Dass man Kunst mit Nicht-Verwertbarkeit argumentiert, führt zum Korpus der Aussage: Kritik an der Dominanz der Logik und die Folgen eines viele Lebensbereiche umfassenden, natürlich anmutenden, weil allgegenwärtigen Verwertungsinteresses, auch in und durch Kunst (Stichwort: Kunst-Blase). Die Ausstellung Crashing the Information entstand vor dem Hintergrund der Forschungsaktivitäten der STWST; an die Community-Währung Gibling sei erinnert und das Donautik-Projekt, wo die Verwandtschaft von Wasser und Information in unterschiedlichsten Settings und Serien untersucht wird. Shu Lea Cheang und Franz Xaver konzipieren das 48-Stunden-Kunstprogramm als Infolab, Infodetox und Infocrash mit Artist-In-Residence-KünstlerInnen für den halb-öffentlichen Raum zwischen dem Haus Kirchengasse 4 und am Ufer der STWST.
Infolab
Infolab untersucht Wassertiere, den Zufall und die Geheimnisse der Pilze. The Eel Hotel (Donautik) versteht sich als Hommage an Aale, welche sich laut dem Meeresbiologen Dr. Dimitri Davor (Universität Kiew) in einer Evolutionsfalle befinden. Aale haben gewissermaßen eine »Weltkarte im Kopf« mit der sie zum Laichen zurück in die Sargasso-See im Bermuda-Dreieck finden. Nun stehen die Aale vor dem Problem, das sie eine 100 Millionen Jahre alte Karte nutzen und diese veraltet ist. Vor 9000 Jahren ist der Bosporus durchgebrochen und diese Veränderung der Wasserwege wird nur sehr langsam in den Informationsspeichern (Gene) einer so alten Tierart aufgenommen. Aale finden aus dem Rhein, der Elbe, der Havel und überraschend auch aus dem Waldviertel, aber nur aus den nach Norden entwässerten Bächen und Flussläufen, wie zum Beispiel aus der Lainsitz zurück zu ihrem Laichplatz. Sie finden aber nicht aus der Donau, nicht aus der Mur, nicht aus dem Inn, nicht aus der Isar und aus nicht aus dem Süden von Russland zurück in die Sargasso-See. Laut Dr. Dimitri ist der Grund dafür der Durchbruch des Bosporus, der auf ca. 7000 v. Chr. datiert wird, und dass dieses Ereignis im trägen Informationsspeicher des 100 Millionen Jahre alten Tiers noch nicht aufgenommen wurde. Das von Donautik entwickelte Unterwasser-Hotel ist eine wirkliche Behausung für diese Informations-Verweigerer, und dient den Aalen als mögliches Up-Date ihrer aktuellen Weltkarte.
Ghostradio ist am Grenzbereich von Logik/Irrationalität angesiedelt. Die Premiere von Ghostradio verlief paradigmatisch: der Geist kam – Dinge fielen aus Schränken. Faktisch ist Ghostradio jedoch ein Setting mit einem Lord-Kelvin-Generator, um Zufallszahlen zur Kryptografie zu ermitteln. Im Szenario der totalen Überwachung steht der Zufall und seine Rolle in Verschlüsselungstechnologien im Mittelpunkt (nicht die zwielichtige Mittlerrolle des Geistes der Zwischenwelt; der Geist muss im Hintergrund bleiben). Stehen Besucher unter der sehr großen Pentagramm-Antenne vor der STWST, dann sind sie im Ghostradio, in der Welt der Zufallszahlen angekommen.
