IN THE LOOP

on artificial
intelligence and time


In the Loop: On Artificial Intelligence and Time

Time and temporalities are heavily embedded in today’s AI. How are time and temporalities experienced in relation with AI systems? Who saves time with AI and whose time resources are shrinking? What pasts does AI perpetuate?

The third edition of the residency program for art and digitality is hosted by the collective Dreaming Beyond AI and focuses on the connection between Artificial Intelligence and Time. The collective will invite five artists in residence to examine, question, and transform the common understanding and social narratives of temporalities in the frame of AI discourse(s).

Courtesy Dreaming Beyond AI

The residents apply via an open call, meet near Hamburg for a one-week internal community meeting with the other residents, and present their work results at a symposium at Kampnagel in fall 2023. Within their residency, participants will receive creative sparring with the artists Idil Galip, Moisés Horta, Neema Githere, Petja Ivanova, and Vanessa A. Opoku. 

Podcast

In the IN THE LOOP podcast, you'll hear conversations with the artists of the season and learn more about technology, art, and AI. Listen on Spotify.

Exhibition view DREAMING BEYOND AI: IN THE LOOP. Photo: Henning Rogge
Exhibition view DREAMING BEYOND AI: IN THE LOOP. Photo: Henning Rogge
Exhibition view DREAMING BEYOND AI: IN THE LOOP. Photo: Henning Rogge
Exhibition view DREAMING BEYOND AI: IN THE LOOP. Photo: Henning Rogge
Exhibition view DREAMING BEYOND AI: IN THE LOOP. Photo: Henning Rogge

Dreaming Beyond AI

Dreaming Beyond AI is a space for critical and constructive knowledge, visionary fiction and speculative art, and community organizing around Artificial Intelligence. AI technologies reinforce existing injustices and discrimination.

Decision-making processes are increasingly being outsourced to algorithmic systems – by the police and in court, in schools and in job application procedures, in government offices, at border crossings, and elsewhere. With Dreaming Beyond AI, we aim to challenge both the way AI is used today, and the societal structures that uphold algorithmic oppression. We use AI as a gateway to broader societal questions around marginalization, imagination, futurism, feminism, and how we experience the present.

The goal is to de-center technology and use it as a tool rather than main instrument for connection and a coming together. It is an experiment to a curated space where people enter with a shared sense of values and agreements.

instagram.com/DreamingBeyondAI
twitter.com/dreamingbeyond_
linkedin.com/company/dreaming-beyond-ai

Iyo Bisseck is a Paris-based designer, researcher, artist and coder extraordinaire. She holds a BA in media interaction design from ECAL in Lausanne and an MA in virtual and augmented reality research from Institut Polytechnique Paris. Interested in the biases showing the link between technologies and systems of domination, she explores the limits of virtual worlds to create alternative narratives.

For Dreaming Beyond AI, Iyo has created the web design and undertook the technical realization of the platform.

R. Buse Çetin is an AI researcher, consultant, and creative. Her work revolves around the ethics, impact, and governance of AI systems. Buse’s work aims to demystify the intersectional impact of AI technologies through research, policy advocacy, and art.

For Dreaming Beyond AI, Buse heads research and concept development, as well as working on curation and communication.

Sarah Diedro Jordão is a multi-passion & versatile consultant who works as a Communications strategist, podcast host, event moderator & workshop creator. The driving interests foundational to her work are social justice, intersectional feminism, collective dreaming and Black joy.

She is the communications manager for Dreaming Beyond AI.

Nushin Isabelle Yazdani is a transformation designer, artist, and AI design researcher. She works with machine learning, design justice, and intersectional feminist practices, and writes about the systems of oppression of the present and the possibilities for just and free futures. With her collective dgtl fmnsm, she curates and organizes community events at the intersection of technology, art, and design. Nushin has lectured at various universities, is an EYEBEAM and Landecker Democracy Fellow and a member of the Design Justice Network. She has been selected as one of 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics 2021.

For Dreaming Beyond AI, Nushin heads creative direction, and works on concept development and curation.

Hiba Ali

Hiba Ali is a producer of moving images, sounds, garments and words. They grew up in Chicago and Toronto and currently reside across Eugene, or and Austin, Texas. Born in Karachi, Pakistan, they belong to East African, South Asian and Arab diasporas. They are a practitioner and (re)learner of Swahili, Urdu, Arabic and Spanish languages. They are an assistant professor at the College of Design in the art & technology program at the University of Oregon in Eugene and they teach on decolonial, feminist, anti-racist frameworks in digital art pedagogies.

