vision of the world and the individuals who inhabit it?

Li Fei-Fei, Kai Li, Image-net, 2009 (detail) Courtesy Fondazione Prada

ImageNet is perhaps the biggest surprise of the exhibition. You expected earlier systems presented in the show to come with their fair share of failings. But ImageNet was launched in 2009 by researchers at Stanford and Princeton universities so it comes with a certain credibility. This visual database counts more than fourteen million images and is one of the most widely used sources for training AI technologies to recognise people and objects. The photos have been classified and annotated by workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk, making ImageNet one of the world’s largest academic user of Mechanical Turk. However, the prejudices of the human Turkers found their way into ImageNet and as ImageNet Roulette, an application developed by Paglen and Crawford, demonstrates, the prejudices of that labour pool is echoed in the AI technologies that rely on that data.

Trevor Paglen Studio, ImageNet Roulette, 2019. Training Humans at Osservatorio Fondazione Prada. Photo Marco Cappelletti

ImageNet Roulette uses an algorithm trained on portraits found on ImageNet, it detects human faces in any uploaded photo and assigns them labels, using one of ImageNet’s 2,833 subcategories of people. The project went viral when people tested it on their own selfies and found out that the result of the face recognition process were ranging from utterly idiotic to downright racist or sexist. I tried the project while visiting the exhibition. ImageNet Roulette was incredibly fast at labelling me an oboist, an aviatrix and even an “alkie”. The labels changing depending on whether or not i had my headphones on or if i allowed my hair to go all Dave.

Li Fei-Fei, Kai Li, Image-net, 2009. Training Humans at Osservatorio Fondazione Prada. Photo Marco Cappelletti

The exhibition makes it easy to understand where the flaws in the face recognition system come from. Right before the a ImageNet Roulette installation, visitors encounter walls plastered with annotated photos from ImageNet. A guy happily dancing in a crowd with an arm raised is labelled a “gouger. An attacker who gouges out the antagonist’s eye”; an man with a beard and a rounded skullcap protesting in the street is tagged “anti-American”; white, potbellied middle aged men are “board members”, etc. It pleased me no end however to see a photo of Donald Trump with the label “mortal enemy”.

Since AI is increasingly used by tech companies, university labs, governments and law enforcement agencies, its inherent biases can have a tragic impact on the lives of individuals whose face ends up being inserted in the data sets, after having been categorised and labelled using parameters we know little of.

ImageNet Roulette quickly went viral. Five days after its launch, ImageNet announced it would remove remove 438 people categories and 600,040 associated images from its system.

The rest of the exhibition is equally fascinating. There isn’t any other artwork but there is an impressive documentation of projects that have, at some point, attempted to catalog and reduce our bodies and behaviours to a series of labels. There are mugshots and fingerprints of course but also hand gestures, voice samples that attempt to categorise local accents, irises, gait, etc. It feels like pretty much anything about us can be dissected and measured. Yet, the conclusion that emerges is that there exists no universal, no neutral idea of what/who we are. The image we have of ourselves never corresponds to the one others have of us. It doesn’t even correspond to the image we had of ourselves 5 years ago. It certainly never corresponds to the one machines reduce us to. Humans are simply too complex for machines. At least, that’s what we like to think.

Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen commenting on Training Humans

Michael J.Lyons, Shigeru Akamatsu, Miyuki Kamachi, Jiro Gyoba, The Japanese Female Facial Expression (JAFFE) Database, 1997 (Detail). Courtesy Fondazione Prada

Training Humans at Osservatorio Fondazione Prada. Photo Marco Cappelletti

Left: Yilong Yin, Lili Liu, Xiwei Sun, Sdumla-Hmt, 2011. Right: Woodrow Wildon Bledsoe, A Facial Recognition Project Report, 1963. Courtesy Fondazione Prada. Training Humans at Osservatorio Fondazione Prada. Photo Marco Cappelletti

Training Humans at Osservatorio Fondazione Prada. Photo Marco Cappelletti

On the wall: Bor-Chun Chen, Chu-Song Chen, Winston H.Hsu, Cross-Age Celebrity Dataset (CACD), 2014 and on the screens: Gary B.Huang, Manu Ramesh, Tamara Berg, Erik Learned-Miller, Labelled Faces in the Wild, 2007. Training Humans at Osservatorio Fondazione Prada. Photo Marco Cappelletti

CAISA Gate and Cumulative Foot Pressure, 2001, Shuai Zheng, Kaigi Huang, Tieniu Tan and Dacheng Tao Created at the Center for Biometrics and Security Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the dataset is designed for research into recognizing people by the signature of their gait

SDUMLA, HMT, 2011, Yilong Yin, Lili Liu, and Xiwei Sun, The finger and iris prints come from a larger multimodal dataset developed at Shandong University in Jinan, China which includes faces, irises, finger veins, and fingerprints for use in biometric applications

Paglen and Crawford have taken ImageNet Roulette offline on 27 September, as it had triggered the kind of public debate about the politics of training data the duo was hoping for. If you still want to try it, you’ll have to go to Milan.

Training Humans is at the Osservatorio Fondazione Prada in Milan until 24 February 2020.

Since i’m on an AI roll this week, i thought i should write about an artwork i tell everyone about but have never taken the time to mention on the blog: Asunder, an installation that exposes the possible consequences of an AI-driven management of the environment. I discovered it last June at the exhibition UNCANNY VALUES: Artificial Intelligence & You at the MAK museum for applied arts in Vienna.