Das fremde Leben der Pilze untersucht MYCO-LOGICK – indem Pilzsporen in und aus dem Orbit geschickt werden. Pilze sind in wissenschaftlichen Kreisen noch immer strittig: Sind sie Tiere oder Pflanzen? Ist es Zeit für eine neue Spezies, die Blumentiere? Wie funktioniert ihr unterirdisches Kommunikationssystem und können sie als intergalaktische Informationsträger getestet werden? Pilze stellen abseits ihrer psychedelischen Bedeutung – Aldous Houxley läßt grüßen! – ein mächtiges Kommunikationssystem dar: Myco-Logick beschäftigt sich mit der geheimnisvollen Sprache des Myzels und schickt Sporen in einem Ballon auf die Reise ins All.
Infodetox | Infocrash
Das hätte sich der Algorithmen‘ Namensgeber al-Chwarizmi (* um 780) nicht gedacht: Sie bestimmen unser Leben! Alles ist Sinn und Zweck, wird gemessen und berechnet, das positivistische Denken eben. True is what works, sagen die amerikanischen Utilitaristen. They Live! sagt John Carpenter. Verwertungsinteressen tangieren unsere Lebenswelt erheblich. Musik, die freieste oder unmittelbarste aller Künste, wird im Internet skaliert und als Zugriffsgröße in Playlists, Charts, von AKM und Konzernen verhandelt. Hingegen kann diese Quasi-Information mit den Abhängigkeiten von Logik, Algorithmen und Verwertungsinteresse brechen. Die Irrationalität der Träume und die Spielarten von Quasi-Information sind überlebensnotwendig, aber sie bewegen sich in einem sinnfreien Raum, haben ganz ironiefrei mit dem Eigenleben der Gefühle zu tun. Infodetox (wo dem Leben zur Sicherheit das Gift beigestellt wird) untersucht die Un-Möglichkeiten sinnfreier Information. Bienen, Bakterien und biotoxische Experimente: Das Diktat der Logik wird an Berührungspunkten unterschiedlicher Lebensformen dekonstruiert.
»We want to design our own catastrophe, generate our own noise. We want to be a mistake.« (<<<File found>>> by A Pelos & aTxE)
Der Mensch ver-lernt den Algorithmus. PISS(ON)LOGIC ist neben acht weiteren Arbeiten von geladenen KünstlerInnen Teil des Infocrash. Infocrash verhandelt Fragen der Informationstechnologien am menschlichen Körper und in anderen biologischen Situationen. Die Rationalität informationsverarbeitender Systeme wird durch Exzesse, Overloads oder Fehler auf den Kopf gestellt und verkehrt. So, don‘t trust the hype but »convert yourself in E-Waste, read your pulse loud, admit yourself in a world without compromise, a world in which dreams greet reality … Crash the Future -«
»Crashing The Information« wurde kuratiert von Shu Lea Cheang und Franz Xaver.
STWST 48
Infolab
THE EEL HOTEL: All the rivers flowing into the black sea host no naturally occurring eels. Eels gather in the Sargasso Sea (near Bermuda) for reproduction. The young eels then swim back to the rivers. This is reciprocal to the behaviour of salmon. Eels were populated in the Danube, but they do not find their way into the Sargasso Sea. Donautik sets up a research buoy in the Danube - a living space for eels (Eel Hotel) is fixed underwater on a chain (8 drainage pipes are intertwined and concreted).
Science is looking for explanations in the physical conditions of the water. But after closer examination of the development of information in nature, other solutions are appearing. Maybe the solution lies in non-existent information, which is passed on to generations in nature through DNA. DNA is a natural storage of knowledge which helps animal beings to make decisions. The Black Sea found its connection to the Oceans over 7000 years ago through the Bosporus. This fact could explain why the eels are missing this information about the Danube. In 2015, a camera is mounted at the Eel Hotel, which streams all underwater movements at the Eel Hotel.
MYCO-LOGICK: myco-logick is a series of projects inspired by & dedicated to the works of Paul Stamets, Terrence Mckenna, Francis Crick... life [on earth] would be totally different without our fungal cohabitants.
