100 Jahre Bauhaus: We are not alone / Shared Habitats

At the beginning of the last century, the Bauhaus developed methods of abstraction, formalization, and general concepts to understand, describe, and change the world. This resulted in production methods of unique efficiency and variability. The aesthetic view also changed: clarity and transparency, but also a focus on the people, their perception, competencies, and needs are characteristics of its tradition.

Today we work with highly differentiated digital tools. And anyone familiar with these tools knows the difficulties of creating in synthetic worlds a dense atmosphere equal to our analogue world. An unprecedented loneliness had settled into digitally generated artifacts that tell us that until today we have not grasped the entirety of the surrounding atmosphere or even its essence, so we could adequately grasp it. We are not alone consoles and warns us: it promises an answer from the ecosphere – animals, plants, cosmos, which speak to us in an old-fashioned way – just as it reminds us that we still do not understand enough of this ecosphere, just as we overlook many other humans who do not live in our culture, our sphere of life, or our social class. And it reminds us that the world does not end with the Earth or even our own limited field of vision. At the same time, the title points out that our technologies are not passive tools that we use with our hands. Rather, they have mutated into co-creative teammates who make predictions, take decisions, and not only generate their own suggestions for action but also implement them. We are not alone!

As artists and descendants of the Bauhaus, we recognize that our role is changing. We no longer believe in the heroic genius of the master who forms the world in a state of intuition. Embedding and feedback reveal that responsible action requires diverse cognitive variations that involve the counterpart in a performative way.

We are looking for practices that place us in a manageable field of action and allow us to uncover a variety of our perceptive abilities. We open the black box of a knowledge-based view of our environment and attempt to take direct action within hearing and sight range. Techniques that we use experience their horizon at the perceptual threshold of the senses. System configurations make it possible to shift this threshold by opening up a space of resonance made of objects, tools, and networks within this sensory range.

In order to leave the human-centered habitat, we synchronize our actions with our perception, separating seeing, hearing, and feeling from its purposefulness, to become attentive to the world’s expressions as such. This is the starting point for a revision of scope of action, control strategies, and future visions.

Here we meet Lazlo Moholy-Nagy again, who lamented 100 years ago that man has lost his manifold sensory and craft skills through modern means of production. “In constant struggle with his instincts, he is raped by external knowledge,” writes Lazlo Moholy-Nagy in his book From Material to Architecture. Inspired by his statement, we would like to recapitulate what forms of cultural design we would like to deepen today.

100 Jahre Bauhaus: We are not alone/Biolab, Credit: Lehrstuhl Media Environments

e not alone/DigitalBauhausLab @ Lehrstuhl Media Environments
100 Jahre Bauhaus: We are not alone/DigitalBauhausLab, Credit: Lehrstuhl Media Environments

100 Jahre Bauhaus: We are not alone/Biolab, Credit: Lehrstuhl Media Environments

100 Jahre Bauhaus: We are not alone/Artistic Research, Credit: Lehrstuhl Media Environments

100 Jahre Bauhaus: We are not alone/Artistic Research, Credit: Lehrstuhl Media Environments

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Overview of projects

ZoomBx: KTV Sessions Vol II.

Rico Graupner (DE)

ZoomBx: KtV Sessions Vol II. focuses on the experimental exploration for real-time-driven composition of public soundscapes. Sound events and movement patterns inside a terrarium are tracked, interpreted, and acoustically applied to a concrete fusion with the outer soundscape. The result is an automated soundscape composition between randomness and determinism, from which questions about the cultural significance of designed sounds and the originality of acoustic phenomena can be deduced.

TRANSCODE!

University of Art and Design Linz, Interface Cultures

Knowing that technology will not save our world, we call for unsecured transcode! The Interface Culture Department of the Linz University of Art and Design is celebrating its 15th anniversary within the 40th anniversary of the Ars Electronica Festival. Reason enough to embark on a comprehensive transformation process and to examine processes of transcoding in particular and in general in the form of an exhibition, performances and presentations as well as discursive approaches.

Tickle

The Center for Haptic Audio Interaction Research (CHAIR) (DE)

The Tickle is an acoustic interface for sound. It’s designed as the missing input device for physical modeling synthesis. Vibrations are captured on the surface and fed into digital resonators. It responds naturally to hitting or scratching, even bowing on the edge, making the interaction embodied, intuitive, and intimate.

