Photo: Peter Mader

FUNKEN Academy

The projects developed and featured in the framework of FUNKEN Academy showcase artistic experiments with different scientific topics, as data, fungi or DNA.

  • Adapted Artifact 258

    Adapted Artifact 258

    Kacper Krajewski (PL)

    A lamp, once used by humans, gets overtaken by nature. The lampshade transforms through mushroom growth, consuming its fabric. The fruiting bodies naturally adapt to their environment. The lampstand is made out of mycelium, the main part of fungi, grown in a specific way to achieve a durable material.Adapted Artifact 258 explores human influence on…

  • Ghostly Collector

    Ghostly Collector

    Pai Litzenberger (DE)

    Ghostly Collector is a multifaceted ghost, capable of transformation and realm-crossing, whose identity figures through micro-performativity. Ghostly Collector explores whether fiction can make new scientific innovations more accessible. By linking nanotechnologies such as DNA folding and protein design with artistic storytelling, the transmedia installation challenges the notion of object permanence.

  • How to negotiate with a material

    How to negotiate with a material

    Eugénie Desmedt (AT/FR)

    Inspired by scientific research towards using mycelium as an economically viable material, the research project How to negotiate with a material sheds light on the protocols of power and control that come to play when using another living being for the production of a good.

  • Infinitesimal

    Infinitesimal

    Ioulia Marouda (GR)

    Infinitesimal is an experimental animation that explores the gaps in scientific imaging by imagining nanoscale movement and how it would appear if visible to our eyes. DNA origami is so minuscule that the microscope captures only its final stage of folding, a process that leaves gaps in understanding intermediate stages. The work departed from images…

  • Safeness

    Safeness

    Erwin Jeneralczyk (PL)

    The piece explores the emergence of ordered patterns from stochastic systems. It results from experiments with encoding information in metal artifacts using advanced 3D printing technologies. A dedicated algorithm analyzes digit frequencies in prime numbers, revealing their patterns through ten matrices and translating them into sound. The work was created during the FUNKEN Academy and…

  • Soft screen

    Soft screen

    Linda Lach (PL)

    The pumping machine works slowly. Inherently unproductive, it exudes a dragging feeling. Pump’s sluggishness bends time and liberates us from normative experience. It is a performative act allowing for an examination of loss and liminality of feedback networks. After everything failed, this is the last thing clemently screening us from peril.