Tega Brain, Julian Oliver and Bengt Sjölén, Asunder, 2019

Artist and environmental engineer Tega Brain, Critical Engineer, artist and activist Julian Oliver and software and hardware designer/hacker/artist Bengt Sjölén developed a supercomputer that gathers satellite, climate, topography, geology, biodiversity, population and social media data in real time. The system then uses the information to interpret and “correct” selected parts of the world that face various ecological challenges: the Arctic, the Brazilian rainforest, the Athabasca oil sands in Canada, Silicon Valley, Dubai, Vienna.

Tega Brain, Julian Oliver and Bengt Sjölén, Asunder, 2019. Exhibition view at the Vienna Biennale for Change 2019

The results of the calculations, visualised onto three screens, are ambitious environmental management plans that, for a change, don’t put the human at the center of the equation but look for a balance between the management of natural resources, social justice, protection of endangered species and sustainable production. In consequence, humans will probably find some of the AI suggestions deeply disturbing: the system recommends whole cities being relocated or simply removed, forests planted, coastlines strengthened, lithium mines transferred to technological production sites and other large-scale interventions on the landscape.

The work suggests that we might not be ready to give up our own vision of a prosperous world for the sake of environmental justice. Asunder also makes clear that, no matter what some advocates of geo-engineering and big data say, ecosystems are too fragile and too complex to be mathematically “optimised” and that algorithms are unlikely to provide the solution to the climate emergency and its consequences.

Tega Brain, Julian Oliver and Bengt Sjölén, Asunder, 2019. Exhibition view at the Vienna Biennale for Change 2019

The other interesting aspect of the work is that the computer requires a lot of processing power (and thus energy) in order to be able to analyse vast amounts of data and run climate models. Which, obviously, further undermines the idea that the salvation of our planet lays in the capable and caring hands of technology.

Tega Brain, Julian Oliver and Bengt Sjölén, Asunder, 2019

For more background on the research behind the project, do read Tega Brain’s essay The Environment is Not a System.

I was wondering how i should end the year. Should i publish a review of Carsten Nicolai’s exhibition at K21 in Düsseldorf? Or write about a book about art and biotechnology? I couldn’t decide so i went for the butt plug instead:

Thomas Hämén, Asstral Traveler, 2016

Not only is it an object that doesn’t tend to appear often here, it is also made of coprolite, fossilized faeces from animals that lived millions of years ago (coprolite is not to be confused with palaeofaeces, a term applied for human poo.) The material has scientific value, providing key information about an animal’s diet, the way they ate and indications about the shape of its digestive system but also the types of plants growing into the animal habitat. In the 19th century, coprolite were valued, not so much for their paleontological interest but for their potential as a source of available phosphate once they had been treated with sulphuric acid. They were then mined on an industrial scale in the UK for use as fertiliser.

Thomas Hämén sculpted coprolite from a dinosaur that lived about 140 million years ago to create a device for anal stimulation, in an attempt to make us connect with geological or “deep time”.

It is naturally difficult for humans to have a sense of time frames that extend so widely beyond homo sapiens existence on Earth. We’ve been around for a mere 300,000 years while dinosaurs were “roaming the Earth” in the Mesozoic Era, between 245 and 66 million years ago. So how do you connect to that ultra distant period at a time when everything around us seems to be accelerating?

As for the title of the work, Asstral Travel, it is a direct reference to astral travel (also called astral projection), an ancient belief that we can separate our physical body from our spiritual one to travel throughout the universe.

Connecting a sex toy with the faeces of an extinct animal humorously links the human interfaces for excrement and pleasure, with the vestigial experience – known but felt by no one – that dinosaurs once existed on earth.

I discovered the work in early November during the Artissima in Turin and i never found a moment to sit down and blog about it. Hopefully, 2020 will give me more opportunities to write about Hämén’s work. He had some amazing artworks at his gallery booth during the art fair.

While in Düsseldorf last month, i visited Carsten Nicolai‘s solo show at K21. I threw myself at it without thinking. I knew i wouldn’t get any of that political, socially-engaged discourse i spend my days immersed into. But i did know i’d be submitted to a fair amount of science, sleek techy objects and installations, along with electrical impulses, beeping, crackling, hissing and powerful sensory experiences. I wasn’t disappointed.

Carsten Nicolai, Unicolor, 2014. Installation view at K21. Photo: Achim Kukulies

Trailer of the exhibition Carsten Nicolai. Parallax Symmetry

Entering his solo show was like stepping into a parallel world. Mostly white, with hits of metals and block colours here and there. It’s cold, immaculate and elegant but never lifeless.

The title of the exhibition, “Parallax Symmetry”, is mysterious and slightly pompous at first sight but as you dig deeper into its meaning you have to admit that it perfectly encapsulate the breadth and spirit of the show. On the one hand, there’s parallax, a physical phenomenon described as the apparent change in the position of an object when the point of observation shifts. On the other, there is the striking symmetry of an exhibition derived from the tensions between light and dark, sound and silence, secrecy and knowledge, visibility and invisibility. The show packs on an impressive amount of physics, biology, mathematics but because the artist counterbalances the sciences with poetical mechanisms and a bit of careful chaos, you exit the building feeling slightly smarter but also more critical of the physical world around you.

Here’s a super quick walk through some of the work i enjoyed at this retrospective of artist and musician Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto).

