when materialism is no longer enough
Exhibition
26.01—16.02 2024
AIL - Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab
Postsparkasse - Georg-Coch-Platz 2
1010 Vienna
Opening hours exhibition:
Mon, Tue, Wed, Fri: 13:00–18:00 / Thu: 13:00–20:00
[ left room ]
1. Planetary Skins
Sylvia Eckermann and Gerald Nestler
A performative mixed-reality art project, 2023
PLANETARY SKINS explores the materiality of the real and the digital. Configuring an osmotic skin between virtual and physical spaces, the art project explores the potentials, ambivalences, and conflicts induced by hybrid forms of presence. PLANETARY SKINS presents a prototype that turns the virtual into a membrane to interface people and habitats across three continents. Interweaving virtual architectures and socio-cultural patterns, cosmology and micro-organisms, atmospheres and soils, biofeedback and poetic fictions, quantum physics and Lucretius’ poem ‘De Rerum Natura,’ PLANETARY SKINS materializes a sensual experience of digital and corporeal entanglements. From the interaction of these perspectives – which resonate and react to phenomena caused by technological developments, social upheavals and ecological crises – an imagination of collectivity emerges which points beyond purely human forms of commonality: aren’t we all radical matter?
2. Interference Spores
Shira Wachsmann and John Wild
Interactive installation, 2023
Interference Spores is an augmented mycelium network. Mycelium uses neural-like spikes in electrical activity to share and process information throughout its network of hyphae. Interference Spores amplify mycelium’s intricate patterns of electrical communications to black out attached lights and broadcast signals on the same frequency as WIFI networks.
3. Octopussy
Johnny Golding
Digital Video, 2023
A 3D love poem to any sentient being whose curiosity drives them to cross the often verboten blood-brain barriers of life, death, nail polish and a few games of ‘go’. Welcome to the world(s) of Octopussy - one of those crazy queer pirates whose very existence upends conventional approaches from AI to genderf*ck to all things rumba-tumba. Originally written in 2021 in honour of Kathy Acker – who long ago passed through those blood-brain barriers with all the guts, curiosity, intelligence and psychedelia of our wildly free, current-day Octopussy. Acker’s book, Pussy: King of the Pirates - banned in many countries – now finds a little resonance in this rendition of Octopussy: King of the Feminists (pirate version). This one’s for you, my friend.
4. An Algerian Technoritual
Yasmine Boudiaf
Video, 2023
How can auto-ethnographic visual art be made without reproducing the colonial gaze? This project offers a methodology whereby machine learning is used to document cultural practices that are at risk of being permanently erased from the collective memory as well as a way for people to connect to their heritage. Using AI as a digital witness, producing meaning from aesthetics while rejecting biometric data capture and surveillance culture through a set of AI generated face filters that echo the aesthetic of Algerian face tattoos.
5. Orbital Bloom
Ameera Kawash and Shira Wachsmann
Data visualisation, 2023
The Orbital Bloom is a data-driven artwork to catalyse the transformation of buildings into sustainable ecosystems. Through its interface – a virtual garden – it makes energy data from buildings accessible, transparent, and emotionally engaging to help communities understand their impact on the environment. It combines data capture with digital storytelling to incentivise and express transitions and transformations of the built environment towards sustainability and Net Zero goals.
6. Just One Word After Another
Mukul Patel
Deck of cards, 2023
Just One Word After Another is a composition of invitations, provocations and directives designed to suggest and generate micro-narratives around critical issues in AI. Drawing on the architecture of flowcharts and the construction of large language models, the work is published as a deck of cards bearing phrasal templates, word mappings, alternative expansions of the initialism ‘AI’, and other catalysts for conversation.
8. Pulsating Places
Jeremy Keenan
Digital video, 2023
"The first place you stop after you die is the pulsating place which is designed to be familiar for people who used to have bodies." (Quote from: Wax, Or The Discovery of Television Among the Bees). Pulsating Places uses this idea as a prompt to initiate a strategy for the generation of virtual afterworlds. Each 'place' follows entangled mappings of oscillating forms over patterns of staggered repetition, creating a sequence of audiovisual 'pulsations' based on different sets of initial conditions.
