STUDIO(dys)TOPIA

Feral Automated System: ULTB-1

Posthuman Studies Lab (RU)

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Feral Automated System: ULTB-1 is a living research project, creating a new vision of automated systems: it re-enacts a networked body of Communism composed from different vegetal, digital and engineering layers. Plants here are a pure “hyle”, a scaffold of the project — in the material of the network, its exchanging information (vegetal cryptocurrency) and its very protocols of exchange (derived from the real mechanisms of vegetal communication). The network rethinks the ecological status of vegetal biodiversity as a legacy of the agrobiological experiments: plants created in the Soviet laboratories and communal households (Heracleum, Lupinus, Populus) still do their labor as green proletarians and accumulate toxic resources on the edge of abandoned industries. By collecting the products of their labor into the power source (flow battery), we are using it for starting and maintaining the network. Toxins accumulated within feral plants help to reconstruct the idea of a commons of — always unstable — interspecies connections.

Credit: Sofa Karavaeva
Feral Automated System ULTB-1 - Posthuman Studies Lab (RU)

Feral Automated System ULTB-1 – Posthuman Studies Lab (RU)
photo: Florian Voggeneder
Feral Automated System ULTB-1 - Posthuman Studies Lab (RU)

Feral Automated System ULTB-1 – Posthuman Studies Lab (RU)
photo Florian Voggeneder

Biography

Posthuman Studies Lab investigates post-Soviet ecologies and cosmologies through hybridization of theoretical, scientific and artistic research models. By approaching the post-Soviet present rather than the Soviet past, we are opening abandoned economies and politics which are being created on the edges of progress.

Credits

Concept: Nikita Sazonov, Ekaterina Nikitina, Ippolit Markelov, Masha Molokova
Computer architecture: Dmitriy Lobanov, Andrew Adamatzky, Sergey Pavlov
Design: Sofa Karavaeva
Front-end: Artem Masoshin
Exhibition architecture: Yulia Filatova
3D: Roman Solodkov
Cinematography: Nikita Sazonov, Irina Petrova, Vera Vishnevaya
Science supervision and support: Natalia Alatortseva, Mike Petrov
Printed forms: Daria Trubarova
Network: Daria Okhrimenko, Roman Solodkov, Daria Trubarova, Alina Brovina, Evgenia Bezginova, Ksenia Ruban, Evgeniy Khlopotov, Irina Gulyakina, Anton Kraftsky, Maria Alexandrova, Natalia Alatortseva, Natalia Kuzmina, Tim Nosov, Altyn Mustafina, Lluís Nacenta
Collaborators: EMCPS Lab, Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology; Faculty of Contemporary Art, the “Sreda Obuchenia” Higher School
Special thanks: Hansi Raber (OsciStudio), Peter Fisher, SDVIG Studio, Vita Shakhnovich, Dmitrii Olgin, Boris Shershenkov
Creative Europe Project 616712 Roots & Seeds consortium: University of Barcelona, Quo Artis, Ars Electronica, Leonardo/OLATS.
Roots & Seeds XXI. Biodiversity Crisis and Plant Resistance is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

Funded through the Roots & Seeds project. Roots & Seeds XXI. Biodiversity Crisis and Plant Resistance is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.