The Poetic Design: From Mimesis to Catharsis.

Homero Ruiz (MX/DE)

The Poetic Design: From Mimesis to Catharsis explores the visual poetry and basis of Greek aesthetic philosophy through its four main elements: Mimesis, Poiesis, Apate (Esthetic Illusion), and Catharsis.

TARDIGRADA – von mikrobiotischen Lebenskünstlern

Maria Antonia Schmidt (DE)

The tardigrade or water bear, a microorganism, survives environmental conditions that hardly any other living creature can withstand. While researchers are working on deciphering the secrets of the tardigrade’s survival, the media are throwing themselves at the cute bear and marketing it in all conceivable variations. In the end, the work poses the question of what sound these tiny creatures make. This is reason enough for the world’s first tardigrade nano-ear experiment: a musical radio feature/4channel audio installation between science and absurdity.

Stereospacer: Nature Space

Michael Markert (DE)

Explore how virtual insect and physical city sounds mix and discover how this experience changes the perception of the area outside the exhibition space.

Simulation

Jörg Brinkmann (DE)

The sound of a voice from a YouTube clip is analyzed with custom software and translated into servomotor movements. The mouth moves in synch with the video’s voice, which is realized with a bulldog clip that is attached to the lower lip. In the original video clip, a controversial and much-discussed shaman known as Little Grandmother delivers a monologue about religion, ego, and love reminiscent of a mantra.

Shared Habitats

The exhibition Shared Habitats focuses on the influence of technology on socio-cultural processes through fourteen works of a digital, biological, and interactive nature. The exhibition focuses on the location of organisms in their environment, the effects of humans on their habitats, and the artistic handling of new biomaterials and technologies. Many of the works on display are based on scientific experiments that are analyzed in a cultural context.

Rhizomes

Freya Probst (DE/UK)

These grown gowns are the outcome of a series of experiments and playful interactions with plants and the observation of their roots through photography or time-lapse video. Experiments with pearls, small gears, or the positioning of seeds lead to different plant responses. The outcome was eventually applied to larger surface areas in the shape of cutting patterns reminiscent of fine woven textiles. The exhibits show a subterranean, hidden aesthetic of a natural structure that cannot be copied by humans.

Prix Forum

One of the absolute highlights of every Ars Electronica is the opportunity to meet Prix Ars Electronica prize-winners and to attend Prix forums to hear the artists elaborate on their oeuvre and current work. Moderated by Prix Ars Electronica jurors, these discussions provide fascinating insights into this year’s categories: Computer Animation, Digital Musics & Sound Art and Artificial Intelligence & Life Art.

Privacy Machine

Timm Burkhardt (DE)

An electronic way to say, “I want to be private today and not appear in your social media photos.” Privacy Machine is a working proof of concept: stand in front of the screen and take the badge or the scarf. Both have a special pattern on it. As long as this pattern is recognized by the camera, the software will pixelate your face. It‘s an unrealistic wish because manufacturers would have to integrate this software into their smartphones as a default.

Introduction to Posthuman Aesthetics

Mindaugas Gapševičius (LT/DE)

Installation with devices and videos (2016-2019) These toolkits invite their users to carry out scientific experiments on a DIY level and be able to introduce their simplified, accessible versions to a broader community. The prerogative is to render and outline methods for independent research, opening the black box of empirical experiments to individuals across disciplines. Whether framing the discussion of political, economical, or cultural issues, the toolkits question the creativity of non-humans and do not presume humans to be the only creative force at work.

Probing the Planthroposcene: Excerpts from a Dis-service Society

Alexandra Toland (US/DE)

Can “ecosystem services” and disservices provided by plants be seen as phyto-technologies of multi-species societies? How are spaces of creative dissonance, resilience, and resistance created by outliers: pests, parasites, invasive species, and allergens? What moral agency do humans have in determining the assets and liabilities of plants during the environmental strains of the Anthropocene? These questions are explored through an assemblage of objects, images, and recordings featuring plants as protagonists in natural habitats along roadsides, probing what Natasha Myers (2016) has dubbed the “Planthroposcene.”