Carsten Nicolai, Unicolor, 2014. Installation view at K21. Photo: Achim Kukulies

Carsten Nicolai, Unicolor, 2014

Carsten Nicolai, unicolor, 2014. Installation view at K21. Photo: Achim Kukulies

Carsten Nicolai, Unicolor, 2014. Telefunken, 2004. Installation view at K21. Photo: Achim Kukulies

unicolor explores the psychology of color perception. The installation is an hypnotising experience that wraps you inside a dark room where long strips of colours flow down the screens, are reflected in the mirrors on the side and make you realise how almost palpable colours and light can be. Until everything speeds up and flashes to blazing white. And the whole process starts again and you want to experience it all over one more time. Or even more.

The screening presents several modules of visual effects that play with the viewer’s perception. The RGB sequence, for example, moves faster and faster until our brains mix the colour and all we see is white.

The sound component follows a programme that translates the colour projection into sound. “The white noise goes with the white visual,” the artist told The Vinyl Factory, “but as the visual frequencies are assigned to red, purple and yellow, so too the amount of white noise fades.”

What makes Carsten Nicolai’s work so good is that you don’t need to understand the science behind it to fully enjoy the experience.

Carsten Nicolai, anti, 2004. Photo: Uwe Walter

The mysterious geometric shape of the sound sculpture anti was inspired by Dürer’s solid, a truncated triangular trapezohedron which appears in his engraving Melencolia I. anti is dark, mat, mysterious and its monolithic presence intimidates as much as it draws you in. The sculpture reacts to the magnetic field of the visitor’s body, enabling an interaction with the visitor. The interaction, however, is asymmetrical: anti absorbs and emanates information while the visitor remains in the dark as to its mechanism.

Carsten Nicolai, 98 % wasser, 2002

The jellyfish is a very unassuming animal. You know you should avoid them on the beach and maybe you even know that they don’t have brains, hearts or eyes. They are freaks. 95% of their body mass is water. The remaining 5% percent is made of structural proteins, muscles and nerve cells. It might not be much but it’s enough to make the jellyfish one of the most captivating and resilient creatures on this planet. They’ve been around for more than 500 million years, long before the dinosaurs thus. Some of them are luminescent, others have survived in outer space, some are even said to be immortal. They are not afraid of the climate crisis. In fact, the sneaky bastards might even take over the world.

98 % wasser is a work that features a jellyfish and a projection which, the project page says, is “a simplified model of the mechanism of a constantly moving shape that receives its directions from the computations of a predetermined formula. the juxtaposition of these two works demonstrates the impossibility to explain natural systems entirely through complex abstract models.”

Carsten Nicolai, tele, 2018 / void, 2007 / raster gradient, 2009. Installation view at K21. Photo: Achim Kukulies

Carsten Nicolai. tele, 2018 / sekundenschlaf, 2007 / raster gradient, 2009. Installation view at K21. Photo: Achim Kukulies

tele is inspired by the peculiarity of quantum entanglement. Albert Einstein called the phenomenon “spooky action at a distance” but a more rational description of it would be that two electrons that might be galeries apart can share a connection whereby if one of these two particles changes, this has an immediate effect on the other, with no temporal delay, as if there was a “telepathic” connection between the two. Quantum physics has since confirmed the existence of the phenomenon. In fact, a few months ago, physicists from the University of Glasgow took an image of a form of quantum entanglement at work, offering thus the first piece of visual evidence of the puzzling phenomenon.

tele are two huge mirror sculptures in the form of a split Archimedean body that are connected to each other by laser beams. “The beams strike photocells that send out impulses to re-trigger the beams anew. this sets up a kind of feedback system linking the two objects through the lasers to establish „communication“. electromagnetic waves spread at the speed of light, and are perceived by the human eye as a stable, straight beam,” in which the eyes see dust dance and evoke a more terrestrial experience.

Carsten Nicolai, sekundenschlaf (microsleep), 2018

sekundenschlaf (microsleep) uses sound as a sculptural material. The work materialises in shiny aluminium the acoustic waveforms of a recording of the spoken word “sekundenschlaf” (microsleep) when flowing through space.

Carsten Nicolai, nebelkammer (Diffusion cloud chamber), 2002

Carsten Nicolai, Future past perfect pt.1 (sononda), 2010 (Videostill)

Carsten Nicolai, Future past perfect pt.1 (sononda), 2010

Carsten Nicolai recorded a reading of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Ur-Geräusch” to act as a soundtrack to the exhibition. The essay, published in 1919, is a very personal and fascinating take on the phonograph, the first device capable of reproducing sound.

Parallax Symmetry remains open until 19 January 2020 at K21 – Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf.

The free digital publication TABOO ‒ TRANSGRESSION ‒ TRANSCENDENCE in Art & Science 2018 features a series of texts presented at the 2018 TTT conference in Mexico City.

Taboo ‒ Transgression ‒ Transcendence in Art & Science explores the nature of the forbidden and the aesthetics of liminality in art that engages with technology and science.

The proceedings are accompanied by photos that document the talks and the accompanying exhibition. As usual in this type of publication, some essays are stronger than others. Some are pleasant to read, others made me sweat. But all in all, the content makes for a fascinating dive into the world of art, science and uncomfortable questions. Here’s an overview of some of the essays i’ve particularly enjoyed:

In Coping with new categories and complex phenomena: a thought-in-progress, Roberta Buiani looks at the new types of bacteria and viruses, bioengineered species, digitised creatures and other complex life forms that have been recently created, often through scientific and technological discoveries and manipulations. She then outlines the questions and debates they have generated over the past 10 years. How do we define the boundaries of these life forms? How do we rethink the models we’ve inherited and used for centuries but that do not reflect anymore the proliferation of life forms designed, redesigned and invented in laboratories? How does this conversation reflect on a concept of nature that has now incorporated an idea of artificiality?

