NEAR + FUTURES + QUASI + WORLDS

July 3 - 26, 2020

STATE Studio, Berlin

ONLINE OPENING July 2nd

ON-SITE OPENING RECEPTION July 3rd at 6 pm

Berlin, 23. Juni 2020

1. Exhibition presentation

Since its launch in 2015 as an initiative of the European Commission, S+T+ARTS, innovation at the nexus of Science, Technology, and the ARTS, has promoted the integration of artistic practices with advanced research and innovation. It has done so via the annual STARTS prize honouring successful collaboration of artists and engineers, STARTS residencies of artists in technology institutions and STARTS lighthouse pilots that have made artists an integral part of their research.

NEAR + FUTURES + QUASI + WORLDS aims to emphasize the vital role that collaboration in scientific, technological, and artistic domains can play in furthering contemporary research and integrative forms of cutting-edge artistic creation. In its first iteration at STATE Studio in Berlin in July 2020, NEAR + FUTURES + QUASI + WORLDS will feature a selection of artworks, objects, and documents highlighting the manifold scope of S+T+ARTS actors and activities—STARTS Prize winners or works of artists from STARTS residencies and STARTS light houses.

Transcending punctual interaction, shared languages of experimentation emerge in common research environments. Every work in the show is a fragment of a newly organized system, a piece of a world-like sphere not fully formed or complete or fully real, but steadily emerging. By way of their visionary capacity and structural insight, these works place the viewer on the verge of reality and demonstrate the elasticity of limits. If the new is shaped by research and informed by experimentation, the selected projects readily approach what is or could be about to happen.

They posit thresholds—unexpected expressions of what is to come. As capsules of an unfinished, truncated, propositional tomorrow, these works are an almost-here. In the form of robotic sculptures, 3D prints, bas-reliefs, digital animations, film, sound, and light work, they make potentiality manifest and claim the conceptual space of what may be close to happening.

The exhibition is curated by Manuel Cirauqui with the collaboration of Silvana Fiorese, and includes work by the following artists: Refik Anadol, Ralf Baecker, Evelina Domnich and Dmitry Gelfand, Félicie d’Estienne d’Orves, Forensic Architecture, Iris van Herpen, Julia Koerner, So Kanno & Takahiro Yamaguchi, Egor Kraft, Kasia Molga & Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner, and Etsuko Yakushimaru. NEAR + FUTURES + QUASI + WORLDS thus explores phenomena of reciprocal influence and cross-pollination between technology, science, and the arts, all at work in each of the selected projects, to open up new modalities for innovation and creation in the foundational spirit of S+T+ARTS.

2. Curatorial project structure

Several thematic blocks structure the curatorial development of NEAR + FUTURES + QUASI + WORLDS, each of them functioning like a specific module that conceptually overlaps with the others and affords a multiplicity of readings for the whole.

Through the notion of statuary, as a crucial concept in Western art history with many resonances beyond, NEAR + FUTURES + QUASI + WORLDS confronts classicism as it reappears, mutates, decomposes, and re-emerges in research-based art and collaborations with advanced technology today. The forms of statuary are not necessarily anthropomorphic or figurative, even though they may surround, expand, or replace the volume of generic human bodies. Rather, these forms seem to be the result of certain attitudes of material—uses of the pedestal, mutations of the torso, mannequin-like arrangements, abstract robotic dances, colourful synthetic protrusions. Since Antiquity, statues emblematize body qualities and highlight the dialectics between artifacts and living beings, representation, and flesh. So Kanno’s and Yamaguchi’s Senseless Drawing Bot, Egor Kraft’s Content Aware Studies, Iris van Herpen’s Magnetic Motion couture collection, Julia Koerner’s Digital Vogue research pushing toward an artificial fur or butterfly wing velvet… These works invite us to think at the intersection of historical time and multi-faceted, post-human thingness. They project new encodings of social memory, monumentality, corporeality, agency, and myth.

