Real-time temporary forecasting:
From “Post-Natural” to “Eco-Contemporary”
Owing to a rapid mutation, the evolution of online interactions occurs on a human timescale; rather than being forced to infer past evolutionary events, we can observe them in near real-time. Just by taking a quick glance at the screen, we are able to make our own predictions for almost any topic. Today, however, these predictions are not so evolutionary or relevant since the individuals started to develop some kind of a long-lasting immunity related to a particular ephemeris, resulting in short-time movements that solely tend to be increasingly shorter as time goes by.
If we apply the same probabilistic method in the current art world, we imperatively face a similar situation: artistic evolution is only transiently advantageous due to the influence of online micro-tendencies. However, I found that such occurrence is not necessarily a bad thing when you’re presented with some ‘eco-consciousness’ related tendencies in the art sphere and online culture. The heel is on practices and discourses of several bio- and eco-aesthetics that have emerged recently: From the digitalized/ post-natural inference in altered landscapes to the prevalence of primordial Earth substances in art installations, there is a certain mutual susceptibility to this cultural paraphernalia (possibly démodé by the time you’re reading this). That’s the main reason why this is transient/ temporary and why the projects featured bellow introduce a contextual & historical progeny part of a research from such data, which I’ve considered to divide in two points:
(a) Post-Natural and (b) Eco-Contemporary:
a) “Post-Natural”
Notes toward a History of bio-aesthetics, offers a wide-ranging repertory around the concept of nature, including the unnatural and the post-natural.
Determined by an independent panel of young artists working with different kinds of media, we can assign the term “post-natural” to basically anything that imposes a radical vision on nature addressed by digital manipulation. Anything that takes on the most organic and primal aspects of nature and deliberately transforms/ extends it into something more. This list could be endless, so I decided to focus on a selection of artworks that somehow share a common interest: the altered land soil as the main source of creation.
Flatland by Thomas Hämén
Berlin-based artist Thomas Hämén applies new forms of perception in what we usually define or understand as natural environment. Such as this large c-print installation, titled Flatland, where Hämén modifies a satellite/ aerial photo of an island to make it become geometric, forming just one of the few surprising techniques of land manipulation in Hämén’s work.
www.thomashamen.com
Skynet by Andreas Nicolas Fischer
By experimenting with aleatoric processes, Andreas Nicolas Fischer creates graphical and spatial compositions blending the virtual and the real. In his generative outcome, he formalizes the coincidental and de-emphasizes conscious methods of composition, making him creator and spectator of his own work. In Skynet, Fischer presents what he describes to be a “non linear animation about a global networked consciousness. (…) the entire world is rolled into one artificial organism communicating with itself in realtime.”
Exitscape by Daniel Keller & Martti Kalliala
Exitscape is a six part video series developed by architect and Renaissance man Martti Kalliala, and artist Daniel Keller, in collaboration with a team of animators working in the video game engine CryEngine. The video series presents a continuously aerial loop view composed with several sourced and original material in order to create a hypothetical ‘patchwork’ landscape, which is heavily informed by the idea of a ‘dynamic geography’. Exitscape video series are available to purchase via Daata Editions, an online platform that commissions artists using moving image and sound to create digital editions for sale and research.
https://daata-editions.com/artists/daniel-keller-martti-kalliala
Indirect Flights by Joe Hamilton
Continuing his ongoing exploration of contemporary landscape, this new online artwork by Australian artist Joe Hamilton with sound by J.G. Biberkopf and supported by The Moving Museum, drive us into a meticulously layered interactive landscape. By merging together an extensive range of found imagery such as satellite images, organic textures, brush strokes and architectural fragments, Indirect Flights presents an extensive virtual terrain that can be explored in all directions like Google Maps, moving layers with different speeds which gives an extraordinary sense of depth to this never-ending online illusion.
http://indirect.flights/
Boolean Nature by Hugo Arcier
This project date back to 2008 when artist Hugo Arcier recreated different natural fields which have been affected by a boolean intersection through a subtracted sphere area. In computer logic, Boolean operations can add, subtract or create an intersection between two objects. Based in this idea, Hugo removed parts of several photographed landscapes and remade the missing parts as 3D sculptures. Together, the image and sculpture presented in Boolean Nature molds the landscape in its totality.
