RIXC Art Science Festival 2021
Joyce HINTERDING, David HAINES. Wrangling Chaos
Alice BUCKNELL. The Martian Word for the World is Mother.
Nina CZEGLEDY. On Sensory Awareness
Sandra ALVARO. Aesthetics of Perception, a historical approximation to inhuman vision and its ecological meaning.
Joyce HINTERDING, David HAINES. Wrangling Chaos
On land of the Wiradjuri, the Dhurag, the Darkinjung and the Gundungurra. We walk between ancient aquifers, underground waterfalls going in the wrong direction, deep, water-worn slot canyons, ancient seabeds and encounter monstrous liquid ironstone forms. At around 1000 metres altitude in the rock formations of the north-western Blue Mountains, of NSW Australia ice-cold clear water is pushed to the level of this high plateau. Here we encounter the residues of phase-shifting matter. Iron in liquid form became ironstone caught in aquicludes and is now frozen in form and shape and leaving behind mysterious harmonic structures known as Pagodas. Unique in the world, the pagodas are identified by iconic weather-worn bladed dinner plates, named as such by any rock climber who has had to weave a delicate passage across them and the characteristic banding that recalls the beautiful periodic precipitation patterns found in the water processes of Liesegang chemistry. It may take extreme temperature, pressure, or energy, but all matter can be changed, and much of this landscape seems to retain the forms and shapes characteristic of the liquid phase.
David Haines lives and works in the Blue Mountains NSW. His practice spans a wide variety of media, from immersive installation and experimental audio for performance to discrete objects, images, and aroma compositions. He often collaborates with artist Joyce Hinterding and is renowned for producing technologically innovative works that combine extensive photographic and video fieldwork with 3d visualisation and real-time interactive 3d environments. David is represented by Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney and is a lecturer at the University of Sydney, Sydney College of the Arts
Joyce Hinterding lives and works in the Blue Mountains NSW, Australia. Her practice is internationally recognised for exploring acoustic and electromagnetic phenomena with custom-built field recording and monitoring technologies, including VLF antenna and experimental graphite drawings. She often collaborates with artist David Haines to produce large scale immersive video and real-time interactive 3d environments. Joyce is represented by Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney and lecturers at the University of Sydney, Sydney College of the Arts.
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Alice BUCKNELL. The Martian Word for the World is Mother.
Merging science-fiction strategies, speculative biology, 3D worldbuilding, language AIs, and contemporary architectural proposals for space colonization, The Martian Word for World is Mother draws new links between a speculative society on the Red Planet and our own. The work uses the fantasy of an interplanetary future for humanity as an allegory to examine planetary systems here on Earth.
Loosely inspired by Kim Stanley Robinson’s classic science-fiction work, the Mars trilogy, the project uses a virtual Mars world built in the game engine Unreal Engine as a lab for exploring the social, technological, and ecological entanglements of three speculative Martian settlements with very different understandings of the Red Planet’s future, and who gets to decide.
Critiquing contemporary ideas of terraforming, or the geological and ecological transformation of Mars into a “Planet B” suitable for Earthly habitation and resource extraction, the project also draws an unlikely link between Mars and Scotland that spans science-fiction, sociology, etymology, and geology. One of the project’s settlements expands on the possibility of non-human life on Mars by merging mysticism, rewilding, and plant consciousness. Using data mapping of drone footage from the Scottish Highlands and a speculative Martian language that combines Scottish Gaelic and a Martian alphabet developed by 19th century French Mystic Helene Smith through a Natural Language Processor (NLP), a 3D rendition of the Highlands gleaned through drone data capturing becomes a site for glossolalic Martian flora that communicates with human agents through Martian-Gaelic glyphs.
In another settlement, a speculative metanational corporation loosely based around Silicon Valley BioTech companies attempts to develop a ‘bio-infrastructure’ base on Mars to mine water for a near-future Earth rapidly running out of resources necessary to sustain life. Meanwhile, in the final settlement, a 3D model of the first proposed Martian city Nüwa (announced in March 2021 and named after the mother goddess of Chinese mythology) and existent ‘Mars training camps’ in desert environments around the world are merged. This slow metamorphosis between real and rendered Martian settlements sets the stage for an experimental and multimedia narrative that dissolves the line between fact and (near-future) fiction.
More generative links between the Red Planet and our own blossomed before interplanetary settlement—and the hyper-masculine neoliberal politics underpinning it—became a near-future concern. The Martian Word for World is Mother reclaims the haptic space of Mars (and the Earth) as a site of entangled sympiosis and multispecies collaboration to envision more-than-human futures for Mars.