Unexpected tensions between time, timelessness, technology, and bare construction also appear in radically abstract kinetic devices such as Ralf Baecker’s Putting the Pieces Back Together Again, Evelina Domnich and Dimity Gelfand’s Hilbert Hotel, Refik Anadol’s Melting Memories, and Félicie d’Estienne d’Orves’s Martian Sun Series. In their four-dimensionality, these art works describe the apparently rhythmic patterns that structure autonomous worlds we encounter in fragments. There is a ticking, sliding, cyclical otherness in each of these art works, where the machine is a landscape and the landscape a machine. Also, at work in these worlds in progress is the merging of micro and macro scales. Like probes of exploded geographies, they inevitably make us think of enigmatic snow globes. In By the Code of Soil: (de)Compositions, by Kasia Molga & Scanner, and I’m Humanity by Etsuko Yakushimaru, the living appears as a generative element in the artwork that permeates the world beyond. Not coincidentally, sound is a key aspect of both these projects—as a haunting manifestation of life’s substrate as well as a translation of the world into genetic code. Meanwhile, sound fragments emerge in Forensic Architecture’s The Murder of Pavlos Fyssas to reveal the disturbing evidence of a political crime in contemporary Greece, the birthplace of classicism and the political laboratory of European post-rescue culture. Again, issues of monumentality, historicity, data landscape, re-emerge in the world-in-progress of concealed facts.

Each of these connected levels addresses a facet of the S+T+ARTS collaborative ecosystem without exhausting it. Modularity will allow a number of potential iterations, additions, and variations of the exhibition farther on, while central issues already appear in the project’s iteration at STATE Studio in Berlin. Additional sections are likely to emerge in future iterations of this curatorial endeavour, in order to shed light on other aspects of S+T+ARTS as a collaborative ecosystem.

3. Curatorial team

Manuel Cirauqui is a curator and writer, working at the crossroads of contemporary art, design strategy, and experimental academia. Cirauqui currently serves as curator at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and is also the founding director of Eina/Idea, a think tank associated to EINA University School of Design and Art, attached to the Autonomous University of Barcelona. At the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, he has organized the major exhibitions Soto. The Fourth Dimension (2019); Architecture Effects (2018, co-curated with Troy Conrad Therrien); Henri Michaux. The Other Side (2018); Art and Space (2017); and Anni Albers. Touching Vision (2017), and he also oversees the institution’s Film & Video exhibitions programming. Recent projects in other international museums include the two-part exhibition Artaud 1936, at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City (2018); and the site-specific installation Puerto Rican Light (Cueva Vientos) by Allora & Calzadilla at Dia Art Foundation (2015, co-curated with Yasmil Raymond). Cirauqui has been a guest lecturer in numerous international universities such as MICA Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore; HEAD Haute École d’art et de design, Geneva; Aalto University of Art and Design, Helsinki; Universidad Complutense de Madrid; and served as Adjunct Lecturer in Critical Curating at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence.

Silvana Fiorese is a curator and producer working across the fields of visual arts, moving images, and sound art. Since 2008 she has managed the programming and production of Lo Schermo dell’Arte, an international film festival in Florence that explores the relationship between contemporary art and film. Special projects at Lo Schermo dell'Arte include collaborations with Philippe Parreno and Peter Greenaway, among other figures, as well as the book 10 Years Between Art and Cinema (Giunti Editore, 2019). She is also co-founder and curator of Sonic Somatic, a sound art festival taking place in public urban spaces of Florence since 2015. She has collaborated with the artists Ari Benjamin Meyers, Thomas Köner, Christina Kubisch, and Invernomuto, among the others. Working as an artist record producer, she has edited the publication Solaris. Sound and Vision in collaboration with the Andrey Tarkovsky International Institute, and produced special editions with Michael Snow, Nannucci Maurizio/Zona Archives, Omer Fast, and Schneider TM.

