HYPERTOPIA
HYPERTOPIA
STATE Studio, Hauptstrasse 3, 10827 Berlin
October 23 2020 - December 06 2020
Opening October 23, 2020 - 6 PM
Press Preview: 1 - 2 PM
Hypertopia bridges today and tomorrow. Powered by the vision of a collective change in consciousness, the transdisciplinary program and exhibition anticipates a post-crisis future to investigate approaches for a meaningful present. With a selection of artistic positions, propositions and exploratory projects that incorporate scientific methods as well as speculative modes of thought, Hypertopia challenges hierarchies, probes ideas, and imagines new scenarios of cooperative, interspecies coexistence. Instead of giving directives – let alone answers – the program is guided by the question of how the state of perceived emergency can transform the relationship between humans, nature and technology in ways that favor resilience, reveal niches of hope, and encourage sustainable action.
The age of the Anthropocene is marked by multiple crises whose intricate interrelations we’re only just beginning to understand. Human needs, actions and aspirations have caused irreversible changes to the natural world, and in doing so, are forcing system earth out of its equilibrium in a number of ways. Although part of the system and – as the world-shaping species we are – a veritable force of nature ourselves, we’ve come to feel increasingly estranged from the world.Circumstances are complex and the situation is critical. Arguably, the status of our relationship with this planet and its myriad lifeforms is more complicated than ever.
As an exhibition, Hypertopia approaches this global, multilateral “relationship crisis” with various forms of artistic reflection and representation. Ranging from an interactive video installation that recounts polar myths from the perspective of the ice over a data-driven light sculpture to a participatory performance piece that will unfold as a textile structure, formed collectively by the audience over the course of the exhibition, the artworks in the show address fundamental ecological, geological, and socio-political challenges of our time.
The exhibition is accompanied by a decentralized framework program, that carries its ideas into the public realm, from the gallery space into open terrain. Instead of sticking to conventional panels or patterns of thought, the participatory format sends visitors on the road; starting from the exhibited artworks, they are given basic instructions to gather clues for fresh momentum. Besides self-guided trips, there will be field trips, which take participants to relevant referent points in the city. With STATE Studio, all excursions have a common point of departure. From there, all forge their own individual paths.
Conceived as an organic meshwork of hopeful ideas, Hypertopia fosters gedanken experiments that go beyond the individual to open up new ways of seeing and being in the world. What all projects, positions, and formats share is their conviction that our earthly politics have a good reason to readjust their “internal relations”. At the same time, they are driven by confidence and some sort of creative centrifugal force, countering the notion of impotence with a fresh form of planetary optimism.
The exhibition presents works by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg (UK), Ani Liu (USA), Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico (IT), Himali Singh Soin (UK / IND), Dominique Koch (CH) and Jana Maria Dohmann (D) as well as a collaborative project by STATE’s Curious Minds Community.
Dates:
October 23 2020, 1 - 2 PM: Press Preview
October 23 2020, 5 -10 PM: Vernissage
October 24 2020, 3 - 6 PM: Field Trip: Lotte Meret.fragil - Guided tour with the artist through her show at EIGEN+ART Lab, followed by a tour at STATE Studio (invite only)
October 31, 2020, 12 PM - 5 PM: Weaving Social Texture – Initiation of the participatory installation by Jana Maria Dohmann
November 17, 7 PM on Zoom: Curious Minds: ArtScience Monthly - Hypertopia
November 5, 7 PM: Field Trip with Science Notes Magazin and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg as part of Berlin Science Week (online)
December 4, 2020, 6-10 PM: Finissage
Further events and contributors to the framework program, as well as dates for special guided tours (for children and youth, blind and deaf visitors) will be announced shortly on www.state-studio.com.
Hypertopia is supported by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds and in partner ship with the Museum of Natural History Berlin, AI for Good, EIGEN + ART Lab, Science Notes Magazin and Berlin Science Week.
Loan ZKM I Zentrum für Kunst und Medien Karlsruhe.
Press Contact: press@state-studio.com
STATE Studio
STATE Studio is a gallery and cultural venue working at the intersection of science, art, and society to help forward ideas for a sustainable future. With exhibitions, residencies, and events, STATE invites its audience to explore current topics that shape our tomorrow.
Opening times:
October 23 - December 06, 2020
Tuesdays - Fridays, 12 PM - 7 PM
Saturdays - Sundays, 12 PM - 5 PM
No need to book before visiting, but registrations (via Eventbrite) are welcome. Due to current hygiene regulations, only a limited number of visitors is allowed in the gallery. Please keep a minimum of 1,5 m distance, and make sure to wear a mask.
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg – Designing for the Sixth Extinction
While conservationists struggle to protect existing ‘natural’ species and reverse the effects of the Anthropocene, synthetic biologists are busy engineering new organisms. Designing for the Sixth Extinction investigates synthetic biology’s potential impact on biodiversity and conservation. Modeled on fungus, bacteria, invertebrates and mammals, novel companion species are released into the wild to support endangered natural species and ecosystems – an act that raises ethical questions. What would the ‘wilds’ look like in a synthetic biological future? Can we ‘preserve’ by looking forward? If nature is totally industrialized for the benefit of society, will nature still exist for us to save?