Wet-Lab art practitioner Adam Zaretsky offers a thought-provoking reflection on his own work which is characterised by a crossover between bioart, bioporn and medical atrocity as well as by the “refusal to live a dopamine-starved suburban non-existence”. His contribution to the publication consists in an introduction and a copy of a license he started working on a few years ago while shooting a performance movie called pFARM. The licence, originally devised to protect the organiser from legal issues involved in producing porn films that showed bioart human experimentation as actually enacted, can also act as a guideline to other artists and creators whose practices might disrupt body integrity.

Lisa Bufano and Sonsherée Giles, One Breath is an Ocean for a Wooden Heart, 2007. Photo via Kontejner

Zoran Todorović, Agalma, 2003-2005

I was very happy to read Kontejner‘s essay. Since 2002, the Zagreb NGO has been a pioneer in the production, exhibition and thinking around the entwining between art, science, technology and body. Their text goes through some of the key moments of their curatorial practice. I’ll just mention Zoran Todorović’s Agalma, a series of events which involve crafting and allowing audiences to try soaps made of the artist’s skin and fat. As well as Lisa Bufano and Sonsherée Giles’ incredible dance performance on wooden stilts.

Olga Timurgalieva‘s contribution used recent art practices conceived with or for other species as a springboard to reflect on speceism as a fundamental aspect of Western subjectivity. Two of the most powerful examples she chose to illustrate the decentering of the human in bioart multispecies interaction are Caitlin Berrigan‘s Lifecycle of a Common Weed and Miriam Simun’s Recipe II: Human Cheese.

Caitlin Berrigan, Life Cycle of a Common Weed, 2007. Photos by Alia Farid

In the performance, Berrigan -who is suffering from hepatitis C- gave some of her blood to a dandelion plant. While the blood carrying the virus is dangerous for humans, it constitutes a nitrogen-rich fertiliser for the plant. At the same time, the artist was drinking dandelion root tea as a treatment to cure her liver of viral infections. “In this way, her hepatitis positive performatively shared care, violence and suffering with the weed commonly unaccepted in urban areas.”

Miriam Simun, Recipe II: Human Cheese, 2011

During the Recipe II: Human Cheese performance, Simun offered the audience homemade cheese produced from human breast milk bought online and mixed with goat’s milk. The artist called the performance a “multispecies collaboration” between mammals and companion species including microbes.

Another absorbing essay was Nicole Clouston‘s. She explained how her artistic practice, which involves collaborating with microbes and in particular the ones living in soils, reveals how interconnected we are to other non-human species and how we have a duty to treat them as companions that deserve care.

Rachel Treide analyses Joe Davis’ Malus ecclesia, an ongoing research project in which Davis has encoded sections of the Wikipedia entry for ‘Good and Evil’ into the genome of the oldest species of apple available on Earth. With this project, she argues, Davis has created a living library that does not rely on human memory.

Sharry Taylor and Efrat Gold have a fascinating essay that reflects on the enduring and problematic legacy of DSM (Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), a book published in 1952 which continues to be instrumental in our understanding of “mental illness” and its association with work and socialisation.

Robertina Šebjanič, Lygophilia (Neotenous dark dwellers)

Andy Gracie, Drosophila titanus, 2012 Photo by Andrew Gracie

Marta de Menezes and Luis Graça, Anti-Marta, 2018

Jude Abu Zaineh, Maqlouba, petri dishes, documentation of Maqlouba, brass nails, 2019. Installation shot by Philip Habashy

The book closes on a documentation of the exhibition Espacios de Especies / Spaces of Species which took place in parallel to the conference at the Centro de Cultura Digital in Mexico. The chapter includes the texts of the exhibition as well as the introduction by the curator María Antonia González Valerio and Marta de Menezes.

I wish i had seen the exhibition. It was packed with what looks like thought-provoking works such as Victoria Vesna‘s Bird Song Diamond, a research project that aims to permit humans to understand the grammar and meaning of bird songs. Or Robertina Šebjanič’s Lygophilia, a series of research-based artworks that explore the dwellers of places dark and inhospitable for humans. Or Brandon Ballengée‘s long term art and science inquiry into the impacts that the 2010 oil spill had on the biodiversity in the Gulf of Mexico. Or Kathy High was showing Gut Love: You Are My Future which examines research in fecal microbial transplants and gut biomes to better understand the importance of bacteria’s function in our bodies. I’m also very curious about Anti-Marta, a skin transplant exchanged between Marta de Menezes and her partner Luis Graça.

The call for paper, poster and artist talk for the upcoming edition of TTT, in Vienna this time, is already up. The deadline is 31 March 2020.

The School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe has recently announced its programme of workshops, trips, scholarship and classes (PDF) for 2020. This year, the school will be looking at drones as a means to investigate concepts of borders, history, politics and human experience; Smell as another way to engage in storytelling; Sensual Technologies that delve into embodiment, desire and the senses; Ethics, AI and the potential of data to disrupt larger systems; there’s also a Made In China program taking place in Shenzhen and focusing on the creative exploration of digital fabrication and IoT. And much more.

Image courtesy of School of Machines, Making and Make-Believe

The Berlin-based School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe works with renowned artists, hackers, designers and other creators to teach and explore art, technology, design and human connection. Students learn new skills, manipulate new tools but they also get to inquire the political and human dimensions of technology.

I’ve been involved with the school a couple of times and each time i was amazed by the range of seriously interesting people i met there. The teachers but also the thinkers and tinkerers who attended as students. In my experience, the courses always end up taking the form of an energising exchange between people who have different backgrounds and competences. Another aspect that makes the school so appealing is that it is constantly shifting focus depending on the tech issues and tools that feel most urgent and meaningful at the moment.