4. Artists’ biographies and selected artworks in the exhibition

Refik Anadol

b. 1985 Istanbul, Turkey

Lives and works in Los Angeles

The media artist and director, Refik Anadol is recognized worldwide among the most important practitioners working with machine intelligence and parametric data sculpture today. He is the recipient of a number of awards, including Microsoft Research’s Best Vision Award, German Design Award, UCLA Art+Architecture Moss Award, University of California Institute for Research in the Arts Award, SEGD Global Design Awards and Google’s Art and Machine Intelligence Artist Residency Award. His site-specific audio/visual performances have been presented in Walt Disney Concert Hall, Hammer Museum, International Digital Arts Biennial Montreal, ZKM | Center for Art and New Media in Karlsruhe, Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, l’Usine in Genève, among many others.

Ralf Baecker

b. 1977 Düsseldorf, Germany

Lives and works in Berlin

Ralf Baecker studied Computer Science and Media Art at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Since 2016 he teaches at the University of the Arts Bremen as Professor of Experimental Design of New Technologies in the Digital Media program. In his work he explores fundamental mechanisms of action and the effects of new media and technologies. He has been awarded multiple prizes and grants, including an honorary mention at the Ars Electronica in 2012 and 2014, and second prize at the VIDA 14.0 Art & Artificial Life Award. His work has been presented in international festivals and exhibitions, such as the International Triennial of New Media Art in Beijing, Künstlerhaus Wien, ZKM | Center for Art and New Media in Karlsruhe, Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, WINZAVOD Center for Contemporary Art in Moscow, Laboral Centro de Arte in Gijón, and Malmö Konsthall.

Félicie d’Estienne d’Orves

b. 1979 Athens, Greece

Lives and works in Paris

Félicie d’Estienne d’Orves is interested in the optical and acoustic sciences, as well as in astrophysics and the sciences of perception and cognition. Her immersive installations use a phenomenological approach to reality, they underscore the perception of time as a continuum. She works regularly with astrophysicists and planetary scientists, especially Fabio Acero at the AIM laboratory (CEA/Saclay), who specializes in supernova and high energies. Her work has been shown at the Centre Pompidou, the Nuit Blanche in Paris, the Sonic Acts in Amsterdam, the Watermans Arts Center in London, the Elektra Festival - BIAN in Montreal, the Maison des Arts of Créteil, the Nemo International Biennial of Digital Arts in Paris, the OCAT in Shanghai, the ICAS in Dresden, and the Aram Art Museum in Goyang.

Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand

b. 1972, Minsk, Belarus and b.1974,

St. Petersburg, Russia

Live and work in The Hague

Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand create sensory immersion environments that merge physics, chemistry and computer science with uncanny philosophical practices. Having dismissed the use of recording and fixative media, their artworks exist as ever-transforming phenomena offered for observation. The duo’s practice has emerged through unorthodox collaborations with pioneering research groups, including LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory), RySQ (Rydberg Quantum Simulator) and the EU Quantum Flagship. They are recipients of the Witteveen+Bos Award, Meru Art*Science Award, Japan Media Arts Excellence Prize, and five Ars Electronica Honorary Mentions.

Forensic Architecture

Forensic Architecture (FA) is a research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London. It undertakes advanced spatial and media investigations into cases of human rights violations, with and on behalf of communities affected by political violence, human rights organizations, international prosecutors, environmental justice groups, and media companies. Its work often involves open-source investigation, the construction of digital and physical models, 3D animations, virtual reality environments and cartographic platforms. Their work has been featured in international art and architecture exhibitions worldwide.

So Kanno

b. 1984, Japan

Lives and work in Berlin

Trained at the Musashino Art University, as well as, the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS) in Japan, So Kanno has developed an art practice that challenges, often with a touch of irony, some aspects related to technology today, such us the relation between signal and noise, error and glitch. His work has been the subject of multiple presentations including the Japan Media Art Festival Sukagawa in Fukushima, the Ars Electronica in Linz, the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial, the Grand Palais in Paris, the Nemo International Biennial of Digital Arts in Paris, at Fondation Vasarely, Aix-en-Provence and at the YCAM in Yamaguchi. He is the recipient of many prizes and special mentions such as the Japan Media Art, Ars Electronica, among the others. He is also lecturer at the Zokei University Media Design and the Polytechnic University both in Tokyo.