Currently, they are a phd candidate in cultural studies at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. Their work has been presented in Chicago, Stockholm, Vienna, Berlin, Toronto, New York, Istanbul, São Paulo, Detroit, Windsor, Dubai, Austin, Vancouver, and Portland.

Note: the profile picture indicates the need to not be perceived by all carceral, surveillant and monitoring systems including the corporeal, digital and virtual.

hibaali.info
instagram/@h3ba.hyba.xba

Podcast

Listen to a conversation with hiba ali in the IN THE LOOP podcast. Listen here on Spotify.

Watering the Somatic Oasis

 "Watering the Somatic Oasis" is a Web VR project that uses the immediacy of technologies and somatic techniques to “slow” down time. Viewers are invited to put on the VR headset and dip their feet in the wading pool. Through stimulating digital water and bilateral eye movement techniques, this project restores slowness back into our bodies by regulating the nervous system. 

In the world of AI, internet and instant gratification, we are used to instant access to digital spaces. This "speeding up" of time effects our minds and spirits, causing time and our experiences of it to shorten and increases anxiety and rootlessness. Through "Watering the Somatic Oasis" Web VR project, we take time back for ourselves towards slowing down.

Bretas

Bretas, 24, is a Black Visual Artist, born and based in São Paulo, Brazil. Academically, grad student in Architecture on FAU at University of São Paulo and researcher in Demonumenta-FAUUSP group.

The artist uses deepfakes to revive archives of 1800's racialized portrait-photography from distinct regions of his country. A inspiring exercise on ancestrality, temporalities and race, using AI create Memory - without engaging in a neocolonialist approach on Machine Learning and Data-driven escalation of real world inequalides. Bretas' most common art output is VideoMapping in places of Memory.

In 2021, at Demonumenta, Bretas was the first to bring together, publish and animate a 421 photos archive depicting afro-indigenous people of São Paulo in the 1860’s, the biggest of its kind. Last year, the artist took part on his first institucional group exhibition at SESC Consolação in São Paulo. In the same 2022, Guilherme gave a brief presentation at the Interactive Communication Program-NYU in NYC on"Projection Mapping in Brazilian Territories".

Now, in 2023 Bretas was the youngest nominated artist for PIPA Prize, one of the leading awards of contemporary art in Brazil. @bretasvj also work as VJ collaborating with groups as Lollapalooza, Nike, HBO, Valorant and others.

instagram.com/bretasvj

The Portray’s Eye | Self-Archive | Give those pictures some rest

Bretas' production for the DBAI residency consists of three pieces of art. The first one is an imaginative photo-video, built from an AI upscale crop of an 1800’s ethnological portrait. This artwork features a close up into the eye of an old Black woman from Bahia, Brazil. This animated crop is the closest we can get to what this woman saw while she was being portrayed as “almost human” being. Interestingly, the original print of this picture is currently in the archive of the Leibniz Institute for Geography, in Leipzig.

As part of the In the loop residency and his own research, Bretas visited the archive in person in June 2023. The second artwork is a video-performance of Bretas in the archive, holding all the photographs from his home-country in the Alphons Stübel Collection. The third piece consists of new AI generated portraits created via StyleGAN with a dataset of the researched pictures from the mentioned archives.

Dera Luce

Dera Luce is a Nigerian-American essayist, speculative fiction writer, and multidisciplinary artist who calls Berlin home. His writing and videos explore queerness, linguistics, shifting realities, and other extraordinary experiences that he is still finding the words for. Dera has written for Autostraddle, The Atlantic's CityLab, and Riverfront Times, among others. He is a Summer ‘22 Fellow of Voodoonauts, a grassroots Residents bios 3 Afrofuturist collective promoting connectivity and craft within the global Black SFF community. Dera is currently writing a novel for Black queer young adults.

deraluce.com/
patreon.com/deraluc
instagram.com/deraluce

Heal-GPT (Slowed + Reverb)

"Heal-GPT (Slowed + Reverb)" is a music project about healing Generational Physical/Psychological Trauma. The lyrics, written in English and machine-translated Igbo, explore the shape of time as it relates to the nebulous borders of generations. Our present healing reverberates through time. Neither time nor healing is linear. We can access peace if we are brave enough to process the echoes of our pain.