I’m not paid to write these lines by the way, i’m just genuinely impressed by the School’s ethos and dynamics.

School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe was founded by Rachel Uwa. Rachel is an artist, educator and organiser with a background in audio engineering and VFX compositing. She’s also the editor of the art/tech zine ¡MEOW! I talked with her during the Winter break:

Image courtesy of School of Machines, Making and Make-Believe

Hi Rachel! You’re the face and founder of the School of Machines, Making and Make-Believe. Does it mean that you’re the one deciding the type of topics and technologies the courses are going to engage with? What guides the themes of the courses and workshops? Is it technology, requests from students, makers and thinkers? Something else?

Humans and society guide the themes of the school more than anything. Each year I look around at the current state of things and ask, Where are we humans at on the whole? Where are we missing the mark and what feels important for us to know now?

I don’t believe in embracing technology because we can but rather in questioning it and its purpose in our lives.

Some years ago I used to wake up and only seconds after reach for my phone. Then our alcoholic neighbour burned down his flat and we didn’t have internet for a year and a half because the fire burned through the cables. Needless to say, I was forced to reevaluate my relationship to this technology.

This is my approach to it, using technology as a tool that helps us to question the world we live in and ourselves.

So I design educational programs to do just that.

Image courtesy of School of Machines, Making and Make-Believe

I love the title of the school. Why Make-Believe? What does the concept brings to the spirit and image of the school?

For me, Make-Believe has always been about imagining a world that doesn’t exist and pretending it’s so for reasons of play (fun), experimenting with what could be (future), and simply survival. These are all super important and underrated life skills that as much as possible I try and bring to the fore.

It’s the kind of education I would love to have had— a gentle and metaphorical approach to dealing with ourselves by putting the focus on something much easier to deal with— technology.

Image courtesy of School of Machines, Making and Make-Believe

AR body filter by Daria Sazanovich. Image courtesy of School of Machines, Making and Make-Believe

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the school is that you make it a priority to work with women and persons from under-represented communities. I wish it wasn’t that ground-breaking to operate this way in the 21st century. And yet, things are moving very slowly it seems. But maybe i’m wrong? Do you feel that the whole tech & creativity world is finally waking up to the facts that talents don’t have to be white and male?

I used to work in audio, then visual effects before getting into the code and tech world. At the time, in each of these fields, there were almost no women to speak of. I’ve always been a person who made it a point to start the women in— audio, tech, etc. group to try and change that.

Looking around now, the situation appears much improved. But not everywhere. I hear often from women in Eastern Europe for example that it’s still a struggle to be taken seriously and it is not isolated to that part of the world only.

One of the things I also see is a lack of confidence in under-represented people in tech (understandably so), so helping people build up confidence to even ask for a seat at the table is another priority for me.

Of course, men always receive more attention even still, let’s be honest.

So we tackle each of these aspects and keep up the good fight until it’s better everywhere. In the end, it’s everyones responsibility to improve this situation, to do better. Even white men!

Image courtesy of School of Machines, Making and Make-Believe

The school was born in 2014. I actually thought it was created earlier given how much it has accomplished in such a short amount of time. What are the moments, achievements you’re particularly proud of?

To still be alive, surviving and constantly evolving is right up there on my list of achievements. I see so many organisations shut down operations. Without any institutional support it’s really a tough world out here.

I also feel proud about having run programs and workshops in other countries which I’ve been doing for several years. Thus far we’ve been in Italy, Serbia, Spain, China and Ireland. It’s immersive learning on all fronts— via culture, technology, community, ourselves. I hope to add more countries to the list soon.

The School offers many courses to learn about IoT, VR, data viz, drones, AI, etc. Which sounds very tech-driven but how does the school address a more systemic critique of tech and challenge western-centric notions of progress and innovations?

As I tried to allude to earlier, yes, we run workshops on technology but it’s not to fully embrace it; the first step is always to question it.

How does this technology make our lives easier? How is this technology used against us? In what ways can we use this technology to express who we are and what we care about (because it matters)?

Last year I was part of a think tank where one guy stood up and was like, “I don’t agree with this idea about diversity in the workplace. I don’t see race or gender.” After being annoyed because he was actually referring to my comment about the lack of diversity the day before, I realised he did have a point.

In the workplace people mute who they are and what they care about because that’s the culture. So you can look around at a group of diverse people and not necessarily see any diversity. I believe that self-suppression, which is very much a part of corporate culture, is doing way more harm than good, giving the false impression that diversity brings nothing to the table. I hope slowly this will start to change.

Of course, I address all these kinds of things and more in each of our programs. These are the fundamentals.

Image courtesy of School of Machines, Making and Make-Believe

This is going to sound super cheesy but i’ve always admired your maverick and daring attitude. You didn’t chose an easy path. An US citizen alone in Berlin builds up her own school from scratch. Would you do things differently if you had to do it all over again?

Well, first of all, Régine, thank you. You know I feel the same way about you! To answer the question, I think living through painful shit makes you a survivor. Of course, I don’t wish a hard life on anybody. But I do believe if we have lived through something, in childhood or onwards, sometimes we can use the injustice of our world to fuel our courage.

That said, while I don’t have a problem with courage, I do have a problem asking for help. So I’m starting to learn better how to navigate that world of asking for what I need because I finally understand what I need. It can feel so awkward and difficult. If you’re a person who’s received such an email from me, well, now you know, I’m still learning!

And yet communication is one of those all-important skills we need for survival.

