Hyphen-Labs is an ether based design duo, led by Ece Tankal and Carmen Aguilar y Wedge that explores absurdities, fantasies, and coincidences at the intersection of technology, art, science, and the future. Charting a path between the profound and the absurd, their work offers reflections upon the relationships between digital platforms and the physical world and how art can be used as a tool of intervention and immersion.

With backgrounds in architecture and engineering Ece and Carmen use emerging technologies not solely as tools but as societal apparatuses to organize our species in alternative ways to rework the boundaries of materiality and imagination.

Hyphen-Labs live and work in London, Vancouver and San Francisco.

www.hyphen-labs.com

Darsha Hewitt’s art practice is situated across new media and sound and largely grows out of material based experimentation with obsolete technology. She make electro-mechanical installation, hand-made electronics, video, drawing and photography. Her practice takes an adventurous hands-on / media-archeological approach, where hidden systems within technology are de/re-mystified as a means to trace out structures of econo- my, power and control embedded throughout western culture. In its deconstructed form, the everyday technology that society throws away exposes the confounding ways that humans treat one another and how we engage with ecology.

Her artwork is presented internationally, with recent exhibitions at the Hong Kong City Hall (CH), Halle14 – Centre for Contemporary Art (DE), MU Artspace (NL), The Museum of Art and Design (NYC), Hartware MedienKunstverein (DE), Gaitée Lyrique (FR), Ottawa Art Gallery (CA), Modern Art Oxford (UK), The CTM Festival Berlin (DE) and WRO Media Art Biennale (PL). Within Germany, she was the recipient of an International Production Stipend from The Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art and held a fellowship at the Berlin Centre for Advanced Studies in Arts and Sciences at the University of the Arts in Berlin.

Alongside her art practice, she has worked as an a guest Professor in New Media in the Visual Communications department at Kunsthochschule Kassel and in New Media/Sound at Karlsruhe University of Art and Design. Her contributions to do-it-yourself technology communities are internatio- nally recognized – her workshops and how-to videos have been profiled by technical forums such as the Chaos Computer Congress and Make: Magazine.

Darsha Hewitt lives and works in Berlin.

In her research “Body Presents, Or Do You Mean Body Presence?“ Nadja Buttendorf investigates body movements and their relation to digital space. Using various motion capture techniques, she questions stereotypical body movements and their relationship to physical and digital space.

Motion Captureis a process in which body movements are digitally stored in three dimensions. The movements can be transferred in real time to a digital avatar. In the entertainment field, MoCap is used primarily in film and computer game development to animate 2-D and 3-D characters. Body movements can be transferred with camera tracking or through motion capture suits equipped with sensors. In most cases, the bodies used to record the movements are professional dancers and performers who can move particularly well and expressively. Motion capture is designed to portray and reproduce effective movements. In contrast to athletic, optimized movements, Buttendorf is interested in minimal, everyday movements, such as hanging out on the couch.

Buttendorf will experiment with a motion capture set from home during the digital residency, hosting livestreams and exploring different body movements in a constructed 3-D environment. The idea is to create an online library of movements that is different from the typical presets used in the game industry. Motion Captureis designed for a normalized human body. How can digital bodies be designed differently in a virtual world? Can mocap sensors function as jewelry? What can be perceived as body motion? Can objects become motion data for bodies?

https://bodypresents.nadjabuttendorf.com/

“Be? Here? Now?” examines the nature of the human hybrid existence emergent in the technological age. The central divide in contemporary discourse on this topic has a tendency to file into one of two factions that function in opposition — the wish for a total technological detox, and the willingness to commit fully and naively to the world of innovation.

Through a collection of resources assembled into a single website, “Be? Here? Now?” speaks to the emergence of mindfulness culture, specifically the emphasis it places on being ‘present’ at the level of consciousness and what this means for interpersonal relationships when being physically present is no longer the single mediator of emotional proximity. Since mindfulness constitutes a central aspect of this project’s interest, it is through the esthetics of mindfulness that these topics will be examined, specifically forms of meditation and relaxation techniques. The design of the website will be inspired by kitsch 90’s and early 00’s web pages, which also happens to be the style of many mindfulness websites to this day.

The title of the project “Be? Here? Now?” is in reference to Be Here Now — a founding book on mindfulness by Ram Dass that has both been called ‘seminal’ and a ‘counterculture bible,’ as well as being so liked by Steve Jobs that it inspired him to visit India in search of his own guru.

Work in progress for BE? HERE? NOW?

Who is not familiar with the last-minute shopping in the duty-free zone before departure or simply strolling through the range of products on offer? In this case, however, we are on our way to the teleport to immortality. What is on offer here should give us a foretaste of the technical paradise of the future that lies beyond: „Mind Uploads“, „Cryonics“, „Whole Brain Emulation“ as well as elevation to the algorithmic cockaigne are part of the range on offer.

Olsen‘sproject puts a special focus on a human-machine relationship that is associated with artificial intelligence (AI). This builds on techno-prophecy, data religion or information monism and is linked to a quest for control and a complete power of disposal over humans and ultimately death. The protagonists of these computational immortalization movements, are aiming everything at the technical paradise of the future. In the present day they have at least one main pillar in the IT-branch and areas that are classified as AI.

Fascinated by questions such as ‚How can human experience be mapped in storage media and preserved forever?‘ or ‚How does it feel to live in immortality?‘, the aim of Olsen‘s work is to give a foretaste of what comes afterwards. For example, smells are one of the things that are currently difficult to represent or preserve, store and preserve in digital media when „uploading“. Olsen will examine this and other difficulties in the man-machine relationship and explore them artistically. He plans to further research the immortality fantasies of the protagonists and, through a humorous approach, tickle the feet of the emerging figures of thought.

Taming Of Chance