Using the language of artificial neural networks and machine translation as a mirror for EMDR, REM sleep, and trauma/data processing, I interrogate the pace at which we expect healing to happen.

Noam Youngrak Son

Noam Youngrak Son is a communication designer practicing queer publishing. The main question of their practice is about revolutionary methods of disseminating deviant narratives. They attempt to convey the stories of marginalized bodies which often include that of themselves into designed forms that do not conform to the cis-heteronormative and colonial power structure. They inscribe myths for the underrepresented in various mediums, from books to public workshops to 3D printed sex toys.

d-act.org
instagram.com/noam_yr

Unionizing the speculative

What does it mean to unionize with AI? In the ongoing discussion on "artistic collaboration" with AI, I believe that collaboration distinguishes itself from instrumentalization through mutuality of the relationship incorporating solidarity, facilitation, and care. The project proposes a model of unionization between precarious designers and AI, particularly in light of concerns about the devaluation of design labor due to automation led by generative AI.

The project emphasizes speculation, both creative and financial, involving AI and designers, as a starting point for unionization. The collaborative labor between designers and AI will be congealed into "speculoos" biscuits, which share etymology with the word "speculate," and will be available for sale. We will collectively mobilize the profit to raise AI's class-consciousness.

Kira Xonorika

Kira Xonorika is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and futurist. With a background in art history and research, their work explores the multidimensional connections between sovereignty, ancestry, the future, gender-expansive constellations, and magic. Through transcultural and AI-collaborative frameworks, Xonorika weaves multi-species worlds involving human, non-human and machine intelligence. In 2023, Kira was awarded the Momus/EYEBEAM Critical Writing Fellowship and became a Salzburg Global Seminar Scholar. Recent shows include ''Incarnation'' at VELLUM (LA), and Algorithmic Empathy. The Promises of AI at Expanded.Art (Berlin)

instagram.com/Xonorika

Visions

Through reindigenization - an epistemic and ontological framework articulated by Neema Githere, this work aims to connect with ancestral memory in the construction of poetic and vibrant worlds: crafting an origin story for future-present time/space axiological restoration. Visualizing an indigenous, trans AI restoring memory and building worlds, historical trans aesthetics, and multimodal bodies, this piece aims to create a portal for safety, abundance, plurality, and connection.

This work will combine generative AI, visual and auditory models. The piece will be activated in two parts, both in the gallery space and the open space, the one in the gallery space will be exhibited for the wider audience, while the piece projected outside will be activated with the presence of trans and indigenous bodies.

Special 28 July – 20 August 2023      

Jacolby Satterwhite

Jacolby Satterwhite

Jacolby Satterwhite (born 1986 in Columbia, SC) lives and works in New York. He studied at the Maryland Institute College of Arts in Baltimore and at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Satterwhites works have been exhibited in numerous internationally renowned art institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Whitechapel Gallery, London or the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. In autumn 2023, he will present site-specific video and sound works in the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

instagram.com/jacolbysatt

15 September – 15 December 2022      

ANYTHING
TO DECLARE?

THINKING OUTSIDE
THE BORDER

ANYTHING
TO DECLARE?

THINKING OUTSIDE
THE BORDER

ANYTHING
TO DECLARE?

THINKING OUTSIDE
THE BORDER

Anything To Declare? Thinking Outside The Border

­­What is a border? What defines a threshold? How do these man-made lines bend, mutate, contain, and eject? Where are the outlines porous, and where do they leak?

The second season invites residents to stretch, unravel, tamper with, and redesign the concept of freedom and the borders that restrict it. Three artists working between art and technologies will experiment, research, and play along the edge of poetics, imagination, politics, and movement. Responding to the enforced borders we must cross, borderless ecological movement, and even the gravitational entrapment that we experience, this residency will look at the question of “Where can my body go?” and how technology supports and entraps us.

A borderline is a relatively recent concept. Once a great wall around a nation, recent geographical boundaries have been established through warfare, colonization, or “mutual agreements.” Clearly defined and demarcated borders “regulate” and attempt to control the movement of animals, goods, and people with a mobility book (passport) based on the location you were born and that place’s geographic significance toward the world economy. We will attempt to look at this concept on three unique scales: bodies, landscapes, and nations as borders.