I’ve been watching some Tupac and Biggie documentaries lately and from what I can tell, it seems if only they’d had a chance to really talk, the story of their lives could have played out so differently! So I think regardless of how it feels, it’s worth it to keep at it, to keep trying to improve communication until the end.

And on the other hand, what are the advantages of throwing yourself at a project with a lot of audacity and independence but not a lot of financial backing?

Lots of people have ideas but don’t make progress because all they see are the obstacles: I need money, I need a developer, I need fill-in-the-blank. Having an alternative mindset is imperative to a life of making things happen. Would I like funding and financial support? Yes, and if someone reading this would like to give it to me, please get in touch!

But I’ve been running the school for five years, designing over 27+ four-week, full-time programs with hundreds of brilliant students and instructors from over 52 countries and I am a better person for it. So I recommend to anyone, move forward on ideas that are important whatever it takes and allow these experiences to change and guide you.

Have you ever been tempted to set up the school back in the US?

I’ve definitely had ideas about running programs in a few states specific to organisations and people I’d like to work with. But there are so many fascinating people and places in the world that in comparison the US feels kind of limiting. I’m not opposed to it. But it’s not at the forefront of my mind just yet.

Image courtesy of School of Machines, Making and Make-Believe

Can you take us through the 2020 programme of the school?

Sure! Well, overall it has to do with this idea that if we want better societies we have to become better people.

So what does it mean to become a better person? I’m suggesting that we start off by becoming the greatest observers of ourselves and our own human needs and experiences, because if we want to know others it starts with knowing ourselves. It’s not the whole story, mind you, but it’s a brave start.

So 2020 classes are all aimed in that direction and are about exploring human experience through play and technology— our senses (Smell, Crafting Food Experiences), our bodies (Sensual Tech), nature (Nature, Generative Art & Machine Learning), our ability to tell intriguing stories and change minds (Transmedia Storytelling), the messages we convey when taking art out of the gallery and into public space (Interactive Berlin), our data and our selves (Ethics, AI and Data) and finally ever-growing in importance, our relationships to other cultures and to machines (Made In China II, Drones, Physical Machines).

My curriculum is my art! Haha. In part, anyway.

Projected photo that sees you looking at him by Michal Shilo at the Machine Learning course

“Mr Blippy” by Brent Dixon

Any other ambitions, projects and wishes for the future of the SoMM&MB?

Always! I’m working on— documentation of the first five years, more online classes, a symposium on designing better societies, more collaborations with humans and institutions I believe in, consultancy in education design, more pancake society events and ¡MEOW! zines, expanding to other countries and holding classes in languages other than English—for a start. And finally securing some funding! After all these years and all this work, I think we deserve it!

Image courtesy of School of Machines, Making and Make-Believe

Thanks Rachel!

Early program applications and hardship scholarship applications are currently being accepted. Deadline to apply for either of these is 26 January 2020. Early program applicants will be eligible to receive a 20% reduced fee if they are accepted.

In 2005, someone who posed as an Iraqi insurgent group posted online a photograph of a captured US soldier named John Adam. They threatened to behead him if prisoners being held in US jails in Iraq were not freed. The US military took the claim seriously but couldn’t locate a John Adam within their ranks. It eventually emerged that John Adam was Special Ops Cody: a souvenir action figure of both African American and Caucasian likenesses. The dolls were available for sale exclusively on US bases in Kuwait and Iraq, and were often sent home to soldiers’ children as a surrogate for a deployed parent.

Michael Rakowitz, The Ballad of Special Ops Cody, 2017. Film still. Courtesy the artist and Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino

Michael Rakowitz, The Ballad of Special Ops Cody, 2017. Excerpt

In Michael Rakowitz’ stop-motion film The Ballad of Special Ops Cody, an action figure breaks into a vitrine at the Oriental Institute in Chicago in order to meet small votive statues from Mesopotamia. It is Special Ops Cody, the toy soldier associated to the Iraqi hoax.

Ancient votive statues have something in common with the action figure: they were surrogates too. Commissioned by the Mesopotamian elite as images of themselves to embody them in religious contexts, they allowed the person they represented to have a spiritual presence when their physical body was away.

In the video, Cody urges the statues to go back to their homes. The artworks, however, remain petrified and silent.

Michael Rakowitz, The invisible enemy should not exist, 2007-ongoing

Michael Rakowitz, The invisible enemy should not exist (detail), 2007-ongoing

Michael Rakowitz, paraSITE, 1997-ongoing. Shelter for George L., Cambridge, 1998. Photo Michael Rakowitz

The film is part of Michael Rakowitz. Imperfect Binding at the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art near Turin, Italy. The exhibition is conceived as a survey of the artist’s over-twenty-year practice traversing architecture, archeology, cooking practice and geopolitics from ancient times to nowadays. I’ve been a fan of Rakowitz since i discovered the inflatable shelters he designed for and together with homeless people some 20 years ago. He hasn’t done anything remotely dull, uninspiring or dispassionate ever since. His work is inhabited by ghosts, invisible and invisibilised communities, generosity and his own heritage as the grandson of Iraqi-Jews who were forced to emigrate from Baghdad to the U.S. in the mid-20th century.

Michael Rakowitz, The invisible enemy should not exist, 2007-ongoing. Photo Andy Keate

Michael Rakowitz, The invisible enemy should not exist (detail), 2007-ongoing

One of the most spectacular works in the exhibition is The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist. The series attempts to reconstruct the thousands of archeological artifacts looted from the National Museum of Iraq, Baghdad, in the aftermath of the US invasion of April 2003, and the continued destruction of Mesopotamian cultural heritage by groups such as ISIS. The pillage and the destructions horrified everyone. In Iraq, in the U.S. and in the rest of the world, people felt like a vital part of the world cultural heritage had just been violated. Suddenly, it didn’t matter whether you were for or against the war. The indignation, however, didn’t extend to the local populations who had lost their livelihood, family or even their lives during or after the U.S. invasion of the country.