Fungal Spores are transmitters of information. They are nearly indestructible and able to withstand radiation
and absolute zero point temperature. They have all the requirements to transport information inter-galactically. It is relatively easy to send them on such a trip. On the opening night of STWST48, two weather balloons filled with fungal spores are launched bound for the stratosphere. Solar winds and the low weight ensure the orbital escape velocity. These balloons expand while rising and finally burst at an altitude of approximately 30km, releasing the spores to continue onto outer space and/or to fall back on earth, where they possibly find suitable conditions to spread their
information of existence.
GHOSTRADIO: Ghostradio is a second order cybernetic mechanism that generates random numbers by chance. This unit works on the boundaries of the causal world and beyond. We are publishing this random numbers datastream for cryptographic key generation. This will release the public from the current state of surveillance.
Ghostradio is the attempt to find randomness in the world of mathematics through the intersecting fields and time-critical reflections of situations. Randomness can be created within the border zone of our deterministic, logical system: Within the world of atomic decay, the quantum world or through the background noise of the universe.
With the ghostradio project, we are working on the subject of chance. we won‘t use any of the anomalies or the boundaries of the causal world, instead we are taking the far broader approach to the possibilities arising in the definitions of string theory and the existence of the multiverse. The ghostradio method functions with feedback and quantum-effects, losing time and space relevance through the creation of transformation entropy with a shift to the boundaries of the parallel world within the same plot but with a different story, that of our doppelganger, the ghost.
Infodetox
BEE FREQUENCY FARMING: Before the rational framed hive, before industrialisation, before ecocide, there were bees and their sounds. Listening to the gentle buzzing of bees is known to have a calming effect... But bees can be angry too... Bees are the sentinels of our ecosystem, our pollinators, our society blueprints... and more.
Bee Frequency Farming performance attempts to create a symbiotic frequency relationship, like those between pollination and nectar exchanges, or between beekeeper and bees. As a result of Samp’s Eleonore infoDETOX residency that took place in June 2015, Samp performs with his ‚bee frequency log hive electronic apiary‘, a sound installation set up during his residency where daily harvesting (recordings), processing (audio) and distributing (listening) take place via qr code ‚seed‘ cards and streaming online.
Samp has been building log hives and collecting bee hive sounds from London, Sweden, Slovakia and Linz. Bee recordings are amplified inside the tube of the log hive, the distorted sounds reverberate off the circular walls and are projected outward. The simultaneous international bee voices across Europe call our attention. Collectively they are a loud global protest, a link to the past, to an active, sustainable connection with nature.
<<<File found>>>: <<<File found>>> is a Bio-Toxic performance that uses bio-toxic-machines as contestation and resistance to the information imposed. The machines as lovers, the performance articulated by an extended arm connects two DIY tattoo machines - one tattooing the real skin and the other making hole-lines in a vinyl, amplifying a sonic experience of pleasure and pain. The tattoo machine serves as a vehicle of information in noise, generating visual and audible scars that make up the findable file (ff). The tattoo machine designed as an artifact is our ally to desecrate the controlled use of our bodies associated with the idea of health, normality and productivity prescribed in a capitalist society. These bio-toxic-machines are our accomplice to reclaim the self-imposed exile of our bodies. By modifying our bodies, we spread ourselves as destructive virus, rewriting files, file found from the borders.
We want to design our own catastrophe, generate our own noise.
We want to be a mistake.
Our eroticization of violence, turning it into ultra-noise, is the antithesis to the normative complacent melody. Our blood electrified, our scars circuited, our body a battlefield. We resurrect pleasure-pain as weapons and blood flow as distorted information. Our tattoo branded in our bodies and souls cries out in anger, not to forget.
FERMENT LAB: There is no need to develop artificial systems for positive change in the societies or superficial solutions for happier ways of living. Information about how we should co-exist is coded in the natural processes, also in micro bacterial world. Ferment Lab aims to reveal information hidden in micro life of bacterias by simply observing, exposing and reusing its mechanisms in makro culture of societies.
