Veronika Liebl, Managing Director, Ars Electronica and Andrew Newman, Producer European Platform for Digital Humanism, Ars Electronica dedicate the tenth edition of Inside Festival to the topic of “Data/ Storage of our data” and present a total of five projects that address the topic from different perspectives.
The project Data Garden received an Honorary Mention at the STARTS Prize 2021. Data Garden is an organism-based data centre. This functional carbon negative data infrastructure is capable of storing and retrieving data from the DNA of plants. Developed by Grow Your Own Cloud and scientist Jeff Nivala, principal researcher at MISL, University of Washington, the installation features tobacco plants and Arabidopsis encoded with curated data related to Data Warming using in vivo DNA data storage techniques.
“The Blue Humanites Archive” is a project by artsit Justyna Górowska (PL) presented in the program of this year’s online festival Garden Gdansk. It is a VR interactive project about the capability of DNA to store digital data better than silicon in our computers. It fits millions of terabytes in a few grams suspension in the water and thereby minimizes the ecological cost of the global network of digital databases.
“TRANSPRIVACY” is a speculative browser game, that you will be able to enjoy in the HSE Garden Pavilion in the Ars Electronica Garden Moscow. The game is exploring the ambiguous nature of social networks’ transparency. It also questions one’s ownership over their digital copy.
The youth perspectiv of this edition of “Inside Festival” is introducing the project with the title “Die Sprechende Teslaspule” from Nikolaus Juch (*2002), who is a graduate of Modellschule Graz, who already participated with his entire class in the 2014 Prix Ars Electronica u19–create your world competition. The “Sprechende Teslaspule” (Talking Tesla Coil) is a power-electronics demonstrator that was especially conceived for special show segments, performances, and presentations. For example, it can be demonstrated during school visits to illustrate the possibilities of state-of-the-art power electronics.
Our Garden Vilnius presents an experimental workshop about “Sourdough DNA”, held by the artist Kamilė Krasauskaitė. The workshop questions food consumption and origins. Major topics and interests in this workshop include commensality, experimental food design, patterns of time, the collaboration between humans, microorganisms, and how it all shapes the food we eat. By separating different lactobacillus bacterias and wild yeast from the objects (like old baker’s peel, abended ovens) we will follow the stories of the new baby sourdoughs, rethink and manipulate what kind of creature just reborn. Activities will be questioning if objects have memory and if the memory is always related to the brain.