Project developed while in residence at RIXC, as part of the Goethe-Institut’s Generation A= AI residency, with support from the Garage Museum in Moscow.
Alice Bucknell is a North American artist and writer based in London. Working primarily through video game engines, her current work explores interconnections of architecture, ecology, magic, and non-human and machine intelligence. She uses speculative fiction and worldbuilding strategies to critique architecture’s role in the climate crisis and its contribution to systems of global inequality. In summer 2021, she organized New Mystics, a platform exploring interconnections of magic and technology through texts co-written with the Language AI GPT-3. She has exhibited her video work internationally, including the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, DAZ in Zürich, Ars Electronica with KÖNIG GALERIE, and White Cube in London, and her writing appears in titles including Flash Art, Frieze, and the Harvard Design Magazine. She studied Anthropology and Visual Art at the University of Chicago and Critical Practice at the Royal College of Art in London.
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Nina CZEGLEDY. On Sensory Awareness
The benefits of Nature on our sensorial being are well known, however it is important to remember that our attitude to, and representation of Nature is always closely linked to political, religious, environmental and social considerations. This includes the impact of radical changes due to the COVID 19 Pandemic affecting every aspect of our life counting our sensory awareness. The advent of the communication revolution contributed to a shift in our perceptions of sensory and spatial abilities. Furthermore in the Pandemic the notions of “private” or “public” space as we have formerly experienced it, have significantly altered affecting our sensory beings. The notion of the constitution of a sentient human being has also changed compelling a reconsideration of knowledge leading to a closer engagement with indigenous peoples. From time immemorial – in contrast to conventional compartmentalized Western worldviews – indigenous cultures across the world focus on a holistic understanding of Nature based on thousands of years of traditional experience. These concepts form an integral part of indigenous philosophy including the notions that everything is connected to everything else, everything including sensory experience is in a state of constant change and this change occurs in cycles or patterns. In Maori philosophy and heritage for example closely linked to and in many ways inseparable from environment: the spirit world of the ancestors is part and parcel of what we see, touch and feel, an integral place in the being of the natural world. In the Navajo universe every component moves continuously in an interrelated mode and the notion of time and space have distinctly different interpretations from those adopted since the Renaissance in “Western” cultures. Lately, “whole system” theories such as a worldview of interconnectedness and interdependence proposed by David Bohm, have found new currency. Bohm and Peat argued that scientific thinking in the last century favored an abstracted, fragmented approach to nature and sensory reality. They suggested a strong interconnection between space and sensory perception, stressing the importance of direct and instantaneous communication determinants and proposed a return to greater creativity and communication in the sciences. In conclusion among all the changes faced in the last century it remains undisputed that the advent of the all-pervasive communication revolution contributed to a fundamental shift in our sensory awareness.
Nina Czegledy, artist, curator, educator, works internationally on collaborative art, science & technology projects. The changing perception of the human body and its environment as well as paradigm shifts in the arts inform her projects. She has exhibited and published widely, won awards for her artwork and has initiated, lead and participated in workshops, forums and festivals worldwide at international events.
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Sandra ALVARO. Aesthetics of Perception, a historical approximation to inhuman vision and its ecological meaning.
Aesthetics is derived from the Greek term aisthetikos, meaning “aesthetics, sensitive, sentient, about sense perception”. First considered as the critic of taste [Baumgarten, 1750] aesthetics was enmeshed in a historical narrative that imposes a distinction between the cognitive-semantic and the affective-stimulant. This paper will sketch a different narrative in which perception is linked to knowledge. In this history, art is an experimental endeavour in which media are resurfaced as constitutive of our experience and always linked to situated histories and politics. Media digital or analogue links the viewer in networks of transindivituation that go beyond their organic limits [Stiegler, 2009, Colebrook, 2014].
This history starts in Modernity with Goethe’s experiments on the perception of colour that led into the avant-garde, this introduction will link with contemporary art and New Media. The possibility of interpretation and action always relies on a complex relationship between digital and analogue, or the capacity to reduce differential complexity to already established units of recognition [Bergson, 1912]. Artworks that process data implementing interfaces and ‘intelligent’ systems whit purposes other than efficiency, control or organic live maintenance engages us in complex ecologies that go beyond our organic limits and our milieu as a given system. This creative process opens our perception to a posthuman world, Gaia evolving indifferent to us [Margulis] and into the possibility of other futures.
Sandra Alvaro is PhD in Philosophy and an adjunct professor of Contemporary Art at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB). Among her research main areas are Aesthetics and Contemporary Art, the Aesthetics and Politics of computational technologies; urbanism and posthumanism.