As part of the infoDETOX residency at Station Messschiff Eleonore, Ferment Lab Linz works in particular with perception of time and ways of observing it. During the residency, the activities of Ferment Lab are scheduled according to fermentation cycles (in oppose to the solar or moon day/night rhythm). During STWST48, Ferment Lab turns in to a bizarre feast of different types of fermented food which was maturing over the residency period. The public are invited to observe fermentative developments varying from using a water drop as a magnifying glass, time-lapse photography to construct DIY laser microscope. In the program are also: fortunetelling based on study of personal bacterias, changing the taste of bread by the thoughts thought during kneading the dough, and possibly other oddities. All of these in the surrounding of balloons pumped up by yeast feed on sugar.
Infocrash
PISS(ON)LOGIC: Piss(on)Logic (PoL) for SWST48 showcases the first prototype city-wide leaky Turing-complete computational architecture. Technology and computation is to be no longer constrained and contained within the geo-logic but opened to buildings, earth and human/animal pissoir flow as both logical structuring and information/bits for a genuinely promiscuous and psychogeophysical operating system. PoL prototypes simple cast ungendered urinary logic gates (XOR/AND) embedded in river banks and city streets; these form the building blocks for simple binary adders, cascaded to form pissed compilers and assemblers. During the SWST48 action PoL is open to the re-placement and re-construction of pissoir gates at will.
NSA: The installation NSA proposes a new listening interface for the information age and components of mass culture transmissions. Across which dozens of radio transmissions literally redrawn, re-arranged and randomly broadcast in space, the installation plays with the clichés from pop to information overloads that is prevalent in our society today. This ensemble of cut-ups in flux will be transmitted across the public space in Linz creating a disorientation of sonic objects, whilst simultaneously being broadcast online where listeners can listen and comment on the result of the transformation of the audio datas.
The NSA also allows viewers to participate in the system with their mobilephones. The audience can select the different radio broadcasts processed by the NSA. They will also be able to manipulate certain parameters of the installation.
GIASO: An international online orchestra developed by APO33 whose goal is to create a place for networked performance. »Great International Audio Streaming Orchestra« uses a bidirectional multiplex platform to perform and mix different audio sources via streaming. Over the time of the performance, streams (web-transmission) are re-made in the ‘local’ space using a system based on mixing multiple audio-streams through a spatial diffusion. GIASO creates a distributed orchestra, where musicians and composers can become virtual entities that emerge from a global community of nodes – audio explorers and performers’ networks.
MAKERY: There is a revolution buzzing on the networks and in our cities‚ the maker revolution. Makery, a budding media agency propelled by an experienced and diverse team based in Paris, reports on the worldwide maker movement. During stwst48, Makery invites labs, makers, hackers and DIY coders across borders to take over the makery.info‘s mapping space. Makery treats information as raw material. The team of Makery travels across continents to discover makerspaces, hackerspaces, fablabs and hybrid spaces where the fabrication and applications of the future are being invented. The labs‘ activities are diverse including open science, citizen politics, collective engineering, upcycling of antique musical instruments and electronic waste... Makery presents data-electro-visual networks with open and participatory lab encounter sessions, augmenting its map of labs with AV live streams, direct from Linz with connection to remote labs who share their information/practices and present their wild/serious projects. This is an event both online and in between walls, in Linz and on the networks, to celebrate the long-awaited reconciliation between the virtual world and the real world.
RIVER STUDIES: River Studies is an ongoing long-term artistic research project about exploring the relationship of rivers and its people, rivers and its transforming cultural landscape, rivers and their function as carrier of cultural landscapes and identities. It utilizes custom, combined and unique methods in digital photography, data visualization, cartography and cultural mapping. As main imaginary tool River Studies utilizes a line-scan camera to sample riverscapes from a moving vessel: Custom-build machine‘s eyes that render into unique representations of precious waterlines. Rivers are natural waterways and lifelines of cultures with complex, diverse and ambivalent historical and contemporary roles. Rivers are connecting as well as bordering, they are deployed as routes for trade, as routes of military actions, as a place of religious worships or as a purely economical resource. My other primary interest is to understand rivers as intersection and connection lines through continents, peoples and cultures - cross lines that form a landscape of natural features and accumulated history, a landscape that is as much a cultural as a geographic landscape.