In Rivoli, long tables are covered with sculptural replicas of artifacts stolen from sites in Iraq and Syria. Rakowitz and his team have spent the past 13 years gathering information about the missing objects from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago’s database and the Interpol website. All of the stolen objects are then handmade in the artist’ studio using the packaging of food products produced in northern Iraq -in particular date cakes (maamoul) and date syrup- as well as from Arabic newspapers found in cities across the United States and Europe, places where Iraqis have sought refuge from the conflicts that continues to plague their country.

A general amnesty was declared for anyone willing to return stolen objects. About half of the 15 000 objects were recovered. Small objects came first, mostly brought in by locals who apologised, saying they had taken them for safekeeping. Even copies of objects for sale in the museum gift shop were returned. There is still a long way to go for Rakowitz and his team though. Since they started the reproduction endeavour in 2007, they have reconstructed “only” 700 artifacts.

Michael Rakowitz, The invisible enemy should not exist (Room N, Northwest Palace of Nimrud), 2018. Photo Robert Chase Heishman

Michael Rakowitz. Installation view at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea. Photo Antonio Maniscalco. Courtesy Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin

In an interview with Malmö Konsthall, Rakowitz gives a moving outline of his background and the motivations behind the colossal quest of faithfully replicating lost artifacts:

Michael Rakowitz at Malmö Konsthall

The title of this body of work, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, is the direct translation of Aj-ibur-shapu – the ancient processional way that ran through the Ishtar Gate, the eighth gate to the inner city of Babylon. The gigantic and colourful brick gate was constructed in about 575 BCE by order of King Nebuchadnezzar II.

Rakowitz used the same papier maché technique he had deployed to replicate the small artifacts to reconstruct some of the large stone reliefs that used to adorn the Northwest Palace built by Neo-Assyrian King Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BC) in the ancient city of Nimrud located on the Tigris River in northern Iraq. Prior to its demolition by members of the so-called Islamic State in 2015, the palace’s many rooms were all decorated with 2m 30cm high limestone reliefs depicting figures and ornamental flowers.

The reconstructed reliefs adopt the colour schemes believed by archaeologists to have been painted on the limestone when the panels were carved in the 9th century BC.

Just like the toy soldier and the ancient votive statues above, the replicas serve as stand-ins for priceless objects lost in a tragedy of cultural pillage that started long before 2003 with Western archaeologists deciding that these ancient artifacts were so valuable they ought to be shipped to Western countries where they were added to the collection of museums.

Michael Rakowitz, The invisible enemy should not exist (Lamassu), 2018. Trafalgar Square, London, 2018. Photo Gautier DeBlonde

The invisible enemy should not exist made a spectacular entrance into public space in March 2018 when a reconstruction of the Lamassu destroyed by ISIS in Nineveh, was installed on the Fourth Plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square. The human-headed winged bull is made from 10,500 empty Iraqi date syrup cans. This references another dimension of Iraqi loss. Aside from the destruction of historic sites begun by the US-led bombardment, invasion and occupation, the country is now also deprived of one of its leading industries and traditions: the production of dates which greatly suffered from the military attacks and the trade embargo.

Michael Rakowitz. Legatura imperfetta/Imperfect Binding is a captivating invitation to reflect on diaspora, war trauma and violence, dispossession, globalization and objects that are welcome to enter a country while humans are not. Only Rakowitz could make such heavy topics both heart-breaking and joyful.

More images from the exhibition:

Michael Rakowitz, Dull Roar, 2005. Installation view at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea. Photo Antonio Maniscalco. Courtesy Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin

Michael Rakowitz. Installation view at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea. Photo Antonio Maniscalco. Courtesy Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin

I wish i could have found the audio of what became the soundtrack of the exhibition for me: Smoke On The Water. Not the famous Deep Purple version, but a cover by New York-based Arabic band Ayyoub. It still talks about absurd violence but the Arabic instrumentation makes it more dancey and haunting.

Michael Rakowitz. Legatura imperfetta/Imperfect Binding was curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Iwona Blazwick and Marianna Vecellio. The exhibition remains on view at Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art near Turin until 19 January 2020.

Previously: The worst condition is to pass under a sword which is not one’s own, Michael Rakowitz’ Dull Roar at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (NL), Enemy Kitchen, paraSITE shelters, etc.

Socially Engaged Art in Contemporary China. Voices from Below, by Meiqin Wang, Professor in the Department of Art at California State University, Northridge.

Publisher Routledge writes: This book provides an in-depth and thematic analysis of socially engaged art in Mainland China, exploring its critical responses to and creative interventions in China’s top-down, pro-urban, and profit-oriented socioeconomic transformations. It focuses on the socially conscious practices of eight art professionals who assume the role of artist, critic, curator, educator, cultural entrepreneur and social activist, among others, as they strive to expose the injustice and inequality many Chinese people have suffered, raise public awareness of pressing social and environmental problems, and invent new ways and infrastructures to support various underprivileged social groups.

In her book, Meiqin Wang reflects on a growing movement of soft cultural activism spearheaded by artists, curators and art critics who believe that art has a responsibility to engage directly with Chinese social reality. These art professionals have developed various strategies to address a series of pressing social and environmental issues. They set up schools, art centres and libraries in neglected rural areas, collaborate with disenfranchised social groups, revitalize urban neighborhoods, document unbridled waste accumulation in order to stir the government into cleaning up polluted areas, curate exhibitions that lay bare the ills of a society driven by a culture of economic growth, etc.

