Intermediate Objects represents the first culmination of artist Kristina Stallvik’s multidisciplinary, practice-based research on ecosystems of independent publishing. The works in the exhibition are both a documentation of Stallvik’s investigative dialogues and a mediation on the social and material histories of risograph printing. By displaying the physical stencil masters used to print an eponymous research publication, Intermediate Objects animates these traditionally discarded products of duplication. Drafted with tools developed by Full Auto Foundry, the typefaces utilized in the exhibition further explore the collaborative potential of the stencil itself as a creative methodology.

The term “stencil” originates from a string of etymological relatives: “stansel” (ornament), “estinceller” (glisten), “scintilla” (spark). These Old English, French, and Latin terms capture the careful dance between permeability and imperviousness required of the stencil. During the Paleolithic era, the body itself functioned as the first stencil tool. Cave paintings were created by spraying pigments over one’s hand, a technique later replaced by more intricate carving into leaves and plant matter. The risograph machine is heavily informed by this lineage, creating prints by pushing ink through a rice-based paper stencil, a method which was considered ‘inefficient’ and replaced with xerography in the early 2000s. The Riso corporation’s adherence to stencil based printmaking – an intermediary technology between screen printing and digital printing — ultimately created the conditions for its popularity amongst artists and self publishers. The publication, Intermediate Objects, calls on this history to traverse themes in contemporary publishing, from the evolving relationship between an exhibition and its catalog to the surprisingly slippery impermanence of a book object. A small library of previous works from Stallvik’s publishing project, cover crop, will also be available to read in the gallery.

Kristina Stallvik (b. 1999. NYC) is an artist, researcher, and founder of the publishing project, cover crop. Recent exhibitions and presentations include Non Productive Readers: a Performance, Between Bridges, Berlin (2023); Slow Leak, a.p., Berlin (2023); Bubble Bath, Magma Maria, Frankfurt (2023); Act 1, Nylistasafnid, Reykjavik (2023); Dyre Lekeplass, Kunsthall Trondheim, Trondheim (2022); and A Thing Shared, Automat, Philadelphia (2022). Recent publications include Landing (Lumbung Press, documenta 15, 2023). Stallvik lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Since spring 2023 Kristina has been a Chancellor Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation with Art Laboratory Berlin as the host institution. They have researched the collective structures that comprise independent artist book and zine publishing in Berlin.

The group exhibition MATTER OF FLUX brings together three art projects by WhiteFeather Hunter, Lyndsey Walsh and Shu Lea Cheang with Ewen Chardronnet. The exhibited artworks critically reflect about nature, matter and health of female and nonbinary bodies through artistic and scientific research – exploring the use of menstrual serum for tissue culture, proposing new modes of care within the context of female and nonbinary health and discussing both traditional forms and new possibilities of reproduction. In context of the group exhibition, Art Laboratory Berlin will also realise a festival of the same title in June 2023 that seeks to initiate a wider network of and for female and nonbinary artists, scholars and cultural players in art, science and technology.

Art Laboratory Berlin
Prinzenallee 34, 13359 Berlin

Dates and opening hours

Opening: 26 May 2023, 8 pm
Running Time: 27 May – 9 July 2023
Thu – Sun, 2 – 6 pm

MATTER OF FLUX Festival

(in collaboration with FEMeeting)
Panel Discussions, Workshops, Reading Groups and many more activities from and for women/ FLINTA* in art, science and technology
15 – 18 June 2023
More information HERE!

The project The Witch in the Lab Coat (since 2019) by artist and researcher WhiteFeather Hunter is a PhD research-creation and scientific research project (in progress) that explores the intersection of feminist witchcraft and tissue engineering through the development of a body- and performance-based laboratory practice. It is a work in progress until mid-2023, currently conducted at SymbioticA International Centre of Excellence in Biological Art at the University of Western Australia. The Witch in the Lab Coat includes the sub-project, Mooncalf, original research by WhiteFeather, which is a scientific and cultural exploration of the development of menstrual fluid for use in tissue culture, as well as multipotent stem cell isolation from menstrual blood. This research was featured by Merck/ Sigma-Aldrich for International Day of Women and Girls in Science 2021, as part of their #nextgreatimpossible series. WhiteFeather is fortunate to be supported in her research by UWA supervisors Ionat Zurr, Stuart Hodgetts, and Tarsh Bates and the external supervisor François-Joseph Lapointe. Some  related experiments were conducted at Pelling Lab with the support of Andrew Pelling.