Julia Koerner

b. Salzburg, Austria

Lives and works between Salzburg and Los Angeles

Julia Koerner received her master’s degrees in architecture from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and the Architectural Association in London.

She works at the convergence of architecture, product design, and fashion design and she is internationally recognized for design innovation in 3D-Printing. She is the founder of JK Design specializing in digital design. Some of her most collaborations include Haute Couture Houses for Paris Fashion week and 3D printed costumes for Hollywood entertainment productions such as Marvel’s Black Panther in collaboration with Ruth Carter which won an Oscar for Best Costume Design. Museums and Institutions which have exhibited her work include the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (MET), the Art Institute of Chicago, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels, Museum of Applied Arts MAK Vienna, Ars Electronica in Linz, among others.

Egor Kraft

b. 1986, Saint-Petersburg, Russia

Lives and works between Moscow, Vienna, and Berlin

Egor Kraft works across media, with a practice that involves artificial information systems, computational technologies, films, often in conjunction with traditional media. He acquired his education from the Gerlesborg School of Fine Art (Sweden), the Moscow Rodchenko Art School, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, the Central Saint Martins College in London, and ‘The New Normal’ at Strelka Institute (Russia). His work has been exhibited recently at Ars Electronica in Litz, Open Codes at ZKM | Center for Art and New Media in Karlsruhe, 5th Ural Industrial Biennial, 5th and 2nd Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, WRO Biennial in Wrocław, IMPAKT Festival in Utrecht, Vienna Contemporary, Manifesta X, the Nemo International Biennial of Digital Arts in Paris, 1st Kiev Biennale, among the others.

Kasia Molga

b. Poland

Lives and works in Margate

Kasia Molga is a design fusionist working on intersection of technology, arts, science and engineering. Through her installations, audio-visual performances or coded multimedia sculptures, she creates narratives about how emerging and ubiquitous technologies impact our understanding of the natural environment. She exhibited and presented internationally, most notably: Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tate Modern in London, V&A Museum in London, Ars Electronica in Linz, TRANSNATURAL in Amsterdam, Meta.Morf , ISEA in Istanbul, Translife Media Arts Triennial in Beijing, MIS in São Paulo, V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam; and she is a recipient of many international awards, grants, nominations and accolades, among many others: Wellcome Trust Award, Ars Electronica, Creative Industries, European N.I.C.E Award, RESHAPE, and LES RESPIRATIONS.

Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner

b. 1964, London

Lives and works in London

Scanner’s work traverses the experimental terrain between sound and space connecting a bewilderingly diverse array of genres. Since 1991 he has been intensely active in sonic art, producing concerts, installations and recordings, the albums Mass Observation, Delivery, and The Garden is Full of Metal hailed by critics as innovative and inspirational works of contemporary electronic music. To date he has scored 65 dance productions, including the hit musical comedy Kirikou & Karaba Narnia, Qualia for the London Royal Ballet, and the world’s first Virtual Reality ballet, Nightfall, for Dutch National Ballet. More unusual projects have included designing sound for the Philips Wake-Up Light, the re-opening of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the new Cisco telephone system used in many offices around the world. Committed to working with cutting edge practitioners he collaborated with Bryan Ferry, Wayne McGregor, Mike Kelley, Torres, Michael Nyman, Steve McQueen, Laurie Anderson and Hussein Chalayan, amongst many others.