Credit: Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg
Dr. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg examines our fraught relationships with nature and technology. Through artworks, writing, and curatorial projects, Daisy’s work explores subjects as diverse as artificial intelligence, exobiology, synthetic biology, conservation, biodiversity, and evolution, as she investigates the human impulse to “better” the world. She is lead author of Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology’s Designs on Nature (MIT Press, 2014), and in 2017 completed Better, her PhD by practice, at London’s Royal College of Art (RCA), interrogating how powerful dreams of “better” futures shape the things that get designed. She studied architecture at the University of Cambridge, was a visiting scholar at Harvard University, and received her MA in Design Interactions from the RCA. Daisy exhibits internationally, including shows at MoMA New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, the National Museum of China, the Centre Pompidou, and the Royal Academy. Her work is in museums and private collections. Talks include TEDGlobal, PopTech, Design Indaba, and the New Yorker Tech Fest.
Himali Singh Soin – we are opposite like that
Himali Singh Soin’s video piece “we are opposite like that” pairs poetry with archival material and a mythical soundscape to recount the tale of the omnipresent anxiety in Victorian England of an imminent glacial epoch. Inspired by field recordings, an original score for string quartet makes audible the sheets of Pancake Ice smashing into each other, the long drone of a boat, the hard timbre of the wind. Melodic fragments of Victorian composer Edward Elgar’s The Snow (1895) encroach upon the image. The string quartet becomes a chamber of resonances, playing the polarity of a potential, post-human future, sounding an un-orientable, topological alarm. Commissioned by the Frieze Artist Award 2019, the video forms part of an ongoing series of interdisciplinary works that comprise mythologies for the poles, told from the non-human perspective of an elder that has witnessed deep time: the ice. It beckons the ghosts hidden in landscapes and turns them into echoes, listening in on the resonances of potential futures.
Credit: Himali Singh Soin
Himali Singh Soin is a writer and artist based between London and Delhi. She uses metaphors from outer space and the natural environment to construct imaginary cosmologies of interferences, entanglements, deep voids, debris, delays, alienation, distance and intimacy. Himali works across text, performance and moving image. Singh Soin holds an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths University, London, and has exhibited internationally, at galleries and cultural institutions including Whitechapel Gallery, London, Somerset House, London, and Gropius Bau, Berlin. She is a jury member for the Frieze Artist Award 2020 and part of the curatorial team of Momenta Biennale Montreal 2021.
Dominique Koch – Holobiont Society
A dense artistic research project, Holobiont Society delves into a complex set of issues related to hierarchies, power structures, and concepts of coexistence – such as the eponymous ecological unit of the holobiont. Initially defined by Dr. Lynn Margulis in her 1991 book Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation, the concept collection of prokaryotes, all of which contribute in some way to the function of the whole. In Koch’s film, the holobiont is visualized by scientific images of corals, bacteria and other symbiotic organisms. The video’s elaborate sound design synergizes with fragments of interviews with the biologist, feminist, and acclaimed writer Donna Haraway and the philosopher and sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato. Interweaving image, sound and text in a multilayered assemblage, Holobiont Society challenges current mechanisms of domination and categorization, in favor of fresh modes of thinking and being in the world.
Dominique Koch (*1983 in Lucerne, Switzerland) lives and works between Basel and Paris. From 2004 to 2011 she studied photography at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, Germany. Her multilayered installations can be described as discursive laboratories. In her practice, the artist integrates various fields of research to form intricate networks of knowledge, in which philosophy, molecular biology, neo-Marxism, and science fiction meet. Her solo exhibitions include “Holobiont Society” at CAN, Centre d’art Neuchâtel (2017), “Maybe We Should Rejuvenate the Words rather than the Bodies” at Rinomina, Paris (2016), as well as “Beyond Chattering and Noise” at Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris (2015). Amongst her most recent group shows are “Protozone: Contamination/Resilience”, Shedhalle Zürich (2020), “WE HYBRIDS!“, Istituto Svizzero di Roma (2020), “Mycelium as Lingua Franca”, A Tale of a Tub Rotterdam (2019), „Trees of Life“, Frankfurter Kunstverein (2019) “Futurs Incertains“, Musée d’Art de Pully (2019), “An Eye Unruled”, Swissnex San Francisco (2019).
Salvatore Iaconesi und Oriana Persico – Obiettivo
The first material outcome of a greater project called Datapoietis, Obiettivo is designed as a warning light system for public spaces. Fed with data sourced from international organizations, it reacts to the number of people living in extreme poverty. The red light emitted by the object is an alarm; Obiettivo is a “totemic object”, designed to raise awareness and make us more sensitive towards one of our planet’s most threatening and complex issues. Built to be installed in public space, the prototype aspires to become a pole for urban neo-rituals, to promote shared action, a new mode of collective responsibility, supported by technologies and science. Datapoiesis, Obiettivo’s collaborative umbrella project, focuses on the production of data-based art and design that fosters new relationships within our globalized world.