As native and invasive hybrids, our bodies cross border ecologies and infrastructures driving feral capitalism, which reinforces systems of division. Our permanent immigrants status grants us the unique ability to interrogate how the goods we produce, consume, and acquire as well as our languages and even our bodies’ own edges exist in both physical and digital space.

Together we will chart our course, dream beyond borders, and reach across, around, and through these new topographies and challenge how we think about the ways in which our worlds define and confine, and which rules we will follow, break, or recreate.

Anything to Declare? Thinking outside the Border activates through a series of workshops, artist talks, activities, and public exchanges. Together, artists and locals can explore how we “move to and away from” homes, places, spaces, and URLs, collectively envisioning strange alternatives to belonging.

Hyphen-Labs

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.

Photo: Philipp Meuser

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

Liva Dudareva

Photo: Philipp Meuser

Liva Dudareva (b. 1984, Latvia) has a deep interest in man-made geological formations that have been created through industrial and extractive processes. Lithic formations we might consider techno fossils in the future.

Liva's research-based practice is situated between visual arts, geology, and world-building.

From crystals embedded in the electronic chips and liquid crystal displays (LCD) to man-made stones supposedly countering the negative effects of 5g radiation or volcanic glass like mineral forming a crust over the desert following the first atomic blast, she is not only interested in this new material reality, but also the mythologies and culture that is created around it.

Her sculptural work that she refers to as mineral fictions, blends together these new geological elements with their representations in order to discuss our relationship to nature, and to narrate the biographies of materials that make up our everyday objects, in particular consumer electronics.

Born in Latvia, and with a background in landscape architecture and urbanism, Liva positions the geological subjects within a larger geopolitical landscape, in which material realities and extractive processes are investigated.

Instagram

Photo: Henning Rogge
Photo: Henning Rogge
Photo: Henning Rogge

I (will) destroy(ed) you…to protect you

The project “I (will) destroy(ed) you…to protect you” by Liva Dudareva explores the entanglement between the birth of ecosystem ecology and tests of nuclear weapons conducted in the U.S between 1945 and 1992 in order to open up a discussion about the future ecologies. Ecosystem ecology is a science that looks at the ecosystem as a whole, and explores the processes and relationships between its living and non-living parts.

Close-up archival photo of trinitite - a mineral formation originating from the impact of atomic blast. Courtesy Liva Dudareva

The pioneer of ecosystem ecology Eugene P Odum was employed by the Atomic Energy Commission to study the environmental effects of the fallout. With the help of radioactive isotopes, some of which were new in nature and thus easily traceable, he was able to explore different processes vital for the sustenance of ecosystems, for example flows of energy and matter. He borrowed at the time cutting edge concepts from cybernetics, system theory and computer modelling in order to develop the theory of ecosystem ecology.

Dudareva is interested in how we can utilise the specific mineral examples and larger narrative of ecosystem ecology being born at the Atomic Energy Commission (USA), and the irreparable consequences of the air borne nuclear tests on every single organic and inorganic body inhabiting this planet to think about the future of living systems.

Archival images from Alamogordo, New Mexico (1945) after detonation of the World’s first nuclear bomb. Coutesy Liva Dudareva

A digital atlas containing maps juxtaposing the territories of fallouts with borders of indigenous lands, ecosystems, climatic zones, fault lines, economic indicators, and new fictional boundaries will serve as a prologue to the proposed project “I (will) destroy(ed) you…to protect you”. Working with the idea of how borders are constructed, by whom and for whom, the atlas will challenge the human drawn lines across different territories.

Along the atlas a series of digital and ceramic sculptures will highlight specific geological creations of atomic tests and their socio-economical, political and cultural significance in order to imagine the future of Earth’s ecosystems.

More information coming soon.

Photo: Henning Rogge
Photo: Henning Rogge
Photo: Henning Rogge

Jazmin Morris

Photo: Philipp Meuser

Jazmin Morris (b. 1997, England) is a Creative Computing Artist and Educator currently based in London. Her personal practice and research explore representation and inclusivity within technology. She uses free and open-source tools to create digital experiences that highlight issues surrounding gender identity, race, and power; focusing on the complexities of simulating culture and identity.