Iris Van Herpen

b. 1985, Wamel, The Netherlands

Lives and works in Amsterdam

Iris van Herpen is a Dutch fashion designer who is internationally recognized for her pioneering use of 3D printing as a construction technique as well as an aesthetic principle. Since her first show in 2007, she has been preoccupied with inventing new forms and methods of sartorial expression by combining the most traditional and the most radical materials and garment manufacture methods into her unique vision. Her work has been featured in various museum exhibitions, including a major retrospective that toured in the United States and Canada from 2015 to 2018. Van Herpen’s creations have been exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York, and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, among others.

Etsuko Yakushimaru

Lives and works in Japan

Etsuko Yakushimaru is a Japanese singer, producer, composer, lyricist, arranger and visual artist. She is broadly active both in the pop industry, as well as, in the experimental music field, as solo artist or with her band, Sōtaisei Riron. Her approach is characterized by interdisciplinarity, she created projects that involves satellite, biological data and biotechnology, song-generating robot powered by artificial intelligence. She has worked on numerous collaborative projects with renowned artist such as Ryuichi Sakamoto, Jeff Mills, Matthew Herbert, my bloody valentine, Christian Fennesz, Thurston Moore, Cornelius, and Arto Lindsay. Her work has been presented in prestigious art events worldwide. Among them, the Mori Art Museum, Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, Ars Electronica Festival, Bozar Electronic Arts Festival, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, National Museum of Nature and Science, Tokyo.

5. About S+T+ARTS

S+T+ARTS is an initiative of the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program. It was launched in 2015, following up on findings of previous activities funded by the European Commission such as ICT&Art 2012, FET-ART, ICT ART CONNECT 2013, and ICT ART CONNECT Study, whose results demonstrated the worldwide emergence of communities producing hybrid collaborations among science, technology and the arts.

S+T+ARTS Prize awards the most pioneering results in the field of co-creativity and innovation at the crossings of science, technology and the arts:

Grand Prize, Artistic Exploration Awarded for artistic exploration and art works where appropriation by the arts has a strong potential to influence or alter the use, deployment or perception of technology.
Grand Prize, Innovative Collaboration Awarded for innovative collaboration between industry or technology and the arts that opens new pathways for innovation.

The S+T+ARTS Residencies program aims to support and fund artistic residencies that bring original artistic contributions to technology-based projects. During each Residency, a Tech Partner collaborates with an Artist, leading to the creation of an original artwork, and the development of the innovative aspects of the tech research. A grant is awarded to the Artist of each Residency as a contribution to their involvement in the residencies program and can also be supported by a Producer.

S+T+ARTS Lighthouse Pilots support research seeking radically novel technology solutions to major challenges for industry and society, in close collaboration with artists. Re-FREAM enables co-creation by scientists and artists in urban environments by offering facilitation services, access to know-how and technologies as well as mentoring. It designs a sustainable, open innovation platform with researched technologies, patterns, concepts, learnings for further development of fashion of the future. The central objective of MindSpaces is to create the tools and develop the solutions for adaptive and inclusive spaces that dynamically adapt to emotional, aesthetic, and societal responses of end users, creating functionally and emotionally appealing architectural design.

For the exhibition NEAR + FUTURES + QUASI + WORLDS, S+T+ARTS partners with STATE Studio, an art science gallery and exhibition laboratory in Berlin. Developed in partnership with Wissenschaft-im-Dialog, the umbrella organization for science communication in Germany, it is a place for creative synergies between science, art and innovation to help forward ideas for a sustainable future.

6. STATE Studio

Hauptstr. 3, 10827, Berlin

Website state-studio.com

E-mail hello@state-studio.com

T +49 30 5527 9411

Socials (Insta/Facebook/Twitter): @statestudiobln

Exhibition opening days and hours:Tue–Fri: 12 pm – 7 pmSat/Sun 12 pm – 5 pm

7. Press contact

Full exhibition checklist and high-resolution images are available upon request.

First contact with Aneffel KADIK – Officer for European Projects

Aneffel.kadik@lafrenchtech-grandeprovence.fr

+33 6 18 91 94 18