Meet the Curious Minds - Theresa Schubert
Meet the Curious Minds - Theresa Schubert
Interview by Lise Ninane & Fotini Takirdiki
Photos by Veronika Hubert Natter
What are the thinking processes and knowledge practices that guide your artistic research?
Thinking is a tentacular process per se so it is always a hybrid approach. To develop my work, I combine research and art studio practice. I explore through my projects unconventional visions of nature and its complexity, novel technologies, and the impact on oneself. A few years ago, I completed a PhD in Media Arts investigating specifics of agency in biomedia art. By means of interdisciplinary methods, such as the re-enactement of scientific experiments, biohacking, theoretical analyses and collaborative practices, my works question the relation of humans to their environment and the evolvement of matter and meaning beyond the Anthropos. Depending on the project, I often work in interdisciplinary teams across a variety of scientific fields. This all contributes to the fact that I am an artist who is very comfortable with complex research practices, experimentation and teamwork.
Credit: Veronika Hubert Natter
My work often combines audiovisual and hybrid media to conceptual and immersive installations or site-specific interventions and performances. The interdisciplinary nature of my projects require personal research into new scientific or technological fields, for example understanding discrete models of cellular automata and creating algorithms for the 8K video “Always Dead and Alive”. This also often allows for interesting and innovative collaborations. I get to work in institutions that one would normally not get access to, such as the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Centre. I believe that, in these art-science collaborations, an artistic viewpoint offers new approaches and visions to the concepts I explore alongside engineers and scientists.
mEat me, performance 06.02.2020. Credits: Tina Lagler / Kapelica Gallery Archiver
Could you give an example of how such interdisciplinary collaborative processes unfold?
My most recent artwork “mEat me” was a more than 1-year long artistic research project that resulted in a performance piece. I started with researching in-vitro grown meat and then collaborated with bioengineers and doctors to produce the in-vitro grown cells from a biopsy of my muscle through laboratory work. After this process, followed further collaboration and consultation with composers, computer engineers, performance artists, as well as solo studio work to produce the conceptual and immersive installation and performance, which premiered in February 2020 at Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana.
Credit: Veronika Hubert Natter
What are you currently working on?
Currently I am developing a new piece that is based on my residency within “Mind the Fungi”, a 2 year-long interdisciplinary research project between Technical University Berlin and ArtLaboratory Berlin. The residency took place at the group of General and Molecular Microbiology (AMM). I was doing a series of experiments investigating the influence of sound frequencies on the morphology and metabolism of local arboreal fungi mycelium, and now I am translating this into an interactive, sensorial work for an exhibition.
Further, last year I did a residency at the afore-mentioned Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Centre in Poland and I produced a lot of video material for a film that I keep working on now whenever I have free time. We did 3D laser scans in forests and inside their server room, as well as some 8K filming. The film is reflecting about the connections between a technologized city and the outside nature exploring themes of (non-) human life, machine intentionality and future societal structures.
And what would you like to explore further?
Following my residency at Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Centre in Poland, I got very enthusiastic about laser scanning, as it is a different approach to capture a scene. The scans create large point clouds and the points can be overlaid with real photo images; transferred into the computer you can create virtual camera movements around the landscapes. So this is a technology that I want to explore more in my art practice.
Credit: Veronika Hubert Natter
In your view, in how far could we take the current situation with Covid-19 as an opportunity to reflect and trigger changes?
Covid-19 may be a chance to encourage us to rethink aspects of our society. We have taken it largely for granted that we – as humans – are in control of nearly all situations. Covid-19 has shown us the fragility of being human again and that we cannot control every situation. Moreover, a factor is that the enemy is not some outside factor but within us, invisible. This is a new situation. There are many more things that Covid-19 is showing us: systemic and individual problems. We (should) have learned from the last 100+ years that putting the human in the centre of the universe leads to increasing destruction of the planet. Not sure whether it is realistic but I am hesitantly optimistic that it may help along opportunities to create new values for us beyond consumerism and exploitation.
Artist Profile