PULSE PROJECT: Pulse Project is an ongoing performance research series exploring the relational interfaces between medicine, culture and technology. In this study, I embody transdisciplinary research practice itself through adopting the role of ‘acupuncturist-investigator’ and acting as an instrument or medium between myself and others and between cultural traditions for understanding and mediating the body. Pulse »reading«, case histories, notations of pulses, i.e., readings of the ‘energetic’ body and algorithmic compositions are all used together as methods for exploring the cultural encounter between a creative producer, participants and diverse cultural/informational practices. Each participant’s pulse is interpreted as a unique set of sound-wave images based on traditional Chinese pulse diagnosis, the soundscapes expressive of an individual’s ‘being’ offer another perspective to conceive of/listen to the interior spaces of the body.
MIRROR PARTY SISTERS' PLAY: Mirror Party Sisters’ Play foregrounds the ephemeral conditions of a system and our embodied position within a network. In this eclectic convergence – not unlike the feminist movement in its various waves and standpoints – a code is handed on via an informal network of sources. Just as a Mexican wave unequivocally spreads as a ripple across layers of beings and has its variations depending on individual, or as a wave crashes for the next set of ebbs and flows. Interrogating the ways in which we understand or resist our foremothers, content is obfuscated and encrypted, twisted or simply replicated as a traditional Mirror Party intends to serve as a foundation for mirroring projects. This work is an ode to the deep influence of the Genderchangers Academy, homebrewed since 2000, their events on flow effects can be traced through the continents. Who will execute the code that another sends in a multi-cast plaintext, free from the lion’s share of toxins? Mirror Party Sisters’ Play calls for systerservers and web hosts’ participation.
PLANTOID: Plantoid is a bionic blockchain-based installation. Plantoid, the plant equivalent of an android, is an autopoietic sculpture —a self-owned artist that owns and finances itself, and eventually reproduces itself. It is, in essence, a hybrid entity that exists both in the physical and virtual world, where it can interact with other entities on the blockchain. In its physical form, it is a welded mechanical sculpture on display in a public space —an aesthetic ornaments that exhibits its mechanical beauty and begs to be appreciated by the public. Appreciation is done via interactions with the public who can ‘tip or feed’ the Plantoid by sending tokens into its Bitcoin wallet. Legally speaking, Plantoids do not have any legal entity, since —as opposed to corporations— the law does not recognize legal personhood to commodities or things. Yet, as opposed to traditional art pieces, Plantoids are not bought or sold; nor can they be owned as objects.
Even if they are autonomous, Plantoids require the interaction of other species (humans) to subsist and reproduce themselves in a physical form. Reproduction of a Plantoid is enabled through human participation, coordinated via smart contracts and blockchain technology. Thanks to the fund she has secured beforehand, the Plantoid can pay humans to design a new blueprint, gather materials, and prepare, collate, weld, or assemble them, so as to ultimately deliver a new structure for every new instantiation of the Plantoid, with a new life on its own. Although (partially) defined by the contractual rules of the DAO, the actual phenotype of subsequent Plantoids remains open to artistic interpretation, depending on the artist hired to reproduce the sculpture.
ELECTROMAGNETIC DIMENSION: The electromagnetic field extends its influence to all possible scales, creating a continuum from radio waves and chemical bonds to the oscillations of thought — experience itself. We perceive three dimensions, and yet contemporary physics asserts the existence of many more. With this in mind, Sexton installs an antenna and performs a series of spatiotemporal experiments with radio and objects.
Alle Projekte: projects.stwst.at/stwst48/