http://hugoarcier.com/en/nature-booleenne/
b)“Eco-Contemporary”
Expanding the examination of nature in relation to visual culture, numerous samaritans address their aesthetic strategies — through which prevailing ecological matters — have found resonance and creative response in artistic practice, connecting ‘eco-aware’ ideas through objects, using organic substances as materials, and more broadly, by intersecting philosophy and critical theory about the ecosystem, its biodiversity and environmental sustainability. It’s not as if ecology shies away from the word “art” itself. In fact, these artists contribute to an increasingly jussive field of study. “Eco-contemporary” is purposefully an afterthought here, given that it’s been the focus of most coverage recently.
Qway by Siliqoon
Siliqoon proposes itself as an italian art label and a creative consulting agency which produce and promote works made by young contemporary artists in collaboration with a few selected artisan manufacturers. Since its launch last year that Siliqoon has been annoucing an e-publication: “Qway” — which have recently been released and it’s now available to download for free via Siliqoon’s website. From Green Wave Smoothie Pops to notions of ‘Algaetecture’ and amongst a huge variety of other eco-related trends, contributors Zoe De Luca, Andrea Magnani and Iain Ball have risen Qway’s first issue focusing on “Econsciousness” and “Planetcare”, presenting us with several, quite engaging, global future concepts.
http://www.siliqoon.com/qway/
ECOCORE by Alessandro Bava
Continuing on the subject of online publications comes ECOCORE, an irregularly published e-zine managed by Alessandro Bava which aims to edit the identity of ecology, acting as a point of intervention, collecting leading creative and theoretical approaches across a hide range of mediums to discuss nature and the environment, as well as the problematic relationship between architecture and natural ecosystems. ECOCORE has recently guest edited the “disaster” issue via Dis magazine which consisted in a group of online articles in collaboration with artists like Amalia Ulman, Daniel Keller, Ulrich Obrist, Andrew Norman Wilson, AUJIK and Music For Your Plants, just to name a few.
http://www.ecocore.co/
Cambrian Explosion by Pierre Huyghe
This year’s Art Basel was filled up with a few balearic pleasures shown on a considerable number of artworks that call in mind the beach environment and its respective underwater world. Pierre Huyghe’s Cambrian Explosion is a good example of that, which bids a literal reference of a symbolic nod to the aquatic life. Within a glass water tank and between a suspended large rock, we can find four living creatures — two arrow crabs and two horseshoe crabs — enjoying an aquarian ecosystem as an art installation that scored as one of the most acclaimed pieces inside the event.
https://www.artbasel.com/basel
Onanet Spirulina 1 by Daniel Keller
This Spirulina tanks were presented in Kai ♥ Dalston Bushwick, a solo show at KraupaTuskany Zeidler in Berlin by artist Daniel Keller, whose interest in applied ecology manifests in much of his work. The tanks of Onanet Spirulina 1 (2015) are three in total and each one contains the rapidly reproducing Spirulina algae. The tanks are connected with several hoses which circulate the water from tank to tank. This process may be irrelevant to Spirulina reproduction, but in some sense, the interlinking formed by those hoses seems to bring us all deeper into the idea of connection in general. It’s also worth re-emphasising that Spirulina, the Blue-green algae, is the most ancient food descendant of Earth’s first photosynthetic life and is regularly used nowadays as a source of dietary protein.
http://aktnz.com/kai-%E2%9D%A4-dalston-bushwick/
LIVE/WORK by Brad Troemel
Nine mid-size acrylic ant farms were hung perpendicularly to the wall in Brad Troemel’s solo exhibition at Tomorrow Gallery in New York last year. Titled LIVE/WORK, these translucent plastic cases are filled with a nutrient-laden colored gel (commercialized alternatives of NASA’s soil replacement used in ant-based zero-gravity experiments) that small colonies of infertile female worker ants could chew their way to the top of the containers, forming randomized tunnels that in someway shows how ants act as ecosystem engineers. The color gradients of the gel presented in each ant farm correspond with the colors of three non-profit organizations: the Earth Liberation Front, Edward Snowden Legal Defense Fund, and Planned Parenthood, which 10% of the exhibition’s profit were evenly distributed.