Lyndsey Walsh’s project Self-Care explores the personal journey of the artist and reconciliation with their BRCA1 gene mutation diagnosis and the implications of preventative care measures on their sense of body image and notions of self-care. Self-Care is a device that imagines a reality where an individual can take on the caring responsibilities of their cancer, either before they have developed cancer or after it has been removed from their body. Through this device, the narrative of cancer as a bodily enemy is transformed into a narrative about caring systems. The individual/ wearer of the device is given an opportunity to learn about their cancer as an extension of their own self by adopting it with the use of a new technoscientific prosthesis. Self-Care is an artistic attempt to reckon with ruptures in identity caused by the rising use of genetic diagnostics in medicine. Using the artist’s own body, Self-Care weaves a narrative about health, gender, and identity that seeks to resist the confines of the medical gaze. The work features a specially designed chest binder housing living breast cancer cells, which allows the artist to take on the caring responsibilities of their cancer before it emerges in their body. Through this device, the artist explores caring systems and reclaims the potential violence done onto the breasts as liberation through nonbinary gender expression.

Shu Lea Cheang together with Ewen Chardronnet will show the project UNBORN0x9. The art project questions the development of foetuses in artificial wombs outside of the body (ectogenesis) and the cyborg future of parenting. The project explores the role of obstetric science in the increasingly technological experience of human reproduction, speculating on new types of bonding that may emerge with artificial wombs. Here, pregnancy is integrated into a high-tech vision of the body as a biological component of a cybernetic communication system. In collaboration with the echOpen fablab who engages in the development of open source and low cost echo-stethoscope with smartphone application, UNBORN0X9, forks the prototype of a creative tool and hacks the (for humans) inaudible ultrasonic waves in a sonic conversion that allows the interpretation of an audiovisual and ultrasonic emotional score by performers and musicians. UNBORN0x9 is a Future Baby Production, initiated by Shu Lea Cheang and Ewen Chardronnet along numerous collaborators, represents the common group effort to raise issues such as the possible impact of low cost echo-stethoscopy on Global Health issues, questions of access to healthcare and motherhood, ectogenesis and the technicization of reproduction, and the back-and-forth between science-fiction imaginary and science in the making at large.

More information: https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/exhibitions/matter-of-flux/

Residency: 10 May – 7 July 2024

COLLOQUIUM (with Alice Cannavà and Karolina Żyniewicz): 21 May 2024, 7 PM (on-site!)
Free entrance; Registration required:
https://pretix.eu/artlaboratoryberlin/in-progress/4146152/

Public Visits: 31 May and 28 June, 2024, 5 – 9 pm,
and Thursdays and Fridays by appointment:
alice@occultomagazine.com

Occulto’s publisher Alice Cannavà will be in residence at Art Laboratory Berlin from 10 May until 7 July 2024 editing and designing the upcoming issue Occulto 8: Photographic, to be released in July 2024. The temporary editorial studio at Art Laboratory Berlin offers the opportunity to open up and make visible the work behind the birth of a magazine, uncovering its performative potential and the richness of its byproducts and side-effects.

Occulto 8: Photographic focuses on photography from an artistic, historical, technoscientific, and ethical perspective, building on and playing with the transdisciplinary and cross-genre approach developed by Occulto over the years. As usual, the issue will combine richly illustrated essays with visual artists’ projects and experimental sound. Featured contributors include writer and media theorist Valie Djordjevic, filmmaker Laura Lukitsch, the London Alternative Photography Collective, and the artist and photographer Martina della Valle, among others.

