In 2024, Baltan will practice a hopeful approach towards technology. Many technologies started with hope—for example, the early phase of the web or the beginning of the blockchain movement. Nonetheless, because of the continuous colonization of technology by corporate capital, both have led to an amplification of centralized power and profit-driven innovation. This colonization created a great sense of disillusionment. How can we cope with it?
Objects in Residence
Let us restart and do technology otherwise: open it up, unscrew it, dissect its materials and rethink the narratives behind it. Let us reclaim our imaginative power and develop new stories that could inspire this process. And with these stories in mind, let us think about how developing more diverse technologies could challenge our current one. Different technologies by different voices, for different human and non-human users, with different materials and production models, for different temporalities and localities.
The exhibition at Ars Electronica will focus on presenting the Objects-in-Residence trajectory of Baltan Laboratories’ 2024 program. An object is the intersection of economic, material, political and social interactions. Starting from specific technological objects (the smartphone, the battery and third-party cookies), we invited three artists/designers to spend one year with those objects, take them apart, materialize/visualize how they work, analyze how they are produced and assembled, what materials are chosen and where they come from.
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Alignment Problem
Thomas Thwaites (GB)
What can we do in the face of the ever-worsening climate crisis? This project titled Alignment Problem presents two apps that attempt to have an effect. The first app limits your screentime on your phone based on the carbon emissions associated with its usage.
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Decline All
Marie Dvorzak (AT)
This work explores the persistence of third-party cookies, a technology Google has repeatedly tried—and failed—to phase out. Known to most EU citizens as the cause of those annoying consent pop-ups on websites, these cookies highlight the difficulty of moving beyond entrenched digital practices and the influence of surveillance capitalism.
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Sediments of Power
Azahara Cerezo (ES)
Sediments of Power is a research-based work that examines lithium batteries in electric vehicles to address the ambivalences of the twin transition, its material dependencies, and the effects on our fast, portable lifestyles.
Baltan Laboratories (NL)
Baltan Laboratories is a cultural “indisciplinary” lab based in Eindhoven. We focus on societal issues through a relational approach, creating spaces to rehearse living otherwise. In a world full of uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, the interactions and exchanges between different disciplines are fundamental to achieving a relational approach that responds to the environmental, political, social, economic and technological issues we must address today.
Credits
Baltan Laboratories curated and produced the exhibition Technologies Otherwise. The exhibition features first outcomes of the year-long artist-in-residency program.
Objects-in-Residence, a part of Baltan Laboratories’ program for 2024 – Technologies Otherwise. Three artists in residence, Marie Dvorzak—Azahara Cerezo and Thomas Thwaites—developed new projects about different technologies.
Curators: Lorenzo Gerbi and Marlou van der Cruijsen / Production: Sarie Hermens, Julia Kassyk / Communication: Matteo Borsato
The exhibition is an outcome of the residency, Objects in Residence, at Baltan Laboratories. The residency is part of a year program for 2024 Technologies Otherwise, supported by Creative Industries Fund NL and Stichting Cultuur Eindhoven.
