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STUDIOTOPIA is delighted to be part of Ars Electronica Festival for the second year. “A New Digital Deal” is both the theme and the goal of this year’s Ars Electronica. The world’s leading festival for art, technology and society will be taking a look at the skills and scope for action that we need to get up and running with a new approach to the great challenges of our time. Hundreds of artists, scientists and activists will be demonstrating how this might be done from September 8-12 in a festival that will take place not only in Linz (Austria) and 86 other Ars Electronica Gardens around the globe, but also online. The on site and online presentations of all these artistic-scientific proposals will take different, independent forms. While Ars Electronica 2020 was a hybrid festival, in 2021 it will be dual.
STUDIOTOPIA is a creative journey addressing sustainable development across Europe through the converging views of art and science. In the course of almost two years, with a unique, long-term Art&Science European-wide residency programme, STUDIOTOPIA encouraged renowned and emerging contemporary artists to host a scientist or researcher in the independent and inspiring environment of their studios, reversing the usual approach whereby artists are invited to work at R&D departments of universities or companies. During their residencies, both the artists and the scientists were put on the same level. More than 13 artists and 25 scientists have as such teamed up for a 17 months-long residency programme across 18 countries. On the occasion of Ars Electronica Festival, STUDIOTOPIA seizes the oppprtunity to present to the public the evolution of its Art&Science Residencies. Get a first glimpse at some of the projects, dive into the artists minds and studios and discover what eventually will lead to the STUDIOTOPIA, Art meets Science in the Anthropocene, travelling exhibition. Next Spring ‘22, the results, developed concepts, research material, or artworks generated during the STUDIOTOPIA residencies will be exhibited in partnering venues across Europe.
Whom and what to expect at the Studiotopia Journeys?
'It may seem unfathomable that we could ever grasp the sheer complexity of the interdependencies of Ecosystem Earth. Each and every one of our quantum computers would crash when faced with the task of mapping all interactions from our microbiomes to the zonobiomes. One human mind cannot comprehend it all, but multitudes of minds have tirelessly worked towards contributing to a shared knowledge that together unravels these interdependencies. Within the initiative STUDIOTOPIA, seven European cultural institutions have invited artists to host scientists in their studios, and it is the hope that these collaborations build upon this shared knowledge. The journeys featured in this year’s festival offer a glimpse of how these encounters can shape a new understanding the role and responsibilities of humanity on our shared planet.' Ars.electronica.art
- House Swallowed by A Tomb | Ciprian Mureșan (RO) Confronted with their ephemerality, human beings continue to (sometimes abusively) build and create, driven by the sole ambition to leave something behind. Should we fill museums with objects and then build an industry to keep them intact? Browsing through my notebook, I rediscovered some sketches from the last year’s trip to Letea, a village in the Danube Delta. An abandoned hut is an eating ground for a horse. Houses in the delta, built on wooden structure, are made of reeds and clay. The roof is also made of reed. The Danube Delta, a land of harsh natural conditions and a complex social context, appears like a desolate landscape, abandoned by humans, with houses in decay, fallen to the ground and transformed into undefined grass-covered mounds, resembling a grave. As in The Little Prince, the hat drawing (a mound, a heap of sand) is of an elephant swallowed by a snake or a house swallowed by a tomb. There are no ruins, no architectural traces or human intervention. Maybe the work of art should have a similar life to that of humans: it is born, it lives and it dies.
Discover Ciprian Mureșan's project on the Studiotopia Journeys.
- The illness of the consciousness is corruption – smell and think. | Oswaldo Macia (CO/UK) with Emilia Leszkowicz (PL) & Chris Bean (IE) The aim of the project The illness of the consciousness is corruption – smell and think is to raise awareness about human consciousness and how unconscious we are of what happens around us. Oswaldo’s body of work consists in sculptural compositions formed from images, objects, sounds, and smells that create spaces for thought. His artworks investigate conventional notions of knowledge and perception. This raises new questions, such as how to find “‘back doors”’ to enter viewers’ consciousness in an unconscious way beyond one’s beliefs and judgements? How to open peoples’ perception toon the perspective of the Other? How could we start to feel responsible for the world around us? How can we truly listen to our planet and its human and non-human inhabitants?
Discover Oswaldo Macia's project on the Studiotopia Journeys.