7. Fashion of Resistance
Manu Luksch
Concept costume, digital video, 2023
A photograph from the women’s protest at Shaheen Bagh, Delhi, is reproduced across over 100 textile flaps that make up a radical costume; the women’s faces are anonymised. The performer in the costume takes a step, then gracefully inverts. As she walks on her hands, the costume flips to momentarily reveal the original, unredacted image. This costume addresses the protestors’ dilemma: visibility and anonymity – for protesters, both are essential. The body must be present to occupy space, while individual anonymity is necessary for protection against arbitrary or extrajudicial coercion.
9. Polymorph II
Sonia Bernac, Jeremy Keenan and Maggie Roberts
Digital video, 2023
Documentation of the Polymorph II installation, which is a result of research into multisensory, distributed
AI working fluidly across different forms of matter, connecting the indeterminacy of complex physical systems with fixed, generative AI models to produce emergent outcomes. In this iteration, small changes in air current, the movement of bodies, and fluctuating electromagnetic interference are entangled with fine-tuned generative AI models.
10. Becoming Octopus Meditation video
Maggie Roberts
Digital video, 2020
"Sink towards this ocean's floor, breathing rhythmically and slowly as you allow your limbs and skull to relax and drift. Out, out into the vastness, moving with the ebb and flow of liquid space without beginning or end." Maggie Roberts' 'Becoming Octopus Meditations' is an eight-part series that aims to transport the viewer into the liquid world and thought process of the common octopus. Each of the 8 sessions – reflecting the 8 arms of an octopus – lasts around 10 minutes.
11. Crow Bird Boy
Ajamu Ikwe-Tyehimba
Platinum Print on Tosa Washi paper, 2023
Ajamu Ikwe-Tyehimba’s practice-led research is concerned with rethinking the wet-based darkroom concerning its material attributes and the senses. In his work, he focuses on corporeality, gestures, move- ments, rhythms, and tacit knowledge. Creating within and of the dark, in what he is naming as Onto-Erotica, this method privileges the sensual material and tangible attributes of production and the non-visual aspects of photography rather than an over-determination of representation.
12. Jupiter
Linn Phyllis Seeger
Video installation, 2023
Based on the historical intertwining of photography, telegraphy and the railroad as technologies for annihilating time and space, Linn Phyllis Seeger’s moving image piece “Jupiter” considers the presence of these very technologies in the suicide of a close friend in 2020.
13. Charcot Flowers
Selina de Beauclair
Digital prints, 2023
Subject of this series is Jean-Martin Charcot, neurologist, inventor and self-proclaimed healer of hysteria. Through hypnosis and suggestion, by the sheer power of speech, he demonstrated dominance over the will and body of his patients and crossed a hitherto unknown boundary of control. Freud and Breuer later spoke of it as reprogramming the consciousness. Today, however, the Master's Voice belongs to everyone who can feed a prompt into the machine, causing the chains of signifiers to rattle.
14. AF 1138/3, 13945/1, 13945/4, 13945/5 and 13945/8
Tina Lechner
One gelatin silver print and four pigment prints, 2020-22
Tina Lechner‘s photographs combine body, form and material, amalgamating discourses on femininity and identity. With roots in the historical avant-garde, her works are just the visible part of a reflection process that deals with human body metamorphoses in relation to the superstructure represented by clothing, work tools, and entertainment. Tina’s photographs are questioning the biological limits of humanity, but also the consequences of Faustic experiences that seek the essence of life.
15. In the Vertigo of Translations
Dario Srbic
3D-printed platonic solids, photography, 2022
It is difficult to evoke a notion of translation without dragging along the Platonic discourse of original and copy, a deterministic hierarchy established with the primacy of the ideal model over its imperfect material actualisations in reality, mirroring the inferiority of a translation with respect to the original. This well-behaved relationship can similarly turn vertiginous through a non-deterministic movement that gets magnified to a scale where previously negligible differences begin to matter.
16. Index Cards
Ivonne Gracia Murillo
Installation, 2023
Presented are some index cards conforming to an epistemological instrument, whose flexibility enabled an ambiguous form and invited playing against rigid limits. Every tool will allow the creative to have a different dialogue with their mind in that fleeting process of the development of ideas. What do we require in the first instance from a knowledge creation system? To register the volatile reaction that arises in us when we encounter a particular piece of information. The flash of our synapses. And, perhaps, something more valuable: to facilitate a fluid experience, the alchemy between things, rather than their finite, sterile form.