http://tomorrowgallery.info/index.php?/upcoming/live--work/
After Wilderness by Ella Görner ft. Stephen Nachtigall
Ella Görner’s work engage with issues at the intersection of science, economics, culture and technology. For example, in her first solo exhibition Sustainability & Opportunities at Konstanet, she created a fictional scenario that questioned in which position in the timeline of our existence of the ecological countdown we are. With her on-going investigation into these fields she creates a visual commentary on our constructed surroundings like in her latest project titled After Wilderness. In colaboration with Stephen Nachtigall, whose practise seeks to exploit gaps between notions of identity and signification from an ecological and environmental perspective, they addressed the visuality and placement of eco-innovative products and is investigating into current prototypes of corporational structures. After Wilderness examined eco activism, the power of eco innovation and how the conditions of visuality are changing under the anthropocene.
http://www.ellagoerner.com/
Lost Heritage by Pakui Hardware
Pakui Hardware is a brand name of a collaboration between Ugnius Gelguda and Neringa Černiauskaitė set up in late 2014. Lost Heritage, their latest project created specially for kim? Contemporary Art Center in Rīga, shows a dysfunctional gardening on display, where Pakui Hardware continues its research into the relationship between materiality, technology, biology and nature. How technology is shaping the physical reality, including the human body? When synthetic biology attempts to create organisms from scratch with whole new gene clusters, the nature becomes about writing, programming and designing, not evolving. How about including ourselves into the list of heritage to be preserved for the inspection in the future? This are some topics that Pakui Hardware raised in Lost Heritage through — what they like to describe as “Cut-open limbs with silicone arteries stretched through their hollowed shells.” or “Micro-beginnings of species outside of nature. Human-created-designed-programmed organisms crawl out sterile laboratories”.
http://www.pakuihardware.org/index.php?/ugnius-gelguda-with-neringa-cerniauskaite/lost-heritage-kim-riga/
BYOP (BRING YOUR OWN PLANT) curated by Andreas Ervik
Oslo-based artist Andreas Ervik is certainly not new to these wanderings. His engagement to concerns related with ecology, humans and technology are just as recognizable as incredible. For example, in BYOP (Bring Your Own Plant), Andreas invited the public to bring their own potted organisms to an exhibition under his curation. BYOP consisted in a interspecies socializing event between artists and their plants, or at least, their own interpretation of botany. The idea for this exhibition also came out while watching a BBC documentary called How Plants Communicate & Think, which is about plant intelligence. BYOP somehow intended to extend that connection with humans, which was outlined by the organic artworks of Kari Altmann, Espen Friberg, Øivin Horvei, Bjorn-Henrik Lybeck, Andreas Meinich, Jasper Spicero, Jessica Williams and Andreas Ervik.
http://andreaservik.com/byop.html
HERBA-4 by Veit Laurent Kurz
In HERBA-4, Veit Laurent Kurz assembles disparate elements such as artificial plants or plaster to create sculptures resembling ecosystems amongst multivitamin formulas managed by the artist himself. For this project, Veit Laurent Kurz follows some ecologic principles of “Niche Displacement”. It refers to the microbiological and chemical reactions that lead to the highest concentration of Vitamin A,B,C as well as complex, long chained amino acids. The whole piece is a product made from different components that conducted Veit Laurent Kurz’s design for the herbal juice (HERBA-4), which extended the idea of a product. This project is a combination out of an ecosystem and a machine dummy that produces a vitamin gel. Each component has a different flora and fauna/ herbal matter and by this process different chemical reactions which enrich the gel with a high concentration of vitamins and minerals.
http://megayaproject.com/index.php?/2014/by-night-with-torch-and-spear/
– Nuno Patrício
Sep, 2015.
Cover Image: Image from SunGlacier project presented in Qway’s 1st Issue.
Nuno Patrício (b.1985) is a visual artist based in Lisbon, Portugal. His work combines video, installation, sculpture and graphic composites in order to address the influence of technology on pop culture and digital personas. He is specially interested in the emotional impact of interpersonal relationships established on the internet.
He is also the director and editor of O Fluxo, an online platform that aims to disseminate a critical understanding of contemporary culture by promoting the work of media art professionals, emerging artists, activists and students from all over the world.