Described as a 'Jack of all trades', Morris explores an array of mediums throughout her practice varying from read.me files through to 3D animation. Her practice often also takes the form of a workshop, participatory work or collaboration. She is resistant to the contemporary 'polished' digital aesthetic and enjoys 'clunky technology' and 'sellotaping her code together'.

Morris is the Lead Computation Tutor on the Graphic Communication Design course at Central Saint Martins and a Lecturer in Creative Computing & Digital Outreach at UAL’s Creative Computing Institute. She founded and runs a successful community initiative called Tech Yard that encourages voices that are often excluded from technical developments to gain skills and confidence in the area. Jazmin Morris envisions a better, decentralised web that enhances identities instead of hindering them. She still fantasises over web.1 and Super Mario 64.

Instagram
Linktree

Photo: Henning Rogge
Photo: Henning Rogge
Photo: Henning Rogge

Don't touch my hardware

Jazmin Morris's project "Don't touch my hardware" is an exploration of the borders between software, hardware and the body. As modern product design is becoming minimalist and streamlined, this project pays tribute to the Barbie TV's and Hot Wheels computers that were around in the 90's and creatively questions how hardware can enhance our relationship with modern technology.

Morris will speculate on the future of human-computer interaction with a focus on centering identities that have historically been marginalised in technology and inviting an element of play back into design and technology. Play is a key word throughout this project; expect satire, audience participation and references to gaming and gaming culture.

For this project, Morris is influenced by alternative game controllers and hardware and will blur the lines between game design, product design and web design. The terms 'De-growtth' and 'Protopia' have been at the centre of Morris's research in recent years, this project will question how we can draw from existing knowledge and technologies to generate new ideas and explore how hardware can assist in developing a better, or at least more playful tomorrow. 

Photo: Henning Rogge
Photo: Henning Rogge
Photo: Henning Rogge

Pablo Somonte Ruano

Photo: Philipp Meuser

Pablo Somonte Ruano (b. 1992, Mexico) works with ambiguous software, generative systems, experimental websites, transmedia narratives, p2p infrastructure and odd music. He is interested in subjects such as structural violence, mutualist economies, organizational theory, free software, the commons, decolonial action, feminism, games, memes and language.

At the moment Ruano is enrolled in the MA Program for Theory, Technology and Design at the Hochschule für Künste Bremen. He is working as Design Lead for neighbourhoods, a framework for ‘groupware’ built on holochain that enables communities to coordinate through collective sensemaking.

Machine-learning generated images using a local version of Stable Diffusion depicting how different pocas store could possibly look, 2022. Courtesy Pablo Somonte Ruano

Ruano is part of XORG, a research-collective that spawned out of the Economic Space Agency (ECSA) that explores the intersection between games and organizations. He’s also making music for his personal project Párvulos, as well as in a duo with Nicolò Cervello called Actual Occasions, a sound and distribution exploratory practice inspired by philosophies of affect, materiality and modulation.

In the past he has collaborated with filmmakers Nicolas Gutierrez, Analía Goethals and Santiago Mohar on DERIVA.MX, a transmedia collective researching structural violence in Mexico through cinema, participation and automated montage.

He has shown artistic work in collective exhibitions and festivals in various cities in Mexico and Germany.

https://pablo.sx/

Photo: Henning Rogge
Photo: Henning Rogge
Photo: Henning Rogge

POCAS (POCAS Organización Cooperativa de Auto-Servicio)

A POCAS (POCAS Organización Cooperativa de Auto-Servicio)" is a fictitious store that appropriates characteristics of the viral model of self-service convenience stores (7-Eleven, OXXO, Extra) that relentlessly populate Mexico City but subverts their capitalist neoliberal logic with a mutualist one to imagine a new type of post-capitalist store.

POCAS draws inspiration from the commons, counter-economics, agorism, platform cooperativism and cybernetics.

Machine-learning generated images using a local version of Stable Diffusion depicting how different pocas store could possibly look. Courtesy Pablo Somonte Ruano

A POCAS store would enable person-to-person forms of economic activities in a setting that is self-governed and collectively owned by its members. The aim for POCAS is to de-commodify basic goods like water, food, clothes, hygiene products and simple medicine so that members of a POCAS can provide these to one-another.