17. Zoe
Noor Stenfert Kroese and Amir Bastan
Installation and documentation, 2023
ZOE is a temporary co-existence between reishi mushrooms and a custom-made robotic system. Noor Stenfert Kroese and Amir Bastan explore with ZOE the possibilities of internal communication between a robotic system and reishi. Within this seeming paradox between nature and technology, an ecosystem occurs that cares for and affects the other through sensing technologies. It continues onto the research of the interaction and unknown communication within fungal mycelia networks.
[ right room ]
18. TankWoman
Shira Wachsmann
Film still from TankWoman video, 2021
The work is a correspondence with a tank that tries to identify a certain feedback loop relationship with
a tank and the landscape. The correspondence refers to iconic images of the tank and its relationship with humans in history. Amidst the absurdity and fear in the interaction between tank and human, a glimpse of hope emerges before the explosion, highlighting the potential for change in those critical moments before the devastating end unfolds.
19. The Sight of Clouds
Gerhard Lang
Three drawings, 2023
Throughout the drawing process, Gerhard Lang’s eyes were solely focused on the clouds. The drawing method employed is commonly known as blind drawing, but in his work, it is referred to as "Visus Signatus" – the drawn sight. In this process of drawing eyes and hand become part of an uninterrupted connection between sunlight, clouds, eyes, body and torso, hand, graphite pencil, and the line emerging on the paper. A short circuit occurs, propelling the cloud into proximity.
20. Three Acrylic Paintings on Stands
Ashley Hans Scheirl
Suspect Speculation, 2024. C/O Crone Berlin Wien and Loevenbruck Paris
CumxCumCumx, 2019. C/O Crone Berlin Wien
Deviant Derivatives, 2018. C/O Crone Berlin Wien
21. Candid 1571 and Candid 2391
Julian Palacz
UV printing on acrylic glass, 2020
Using an image analysis algorithm, personal video recordings from the artist‘s private life were examined for their movement patterns. The colours of the lines are the original colours of the video, all movements that were captured in the video are distilled on the image surface. Nevertheless, the images do not resemble technical recordings of surveillance but create a sensual space weaved from delicate structures.
22. Atlas of the Liminal: From Matter To Data
Manu Luksch
Giclée prints, 2021-23
Machinic seeing unwraps three-dimensional drone image data onto the plane – obtaining perspectives alien to the human eye, and integrating the dimension of time where views overlap: this series reflects on environmental and human health risks caused by Big Tech corporations and questions their central product – algorithmic predicaments and systemic order. The semiconductor industry boom in the early 1970s left a bi-fold legacy: Silicon Valley became home to the world's largest high-tech corporations. Less known, contamination by volatile organic compounds is affecting the local population until today by damaging internal organs as well as the nervous and reproductive systems.
23. ...presemic utterances and undulations...
Jonathan Boyd
Asemic Animation and installation, 2023
These two works explore the radical mattering of palimpsestic and pre/a-semic logics. Emphasis is how an emergent, poetic approach is required in order to understand, inhibit and play with our contemporary moment filled with ever-proliferating narratives outputted by LLMs. Visualising and materialising the rhizomatic and emergent pre-semic narrative structures of AI. Animations developed through distributed loops between human and non-human actants via processes of hand fabrication, casting, collage, text to image, image to image and image to video and datasets of the artist’s artefacts.
24. Color Inventory
Bernhard Cella
Artbook installation, 2023
This installation and the related publication gather a selection of 16,000 titles that Bernhard Cella dealt with in the context of his long-term project Salon für Kunstbuch. For him, books are an archive of ideas and their materialisation, a mapping of his engagement with the material world, which allows him to contemplate, negotiate, and share art without the fetish of the original. For this project, Bernhard sorted books according to their colour and wove a dazzling tapestry from their covers.
25. Journal prototype
Ivonne Gracia Murillo and Maximilian Gallo 2023
The radical⇌matter project's journal cultivates sticky cohesions and enduring encounters among agents across editions. Unlike a chronological archive, we embraced an octopussian form, akin to an evolving organism with growing tentacles and connecting cerebral nodes continuously. This distinctive structure highlights unexpected connections between entities, steering away from a linear display of chronologically developed articles. The journal unfolds as an ever-expanding exploration, encouraging a dynamic and interconnected narrative.