Pig Simulator

Stephan Isermann (DE)

The Pig Simulator takes place in virtual reality but also in real space. The goal is to escape the slaughter in virtual reality – and, as in the real life of the real pig, this idea becomes futile. The user will live and die like a pig and experience the habitat of the animal as closely as possible through the virtual embodiment of an artificial and cruel habitat designed by humans to satisfy our desire for mass consumption of meat. The Pig Simulator may subvert common expectations about gaming and fights the dark irony of a just world of unequal life forms living in the shared habitat called Earth.

PhD PANEL: slow algorithms and the hazards of standardization

Bauhaus University (DE)

Made up of four doctoral research students from the Bauhaus University Weimar’s practice-based PhD program, this panel uses the 100-year anniversary of the Bauhaus to critically reflect on the cultural, educational, political, and economic standardization of art and design in society today.

microplastic_hyperobject

Maria Degand (FR/DE), Leon-Etienne Kühr (DE)

Numbers and graphs are the essence of most scientific papers. They try to describe the world, facts, and problems. Microplastics are one of these problems. This artistic research is an example of how people can literally be put in these graphs. It looks at the real problem particle in this particle system. The design of experimental research is set up to simulate the experience of the hyperobject in virtual reality. Experiments on the scale in virtual reality and about connections in virtual space.

Machine to Support the Starving Artist

Timm Burkhardt (DE)

This work is designed to undermine the vital but patronizing “Harz IV” agenda of the German government in which self-employed individuals must send in records of their expenses in order to verify the necessity of support. Made of stainless steel, this unobtrusive machine is suited for the harsh environments of the streets. It generates receipts for random items, quantities, and sale amounts. Each receipt is printed on thermal paper like an actual receipt and could be sent to the authorities.

^lgorithmZoo Pt. 5. : KTV Session

Rico Graupner (DE)

^lgorithm Zoo pt. 5 “KtV Sessions Vol II. is a concert series that deals with the sonic fusion of different biological habitats. In this case, a beetle-controlled synthesizer interacts with the sound installation ZoomBx. The movement events of the insects are tracked by a specially developed software (IcCE) that makes it possible to map the acquired data to musical parameters as well as different positions in space.

Humus, Humanity & Humility

Julian Chollet (DE)

Humus is more important than art, money, or success. Humanity depends on intact ecosystems and fertile soil. Humility and responsibility will help our species survive.

Telecommunications Art

THU 5.9. | 12:30 – 13:30

Ars Electronica History Summit

THU 5.9. | 14:00 – 18:00

100 Jahre Bauhaus: We are not alone

THU 5.9. | 11:00 – 12:30: The panel introduces lecturers who in recent years have devoted themselves to arts education that straddles the humanities and the natural sciences. The experiences gained through this examination of science and art find expression in an original theory as well as in the artistic practice of students, sometimes over several generations. We would like to take the time for a critical inventory that not only leads to skepticism, but also to a change in the design of cultural technology. Teachers from various disciplines will explain approaches developed from the encounter of art practice and theory at art colleges. The focus is on the adventures and visions that manifest themselves 100 years after the euphoria of the Bauhaus.

Ars Electronica History Day

The History Day conferences are dedicated to the anniversary celebrations of Ars Electronica. After 40 years in existence, we reflect on the various forms of digital media art that emerged during this time and were embedded and presented in the festival. Pioneers of artistic movements with strong impacts on the digital revolution from all around the globe will discuss outstanding ideas, practices and contributions from the intersection between art and technology.

Growing Geometries – tattooing mushrooms

Theresa Schubert (DE)

Growing Geometries – tattooing mushrooms explores the morphology of fungi and evolution of geometrical shapes on living and growing membranes.

Relations – Experimental Radio Showcase

Bauhaus-Universität Weimar

In addition to the thematic exhibition “Shared Habitats,” Bauhaus University, Weimar will present other projects from the departments of Experimental Radio, Media Environments, Human-Computer Interaction, and Product Design.

Drosophila Karaoke Bar

Ursula Damm (DE)

Drosophila Karaoke Bar invites visitors to establish a direct exchange with fruit flies through a technical interface that invites visitors to talk and sing with the flies.

Thoughts on Day and Night

Maike Alisha Effenberg (DE)

By extending mechanical models from the 60s, you will find here a new approach towards nature and ecosystems. Contemplate the equality of the energy flow within a machine and within an organism. Both receive their energy from the light, react to it, and save it for processes at night. At least, this is what we think they do. So how much life do we find in a machine and how much construction do we find in nature?