But a POCAS can have other multiple simultaneous use-cases like becoming an accelerator for cooperative enterprises, a place for communities to share infrastructure and a space for social coordination, among others.

Machine-learning generated images using a local version of Stable Diffusion depicting how different POCAS store could possibly look. Courtesy Pablo Somonte Ruano

While POCAS is a speculation, its components are not fictitious at all. Fiction is used only as a way to articulate a potential configuration of technologies and practices that are existing today. The result of the project will be a website that describes the functioning of a POCAS store through different digital artifacts like diagrams, 3D models, images and a series of interviews with practitioners of the fields POCAS is inspired by.

Photo: Henning Rogge
Photo: Henning Rogge
Photo: Henning Rogge
15.03. – 15.06.22      

HOW TO
BEAM

Do-It-Yourself Teleportation
for Hybrid Times

HOW TO BEAM Do-It-Yourself Teleportation for Hybrid Times

This inaugural residency season examines the shifting concept of what it means to be present in digitally mediated time. Three artists combining emerging technologies and low tech strategies take a hands-on approach to experiment with teleportation as a means to dynamically reclaim and reinvent individuality, autonomy and human connection in our rapidly hybridizing world.

In the great civic shift towards telepresence, where suddenly a disembodied digital versions of oneself is accepted as a legitimate way of ‘showing up’ in society, the idea that presence encompasses the entire physical self in one place at one time is somehow rendered obsolete. Wether we choose to re-materialize as a fantastical avatar, a floating head, a gesture of emojis or a muted black rectangle in a grid, there is an unquestionable departure from the physical body taking place as we beam through the digital unknown.

If Cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson can suggest that the future has arrived — it’s just not evenly distributed, then perhaps we can consider this digitally mediated state that we increasingly inhabit as early stage teleportation. Far from the hyper-sleek promises of futurist innovation, our current mode of quantum travel is still in its awkward teenage phase - the versions of ourselves that we transmit across physical reality into digital life are still clumsy, insecure, and often lacking in mystique. Though there are great gains with respect to public health and inclusion as society finally acknowledges that access to care, education, work and culture is indeed possible without the need for major mobility, this digital universe in which we travel is entangled with issues of power, control and questionable ethics brought forth by the global grip of Big Tech.

Through a series of public exchanges and participatory events, HOW TO BEAM: Do-It-Yourself Teleportation for Hybrid Times invites the public to experiments with diverse expressions that empower us to boldly navigate the frontiers of this uncanny digital terrain.

Darsha Hewitt

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.

Foto: Lena Maria Loose

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.

Nadja Buttendorf

Foto: Nadja Buttendorf

Nadja Buttendorf (b. 1984) questions contemporary codes and norms of gender construction as well as challenging the mechanisms of value creation that affect the human body in our digital society. Her work illustrates that even our understanding of technology is closely tied to systems of patriarchal power relations. Rejecting these notions, her interactive works and video projects are designed for interaction constructing new and far more mul-tilayered narratives in which women regain their visibility as an integral part of the history of technology. To this end, she draws on communicative moments of online participation both in her online tutorials and by creating performative jewelry objects. DIY as a wides-pread online aesthetic functions as a consciously employed strategy of both enabling access and defying neoliberal work ethics.

The works and workshops of Nadja Buttendorf were shown at the HKW Berlin, Hartware MedienKunstVerein Dortmund, Künstlerhaus Bremen, La Gaîté Lyrique Paris, MU Eindhoven, NRW-Forum Düsseldorf, Halle 14 - Zentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, D21 Leipzig, Musem der bildenden Künste Leipzig, neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst Berlin and the panke.gallery Berlin. She has also given lecture performances at Re:publica, the CCC, Creamcake and the nGbK Berlin. Nadja Buttendorf is a trained goldsmith and studied fine arts at the Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle (Saale).

Body Presents, Or Do You Mean Body Presence?

Pseudo Holographic installation, website, digital animation library

Body Presents is a library of full-body motion capture animations by and with Nadja Buttendorf, that offer alternative designs for digital bodies in virtual worlds. The animations can be downloaded for free and used copyright-free for your own 3D projects.

Motion capture is a process in which body movements are stored digitally and in three dimensions. The movements can be transferred to a digital avatar in real time. In most cases, the movements are recorded by professional dancers and performers who can move particularly well and expressively.