- Marine Caves Benthic Terrazzo | Hypercomf (GR) & Markos Digenis (GR) Marine Cave Benthic Terrazzo seeks to investigate and communicate the perceptual and practical problems that arise in marine ecosystem preservation by inviting the subject of the ocean inside our terrestrial homes and exploring ecosemiotic links and physical interactions between human homes and marine caves. Hypercomf, an artist team from Tinos Island, researching the landscape of the seabed as a stage of anthropocentric culture’s undoing, collaborates on this project with marine biologist Markos Digenis from the island of Crete who is studying the marine cave benthos of Greece.
Discrover Hypercomf's project on the Studiotopia Journeys.
- How to Read Poetry to Cancer Cells? | Sandra Lorenzi (FR) What invisible threads link the life of cells to a Latin poet? What resonances do stones and cells share? Sandra Lorenzi’s artistic work explores the worlds of the living, both material and immaterial, right up to the edge of human understanding. Through her multi-faceted practice (drawings, poetry, murals, installations) she deploys imaginary worlds capable of connecting what is not yet connected, of bringing to light and into relationship what remains hidden and separated. This film takes you to the heart of her approach. Let yourself be charmed by the song of a cricket. Be transported by a colours’ vibration. As part of the Studiotopia Art & Science Residency Programme, Sandra Lorenzi collaborates with Jean-Christophe Marine (Professor, Senior Group Leader and Director of the VIB Centre for Cancer Biology, Belgium). Their project How to Read Poetry to Cancer Cells is aligned with her approach, at the crossroads of art and science, of the real and the unreal.
Discover Sandra Lorenzi's project on the Studiotopia Journeys.
- Merging experiences | Evelina Domnitch (BY, NL) and Dmitry Gelfand (NL) Science is the source of inspiration for the artworks of Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand. Their scientific collaborators are also fascinated by art. A portrait of interactions merges the borders of disciplines from the perspective of the intriguing and the inquisitive. The journey will lead us to “Obviously Unthinkable,” a public event at the artists’ studio, where pioneering theoretical physicist Tommaso Calarco shares his insights into macroscopic quantum phenomena at the nexus of quantum computing and art. Afterwards, Domnitch and Gelfand reveal their ion trap installation, Hilbert Hotel, created in collaboration with Calarco and the Quantum Flagship. We then enter the laboratory of Florian Schreck, Professor of Experimental Quantum Physics at the University of Amsterdam who is working on quantum sensors and simulators as well as an atomic clock based on ultracold strontium gases. These gases are cooled down and trapped by laser beams. Domnitch and Gelfand explain how they are collaborating with Schreck in order trap liquid crystal droplets with vortex laser beams. Our next destination is the lab of Guillaume Schweicher, Professor of Chemical Engineering at the Université Libre, Brussels. Schweicher is developing customized liquid crystal polymers to enhance the responsiveness of trapped droplets to twisted light beams. Together with Schweicher and Schreck the artist duo embarks on a journey into the eye of the optical vortex.
Discover Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand's project on the Studiotopia Journeys.
Start your tour of the Studiotopia Journeys as from Sept. 8. All videos will be available online on the Studiotopia Journeys section of the Ars Electronica Festival website. A ticket for the online festival costs 9 euros and includes hundreds of lectures, presentations, concerts, performances, interactive workshops and virtual tours. After purchasing your ticket, AEF will send you a personal link to the Swapcard event platform, on which you can not only consume the complete online program, but also put together your own festival calendar and network and exchange ideas with other visitors in chats. Register here.
Find out about the early stages of the projects on the STUDIOTOPIA Residencies blog. Meet the teams and discover which UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) they've been integrating into their Art&Science residencies and join the STUDIOTOPIA community on Facebook or LinkedIn.