Global Consciousness Interface

Sebastian Kaye (UK/DE)

Global Consciousness Interface is a portable interface that allows users to connect themselves to this net of consciousness whenever they feel the need. As “esoteric electronics,” this device mirrors a part of the tantric approach in Tibetan Buddhist meditation; by using body, speech, and mind, one’s totality is applied. Here, the body is reflected in the use of the user’s heart rate, the bell symbolizes speech, and the mind is united with itself through this interface.

close encounter

Jan Georg Glöckner (DE)

Living sculpture (2019) The work displays a fungus living in a 90 liter bioreactor. In the bioreactor the fungus is kept alive by an artificial life support system that supplies it with the water, sugar, and oxygen that are its basic needs. The fungus adapts to this system and transforms its body into round pellets that are submerged into the liquid. The bodily presence of the fungus in the bioreactor offers humans the chance to observe and to reflect about so-called “natural” and artificial habitats.

Cat: Collaborating with a Neural Network

Rachel Smith (UK)

This work is a conversation between Rachel Smith (human) and cifar10_cnn.py (artificial neural network). In order to communicate successfully, they must speak the same language. The method of communication is a human/machine compromise; a hand-painted grid of pixels. The human must automate and restrict herself, the network must cope with human error and bodily forms.

[burnout] Maschine

Max Kullmann (DE)

The [burnout] Maschine was designed to prevent individuals (who are part of an increasingly stressed society despite diminishing physical work) from burning out by taking on this exclusively human inadequacy. At the same time, the relationship between man and machine is questioned.

Bubbles and Clouds – Illuminated Interactive Inflatables

Kristian Gohlke (DE), Christian Wiegert (DE)

Interactive pressure-stabilized membrane structures (“Pneus”), suspended from the ceiling, discreetly illuminated from the inside. As visitors pass through the room, through touch and draughts, the objects respond. Attempts to elucidate the objects creates a dialogue of light, sound and movement. In the course of the casual interaction, the visitors become part of a performance. The boundaries between viewer and performer, space and content begin to drift – bubbles wafting in clouds.

100 Jahre Bauhaus: We are not alone / Shared Habitats

We are not alone consoles and warns us: it promises an answer from the ecosphere – animals, plants, cosmos, which speak to us in an old-fashioned way – just as it reminds us that we still do not understand enough of this ecosphere, just as we overlook many other humans who do not live in our culture, our sphere of life, or our social class. And it reminds us that the world does not end with the Earth or even our own limited field of vision. At the same time, the title points out that our technologies are not passive tools that we use with our hands. Rather, they have mutated into co-creative teammates who make predictions, take decisions, and not only generate their own suggestions for action but also implement them. We are not alone! As artists and descendants of the Bauhaus, we recognize that our role is changing. We no longer believe in the heroic genius of the master who forms the world in a state of intuition. Embedding and feedback reveal that responsible action requires diverse cognitive variations that involve the counterpart in a performative way.

Maschine, die auf Gott wartet

Hannes Waldschütz (DE)

The Maschine, die auf Gott wartet (“Machine that waits for God”) is part of a series of three “waiting machines.” They were activated in Bremen on October 24, 2007, at 6:07 p.m. From this point in time the three machines had been in operation, the Maschine, die auf Gott wartet is still waiting. It’s a microelectronic circuit, built and programmed in order to constantly inquire about the expected event: God must give a signal via a God sensor. An integrated backup power supply guarantees failure-free and uninterrupted functioning.

Alter Ego (Version II)

Moritz Wehrmann (DE)

Alter Ego questions the mimetic inter-relationship between two persons. It creates a mental conflict of self-localization, a feeling of self-loss and a feeling of empathy at the same time. The work is foundation for a cooperative with neurophysiological researchers, e.g. with Prof. Alain Berthoz of at Collège de France in Paris. It plays an important role in the research areas of self-other perception and mechanisms of sympathy and empathy research and their disorders, e.g. schizophrenia and autism.

Project Credits:

• Text: Ursula Damm

“We are not alone!”: Bauhaus and Ars Electronica celebrate together

The Bauhaus University Weimar is not only celebrating 100 Years of Bauhaus this year, but students, teachers and alumni are also presenting themselves as a partner university at the Ars Electronica Campus 2019. In exhibitions and panels, they are encouraging: “We are not alone!”