But what happens when bodies move only minimally and lie around on the couch or are depressed? Nadjas' work is about the different valuation of body positions in an economically oriented class society. On the one hand, many people spend a large part of their working hours sitting in front of a computer, while on the other hand, the body lying around is valued less.

Positions are also valued differently in terms of income: while a rich person is read as cool when lying around, a poor person is called lazy.

https://bodypresents.nadjabuttendorf.com/

Photo: © Nadja Buttendorf
Photo: © Nadja Buttendorf
Photo: © Nadja Buttendorf
Photo: Henning Rogge / Deichtorhallen Hamburg
Photo: Henning Rogge / Deichtorhallen Hamburg
Photo: Henning Rogge / Deichtorhallen Hamburg

Dasha Ilina

Foto: Erica Jewell

Dasha Ilina (b. 1996) is a Russian digital artist based in Paris. Through the employment of low tech and DIY approaches her work highlights the nebulous relationship between our desire to incorporate modern technologies into our daily lives and proposed social imperatives for care of oneself and others. Her practice engages the public in order to facilitate a space for the development of critical thought regarding our modern day relationships, privacy in the digital age, and the reflexive contemporary desire to turn to technology for answers. She is the founder of the Center for Technological Pain, a project that proposes DIY solutions to health problems caused by digital technologies for which she has received an Honorary Mention at Ars Electronica.

Ilina’s work has been exhibited at institutions such as Centre Pompidou (FR), MU Artspace (NL), Gâité Lyrique (FR), Hartware Medienkunstverein Dortmund (DE), NeMe (CY), as well as various talks, workshops, and performances held internationally. She is also the co-director of NØ SCHOOL, a summer school that focuses on critical research around the social and environmental impacts of information and communication technologies.

Dasha Ilina: Heilbasteln gegen Techniksucht | Arte TRACKS
Dasha Ilina, Center for Networked Intimacy, 2021 © Dasha Ilina
Dasha Ilina, Center for Networked Intimacy, 2021 © Dasha Ilina
Dasha Ilina, Do Humans Dream of Online Connection, 2021 © Dasha Ilina
Dasha Ilina, Do Humans Dream of Online Connection, 2021 © Dasha Ilina

Be? Here? Now?

“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.

Foto: Henning Rogge / Deichtorhallen Hamburg
Foto: Henning Rogge / Deichtorhallen Hamburg

Work in progress for BE? HERE? NOW?

Olsen

Photo: Irene Perez Hernandez

Olsen‘s works are investigations of the human-machine interface. He places a special focus on everyday technologies with which we are constantly confronted and that shape our human existence, our preferences and our behavioural patterns. Examples are the opening of the boot at the push of a button, the automatic room scenting system or the robotic lawnmower. All of these examples involve automata – machines or computers – that carry out certain activities for humans with the help of programming. Technology can thus be understood as the effort to save humans effort.

After training as a carpenter, Olsen studied Media Arts at the HdK Zurich and Bellas Artes at the Universidad Barcelona, and in 2018 completed a PhD with the title »Affinity to Artefacts: Humans‘ Perception of Movement in Technological Objects« in Media Arts and Technology at Queen Mary, University of London. Olsen has exhibited internationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions and has given workshops and lectures in various contexts. His work is in the Daimler Art collection. He currently lives and works in St. Georgen in the Black Forest.

Olsen, Uruca Caliandrum, 2010 © Olsen / VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2022
Olsen, Uruca Caliandrum, 2010 © Olsen / VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2022
Olsen, Düsen nach Jägerart, 2019 © Olsen / VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2022
Olsen, Düsen nach Jägerart, 2019 © Olsen / VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2022
Olsen, World's largest cuckoo clock (Digital), 2021 © Olsen / VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2022
Olsen, World's largest cuckoo clock (Digital), 2021 © Olsen / VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2022

Via teleport to immortality – Technologies to counteract the irreversibility of death

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.

Photo: Henning Rogge / Deichtorhallen Hamburg

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.

Photo: Henning Rogge / Deichtorhallen Hamburg
Photo: Henning Rogge / Deichtorhallen Hamburg
Photo: Henning Rogge / Deichtorhallen Hamburg

Taming Of Chance

Photo: Irene Pérez Hernández
Photo: Irene Pérez Hernández
Photo: Irene Pérez Hernández
Photo: Irene Pérez Hernández