[cinema]
26. I thought I was hearing citizens
Manu Luksch and Mukul Patel
Digital video, 2023
This short film casts AI avatars generated from human actors to relate excerpts from recorded discussions on information politics and democracy. The title alludes to Harun Farocki’s I thought I was seeing prisoners (2000), which piercingly questions our outsourcing of seeing to machines and the moral ‘air gap’ it creates. I thought I was hearing citizens points to a new space of human-machine encounter where such distancing occurs. As it becomes possible to generate convincing ‘fake persons’ who have never existed outside of an algorithm, the question arises – when does it matter that there is nobody behind?
27. On Ether
Thandi Loewenson
Digital video, 2021
On December 11, 1978, an attack by guerrilla forces on a fuel storage facility in Salisbury (now Harare) was a victory in the liberation struggle, which two years later brought independence to Zimbabwe. The assault destroyed twenty-five giant storage tanks, extinguishing 17 million gallons of diesel, aviation fuel, and gasoline. Through this explosive act, we encounter the atmospheric conditions of liberation: conjured through smoke, thickening of airwaves, and aided by unfamiliar voices and mystical birds.
28. A Dream
Shira Wachsmann
Video, 2020
A Dream is a poetic correspondence with a cactus named Sabra, which holds profound significance in the Palestinian/Israeli landscape. The experiment explores the cactus's response to a loud explosion, recording its ultrasonic waves. The visual representation of Wachsmann's blue voice wave and the red cactus ultrasonic wave forms a 'correspondence landscape' in the moment before the explosion, revealing an existence where both are heard without being pushed into the realm of the ‘invisible’.
29. Deviations of the Fruit Fly
Sonia Bernac and Jeremy Keenan
Digital video, 2023
A short film about unruly cohesions, narrative clustering and circulation of meaning(s). It uses imagery associated with scientific illustrations and 3D diagrams in order to follow the logic of arbitrary associations. The subsequent environments are set up as experiments – the animated interactions of particles are not choreographed but conditioned by attractors embedded in the surfaces of the models. The sound is generated based on the complex movement and position of the particles in the 3D simulation.
30. Pestsäule
Clarissa Cohausz
Digital Video, 2023
Pestsäulen – Plague columns – are Austrian and Southern German monuments that were built out of gratitude when the plague was finally over. In her experimental video, Clarissa Cohausz breathes an eerie new life into these ubiquitous but no less bizarre monuments.
31. Admin
Jonathan Boyd
Digital video, 2023
[ performances during opening ]
32 and 33. Unplayed Realities (Ice cream so good)
Julia Wolf, in collaboration with Anni Katrin Elmer, Janis Lejins and Alexander Weiss
Performers: Anni Katrin Elmer, Yoh Morishita, Julia Müllner, Camilla Schielin and Andrea Vezga
Performance and video, 2023
Critically engaging with TikTok’s NPC phenomenon, this artwork stages five performers as ‘non-player characters’ engaged in deliberate slow-motion, reenacting the digital avatars’ behaviours. They interact with a depth camera, which captures and streams a first-player view to a screen, reflecting a collective, sensor-driven narrative. The performance will be recorded during the opening, and the result will be shown in the cinema room.
34. Rhythms From The Electronic Noosphere
John Wild
Sound performance, 2023
‘Rhythms From The Electronic Noosphere’ places the audience inside the planetary communications machine - resonating their bodies with the sonic frequencies, pulses and rhythms constructed from field recordings of AI servers. These elements are dynamically fused with live data streams captured within the venue in real-time.
The radical⇌matter exhibition and symposium owe their realisation to the generous support of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). Hosted by Angewandte’s Art & Science department, these events are a collaborative effort with the Royal College of Art, London, and the AiDesign Lab in Artificial and Distributed Intelligence, Hong Kong. We would like to thank the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), AIL - Angewandte Innovation Lab, Angewandte Collection & Archive, Ange- wandte University Gallery, Zentrum Fokus Forschung, FJK3 - Contemporary Art Space, Fiona Liewehr, Cosima Rainer, Robert Müller, all the participating artists and all the other wonderful people who made this project possible.
With thanks to our incredible artist-philosophers-scientists: Ivonne Gracia, Maximillian Gallo, Julia Wolf, Tanja Traxler.