Zuo Jing and Ou Ning, Bishan project: villagers help set up an installation at Yixian International photo festival, 2012. Photograph: Sun Yunfan/pr

Zuo Jing and Ou Ning, Bishan project: reading event with villagers at Bishan bookstore, 2014. Photograph: Sun Tao/pr

As diversified as they might seem, these community-anchored artistic interventions have several characteristics in common. First, they challenge the cultural and sociopolitical perceptions about life promoted by authorities and mainstream media while avoiding direct confrontation with the state. Second, they operate on a small scale and often with the assistance of the communities concerned. Last but not least, they echo China’s growing grassroot desire for a society that is fairer and more respectful of its heritage and environment.

Hu Jianqiang, People’s Kindergarten in Yebu, a large village in Gansu province

I’d wholeheartedly recommend you check out Socially Engaged Art in Contemporary China. Voices from Below. By featuring artworks that don’t always get the international recognition they deserve, the book confirms that -as much as i admire his work- there’s more to Chinese socially-engaged art than Ai Weiwei. The book should also surprise anyone who views China as a solid, one-dimensional country. China, as Wang demonstrates, is far more nuanced, interesting and rebellious place for artists to explore.

Quick overview of some of the artists, curators and artistic interventions i discovered in this publication:

Qu Yan, Power Space. Wuzhuang Village Head Office, Tushan Town, Jiangshu Province, 2005. Photo: Faurschou Gallery

Wang Nanming is one of the artistic figures whose work Meiqin Wang’s book explores. The art critic, curator and artist champions the kind of art that boldly engages with the actual Chinese situations they live in.

“The Space of Power: The Photographic Exhibition of Qu Yan” is one of the exhibitions Wang curated in 2007. In this series photographer Qu Yan investigates the office space of government officials or executives of state-owned corporations in developed and underdeveloped regions. His images show urban-based offices equipped with expensive pieces of furniture that suggest a material abundance brought about by economic development. Public offices of minor officials in remote rural regions, on the other hand, are usually poorly furnished but they display a stronger sense of publicness of the space, with posters and other political symbols propagating official policies. The contrasts between urban and rural offices hints at the abuse of state power.

The many social problems generated by the relentless speed of urban transformation is one of the recurrent themes of the book. Like Qu Yan, most of the artists whose work is presented in Socially Engaged Art in Contemporary China attempt to address and in some cases alleviate the problems encountered by the communities whose livelihood and cultural identity are being threatened by rampant economic development.

Wang Jiuliang, Beijing Besieged by Waste

Wang Jiuliang, Weicheng laji (Beijing Besieged by Waste), 2011. Trailer

Artist Wang Jiuliang has been working since 2008 to raise public awareness around China’s escalating consumerism and rapid urban expansion. Beijing Besieged by Waste casts a disheartening glance at the vast landfills surrounding Beijing and the impact their toxicity and pestilence have on the environment and the people who lived nearby.

Following widespread media reports on Wang Jiuliang’s extensive photographic documentation of waste mismanagement in the capital, the municipal government designed a plan to clean up and regulate about 1000 dumpsites surrounding the city. Wang’s next work, Plastic China, didn’t meet with the same governmental forbearance. The documentary film exposed the social, ecological and economic cost generated the plastic waste imported in the country for recycling. This time Wang’s efforts were promptly censored. The film and all associated reviews and comments disappeared from websites in China. In spite of the censorship, the central government actually took in the information presented in Plastic China and acted upon it. Besides, widespread online support of Wang’s work suggests a growing civic environmentalism among citizens.

Wen Fang, Terracotta Migrant Laborers of People’s Republic, 2008

Wen Fang’s work gives a voice and a visibility to marginalised communities. Her installation Terracotta Migrant Laborers of People’s Republic consists of 300 cement bricks printed with head portraits of migrant workers. A direct homage to a relentlessly overlooked social group, the work acknowledges a community whose existence is often rendered invisible in a society that seems to accept that socioeconomic inequality is an unavoidable price to pay in exchange for China’s rise to a global economic power.

Wen Fang, Arts For Crafts Sake-Ningxia Women 1, 2010

Wen went further in her efforts to engage with the life of marginalized populations. She traveled to Xihaigu in Ningxia Province where local women have no independent income and domestic violence is becoming a serious problem. As part of her Art Poverty Alleviation project, the artist helped these women create a series of modern artworks. The works were inspired by local crafts and traditional techniques. 50% of sales profits were passed on to the cooperatives as health, education and development funds.

Wen’s Arts for Crafts’ Sake project was considered by many as a successful experiment in poverty alleviation through art. However, in late 2012, she had to put an end to the project, mostly because of the hostility she encountered from local government officials and some locals in Yuwang town towards her activities in the countryside of Ningxia.

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The face: a territory of cultural confrontation

An illustrated walk through Art Düsseldorf 2019

Heba Y. Amin. The toxic legacy that European ideas of progress left on the Egyptian landscape

Guido van der Werve. Casually setting himself on fire, walking in front of an icebreaker and running from Warsaw to Paris

Training Humans. How machines see and judge us

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Carsten Nicolai. The aesthetics of mathematics

Taboo ‒ Transgression ‒ Transcendence in Art & Science

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Michael Rakowitz. The invisible enemy should not exist

Socially Engaged Art in Contemporary China. Voices from Below