Credit: Salvatore Iaconesi & Oriana Persico
The artistic team Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico observe the mutations of human beings and societies in the advent of new technologies and ubiquitous networks. With projects poised between poetics and politics, bodies and architectures, squats and revolutionary business models, the duo promotes a vision of the world in which art connects science, politics, and economics.
Iaconesi is a robotics engineer, hacker, interaction designer, a TED, Eisenhower, and World Yale Fellow. Persico is a digital communication and inclusion expert and cyber-ecologist. Together, they are authors of global performances, publications, and artworks that have been exhibited all over the world. They founded the Rome-based research center Human Ecosystems Relazioni (HER) as well as the international network Art is Open Source (AOS), which is dedicated to the interconnections between art, science, and technology.
Ani Liu – Untitled (A Search for Ghosts in the Meat Machine)
The idea of being human is an unstable construct. Recent technological innovations allow us to redesign ourselves profoundly— from networked prosthetics and artificial intelligence to the genetic code of life itself. Can our behaviors be reduced to algorithms? Can our bodies be upgraded with nonorganic integrations? Can sentience itself be manufactured in a lab? The original series “Untitled (A Search for Ghosts in the Meat Machine)” comprises nine sculptures that examine personhood from anatomical, psychological, genetic, biochemical, behavioral, algorithmic, personal narrative and memory. Each sculpture is as tall as the artist, and each glass vitrine holds her liquid volume. But besides these basic dimensions, every piece is configured individually to represent one specific organ, body part, or intellectual capability generally considered to distinguish us as a species. For Hypertopia, Liu created one custom vitrine, continuing her emotional confrontation with being quantifiable.
Ani Liu is a research-based artist working at the intersection of art and science. Her work examines the reciprocal relationships between science, technology and their influence on human subjectivity, culture, and identity. Ani's work has been presented internationally, including the Venice Biennale, Ars Electronica, the Queens Museum Biennial, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Asian Art Museum, MIT Museum, MIT Media Lab, Mana Contemporary, Harvard University, and Shenzhen Design Society. She holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College, a Masters of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a Master of Science from MIT Media Lab.
Ani is passionate about integrating multidisciplinary approaches into her practice and is currently teaching at Princeton University. Her studio is based in New York City.
Jana Maria Dohmann - Weaving Social Texture
Weaving Social Texture is a collective research project that seeks to inspire interaction. Over the course of her show, the participatory installation will grow into a collective tissue of decisions, all of which are driven by individual, or mutually coordinated choices. A basic set up pre-installed by the artist serves as a point of departure for the collective, essentially improvised work. Further reference is provided by a set of scores, that frame the action, adding a few fundamental guidelines. Everything else derives from the moment, from free decisions, acts and deeds – that is, from participatory typing, knotting, and interweaving. The explorative situation is supported by a fragmentary reference library, holding ready a subjective anthology of ecological, philosophical, and cultural knowledge. The resulting sculptural structure investigates the potential of collectivity and social negotiation – and thus raises a question on which the future of our planet depends.
Jana Maria Dohmann is an independent artist and art mediator living and working in Berlin. Her intermedial practice hovers between performative research, somatic methodology and installation art. Based on poetic scores and experimental arrangements, her participatory sculptures explore issues of collectivity, collaboration, as well as the element of physical touch. Jana‘s work has been shown at Kunstverein Kärnten, Galerie KUB, Leipzig and the Somatic Academy, Berlin. As part of her collaborative practice, she has worked as a performer for Tino Sehgal at the Volksbühne Berlin and Albertinum in Dresden. Her solo show “PAYBACK” is currently on show at Galerie Sindelfingen. She developed a format for performative art mediation for documenta14, has worked with the Boros collection and is presently attending the MA program “Cultures of the Curatorial” at HGB Leipzig.
Curious Minds – Unrecognised Borders of Transient Beings
When whales die, their carcasses sink down to the ocean floor, giving rise to complex ecosystems that supply sustenance to hundreds of deep-sea organisms for decades. Drawing on inspiration from the so-called Whale Fall, Unrecognised Borders of Transient Beings navigates the body as a porous and integrated ecological site. Through video, sound, surveillance technologies, and coded networks, the work invites participants to reframe their presence in an alternative environment, providing a contemplation site for the following questions: What kind of assemblages do we engage in consciously/unconsciously and physically/metaphysically? How does our body loop into the environment and what kind of micro choices have macro effects on ourselves and the world around us? What systems do we utilize to navigate differences? Do we need to create new systems of communication that facilitate a wider integration between human and non-human bodies?
The community platform Curious Minds challenges the boundaries of conventional knowledge production to promote new ways of learning and collective thinking. Conceived at STATE as an open environment that builds and fosters meaningful connections and engages in creative experimentation, the community works in small transdisciplinary teams on the tricky problems of our times. With backgrounds in the arts, science, technology and the humanities, Curious Minds’ members have the opportunity to contribute to STATE Studio’s program. For Hypertopia, the explorative group project Unrecognised Borders of Transient Beings was developed by a Deep Dive Collective including Andrea Rassell, Ashley Middleton, Bella Spencer, Catri Foot, and Juho