The public is invited to visit the temporary editorial office one more time on 28 June 2024 between 5 and 9 p.m., as part of the Kolonie Wedding monthly open-door Friday. On the occasion, Art Laboratory Berlin will host Publishing Matters, a small temporary bookshop with editions by Occulto, Art Laboratory Berlin, and a selection of publishers, artists, and cultural projects from Berlin and beyond. Margherita Pevere, Karolina Żyniewicz and Theresa Schubert, Sina Ribak, Chiara Garbellotto, Selen Solak  and Para Journal are among the confirmed guests, and more will be announced. There will be again a crafty magazine-making station for children and adults, and the in-progress archive on photography will be available for browsing.

Alice Cannavà is an independent cultural worker, designer, and publisher. She studied visual arts in Milan and Vienna and currently attends courses in the history of science and technology at the TU Berlin. As publisher, she co-edits and produces Occulto Magazine – an independent journal that brings together sciences, humanities, and the arts – and, more recently, the Occulto Editions – a diverse and evolving landscape of zines, artist books and special editions. As designer, she’s active in the cultural scene, recent and ongoing collaborations include the art and research platform Art Laboratory Berlin, the feminist experimental music festival Heroines of Sound (Berlin), the center for art and media technology V2_, Lab for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam), and the artist and researcher Martin Howse (Berlin/London). As cultural worker, she curates and performs at cultural events and workshops in Berlin and beyond. Since 2020, she’s part of the extended team of Art Laboratory Berlin as designer/coder for print and digital media. In 2023 she joined the Matter of Flux festival and network. In 2024 she designed and produced the book MATTER OF FLUX. Art, Biopolitics, and Networks with Care, edited by Regine Rapp.

Running Time: 11 November – 4 February 2024
Thu – Sun, 2 – 6 pm
On 26 January 2024 open until 9 pm

Art Laboratory Berlin is glad to announce the solo show of bio media artist Saša Spačal with the newly produced artwork TERRA XENOBIOTICA (2023) based on her current artistic research.

Humans have an ambiguous relationship to the ground, often identifying and personifying with the soil of their ‘homeland’, and depending on its fertility to survive – and yet, all too often, treating it as mere dirt. This neglect is more extreme in technological zones, not only in industrial areas, but in spaces of communication and transportation. In her new art project TERRA XENOBIOTICA Saša Spačal explores soil life at airports. “Toxins are seeping into the ground, creating unfamiliar lands that call for different kinds of stewards – the ones who navigate and nurture, rather than gatekeep or extract” states Spačal. “As humanity remains locked in an ongoing cycle, a holding pattern of take-offs and landings, the notion of a final landing lurks in an unimaginable distant future.”

The installation Eternity Scanner, based on a residency at the Rillig Lab for Plant Ecologies at Freie Universität Berlin, invites the public to explore how pollutants, especially Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) such as Teflon, so called ‘forever chemicals,’ permeate the soils of airports. Essential in the art piece are 85 soil chromatograms developed from earth gradually polluted by increasing amounts of PFAS, making up Gradients of Eternity, a database created as first of many to train an AI neural network to recognise PFAS pollution on soil chromatograms, and metaphorically symbolising the 85 years since PFAS were first accidentally discovered. Visitors are encouraged to choose a soil chromatogram and place it on the Eternity Scanner, which acts as a contemporary oracle. “The directive is clear and compelling; our only requisite action is to attune ourselves to the scanner’s perpetual soundscapes” remarks the artist. Powered by AI, the scanner reads the chromatogram, producing a sonification of the information it contains, acting as a clarion call for a new generation to come forward and regard the land not as dominion, but as kin.

The film Holding Patterns, written by Saša Spačal and cultural theorist Alison Sperling, creates a dystopian near future scenario where airports still exist but without function, exploring the matter of ground and soil pollution. Essential for Spačal is the “question of grounding, of being grounded, and of groundedness in the unique space of Berlin’s iconic defunct airport at Tempelhof Field”. The film examines the complex and varied epistemologies involved in modern concepts of travel and identity, proposing a new model of responsibility, care, and stewardship.