#studiotopia #arselectronica21 #newdigitaldeal
Artists & Scientists in Residency Sandra Lorenzi (ART) & Jean-Christophe Marine (SCI) Kuang-Yi Ku (ART) & Jean-Christophe Marine – Sofie Goormachtig (SCI) Hypercomf (ART) & Markos K. Digenis (SCI) 3137 (ART) & Dr. Audrey-Flore Ngomsik (SCI) Alexandra Pirici (ART) & Paco Calvo (SCI) Ciprian Mureşan (ART) & Sanneke Stigter – Sven Dupré (SCI) Christiaan Zwanikken (ART) & Emmanuel Grimaud – DM Hoyt (SCI) Dmitry Gelfand – Eveline Domnitch (ART) & Florian Schreck - Guillaume Schweicher (SCI) Oswaldo Maciá (ART) & Chris Bean – Emilia Leszkowicz (SCI) Maja Smrekar (ART) & Jonas Jørgensen (SCI) Kat Austen (ART) & Indre Žliobaitė – Laurence Gill (SCI) Voldemars Johansons (ART) & Hugo Thienpont – Alexander Kish – Antoine Reserbat-Plantey (SCI) Siobhán McDonald (ART) & Chris Bean – Teresa Lettieri – Emily Shuckburgh (SCI)
STUDIOTOPIA partners The Centre for Fine Arts (BOZAR), Brussels, Belgium GLUON, Brussels, Belgium Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria Cluj Cultural Centre, Cluj, Romania Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdansk, Poland Onassis Stegi, Athens, Greece Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands Laboral, Gijon, Spain
This project is presented within the framework of STUDIOTOPIA, which is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
Eager for more? Some of the STUDIOTOPIA partners have their own garden at Ars Electronica Festival.
Ars Electronica Garden Amsterdam
Hybrid Forms Lab Hosted by Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Presenting Hybrid Forms Laboratory: an artscience laboratory situated within the Faculty of Science of Vrije Universiteit. HF Lab serves as a laboratory for scientists and artists to collaborate on joint research. The lab is open to artists to incorporate scientific methods, and for students from all science and humanities disciplines – including art and design academies – to work on projects which all serve as test beds to develop transdisciplinary education and research. We showcase several projects in artscience to illustrate the breadth and depth of this unique laboratory and its occupants, dealing with voodoo in Senegal, black holes merging, artificial intelligence and dancing plants.
Ars Electronica Garden Gdansk
Changes and Challenges Hosted by LAZNIA Center for Contemporary Art
The first section of this two-part garden showcases works by Polish artists responding to the festival’s main topic. Using different artistic approaches, they question such issues as digitalised corporeality, human/non-human relations, and the ecological consequences of digital storage. Karolina Żyniewicz in her performative workshop “Ethnography of flattened embodiment” invites us to explore the perception of a body in the digital world which becomes a 2D image, cropped and filtered in the artificial background. “Plant~Animals ~ Symbiosity of Creation” by Elvin Flamingo immerses us in the social movement of Symsagittifera roscoffensis, a unique, uncanny amalgamation of a plant and an animal, their interdependencies among them and us (humans). Justyna Górowska’s “The Blue Humanities Archive” examines the environmental cost of a network of databases exploring the subject of DNA Digital Storage. The artists touch on various aspects of contemporality, creating a multi-threaded, orchestrated narrative that reveals layers of our fragmented, numerical life. The second project, dedicated to the decade-long LAZNIA CCA’s Art and Science program, presents a film followed by a discussion analysing changes in the relation between art and science. The audience audience is also invited to the discussion connected with the “Trees of Memory: Roots and Runners”project devoted to the tragedy of Babyn Yar. Speakers will look at contemporary practices of commemoration of tragic events and ways of working through the traumatic past by the means of art and technology.
Ars Electronica Garden Athens - The Algorithm and the Park Hosted by Onassis Stegi
Onassis Stegi participates in the digital Ars Electronica Festival for a second year, with the program “The Algorithm and the Park”, presenting highlights from the You and AI: Through the Algorithmic Lens festival, which took place from June 24 to July 25, 2021. The You & AI festival centered on a physical exhibition at Pedion tou Areos park in Athens, which will be presented at Ars Electronica Garden Athens through a short documentary. The exhibition staged 25 international works, within an artificially natural public space, and was complemented by online conferences on AI, ethics and art. Public spaces define a city’s psyche. They constitute the embodiment of collective experiences; they are reflections of a city’s polity and politics; they echo its socio-economic relationships; they contain our common dreams, feelings, and ambitions; they are the material the polis is made of. In an algorithmic era, the physical public space is increasingly intertwined with -when it is not devoured by- the algorithmic public space. It aims at bringing all these issues, lurking in the background of our urban lives, to the frontstage of civic life. By bringing the Algorithm in the Park, we pose the question of what the boundaries of post-human subjectivity are: who are we and how do we position ourselves in an infinitely re-morphed-by-AI world? Is there a new deal, a new social contract that is being tacitly formed between humans and non-humans? Staged at Campus Martius (Pedion tou Areos), a metaphor for the constant conflict between different forms of identity, subjectivity, and collective experience, the “You and AI” exhibition poses and invites you to contemplate on fundamental existential questions for the post-human experience.
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