Art Laboratory Berlin has collaborated many times with Saša Spačal: The artist was present with several works at the exhibitions The Other Selves. On the Phenomenon of the Microbiome (2016), Nonhuman Networks (2017), presented her artistic research at the international conference Nohuman Agents (2017) and had several artist residencies in 2019 and 2022 at Art Laboratory Berlin and the Rillig Lab | Ecology of Plants, Institut für Biologie, Freie Universität Berlin, which lead to the new project TERRA XENOBIOTICA.

Regine Rapp & Christian de Lutz

TERRA XENOBIOTICA | CREDITS

Scientific consulting: India Mansour
Storytelling: Alison Sperling
Film montage: Maja Andlovic
Installation: Dmitry Morozov
Assistance: Flore Wormskamp

23 March 2024, 5:30 – 9 pm
Free entry, no registration

The book can be purchased at the event (25 EUR).

31 August – 6 October 2024
Thu – Sun, 2 – 6 pm
Artist talk 6 October 2024, 3 pm

Site-specific colours combine colour and location, as a type of topographical perception through local colour. What colour producing plants and minerals can be found in this place, and how can they be perceived and understood through colour? Plant knowledge is knowledge of place. The project explores topics of plant blindness, urban ecology, mapping, bio-invasiveness, and migration as well as Zero Waste, Queer Ecologies, and Interspecies Cooperation.

This project has resulted in site-specific colour charts that record, map, and characterise a place; including the fact that, depending on the soil conditions – this also includes pollution and man-made soil compositions – different colours and tones are produced. The same applies to the water composition, acidity, and mineral content.

During production, processes such as fermentation, oxidation and modification by iron or copper oxide, and shifting the pH value bring out colours, and intensify and stabilise them. For the exhibition a series of charts has been created for 12 locations in (initially) Berlin, over the course of a year and through all phases of plant cycles.

The workshop Hidden Colours. Inkmaking with Plants in Urban Space by Käthe Wenzel took place in July 2024 and some of the results will also be displayed in the exhibition.

Colour Topographies

Käthe Wenzel is an artist and researcher working with hybrid bodies, queer ecologies, and the structures of urban consumption. She provides machines and survival kits for the navigation of hegemonic culture and explores the knowledge of plants. Wenzel is a professor of aesthetic practice at the European University Flensburg, and she was a Fulbright Exchange Scholar in New York and a Senior Fellow at IFK/Vienna.

She has received numerous grants and scholarships, including the Stiftung Kulturfonds, Böll Foundation, NRW Stipendium Kunst-Wissenschaft-Wirtschaft, Karin-Abt-Straubinger-Stiftung, Künstlerdorf Schöppingen and others. Her works are represented in numerous public collections, including the Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin, Museum Weserburg Bremen, LWL Museum für Kunst und Kultur – Westfälisches Landesmuseum, Roemer-Pelizaeus-Museum Hildesheim, Museum Oldenburg, Mittelrheinmuseum, the Künstlerbuch collection at Telavi State University, Georgia, and others.
www.kaethewenzel.de
www.globalupfitters.com

HyungJun Park’s solo exhibition Artificial Consciousness. Exposing the Invisible: Data, Rendering and Code brings together three artworks, created in the last fifteen years. Park’s artistic exploration focuses on the relationship between machine and humans as well as humans and nonhuman beings. He connects and exposes nonhuman sensorial experiences through technological tools for human body experiences that mimic other perceptions.

Somniloquy is Park’s ongoing research and his Ph.D. project, focusing on human and machine dreaming. Park has been keeping dream diaries to explore human and machine consciousness. Within the hype of AI tools and their accessibility, machine learning tools have been used more often in the new media art scene in recent years. AI tools have been criticised as heavily biased – white, Eurocentric, homophobic and misogynist through the content it has learned from its users. In contrast, in his artistic research, Park delves into machine learning from a subjective point of view and creates a unique dataset based on the dreams and images he has collected over the years. Based on his dreams, the AI tool creates (or dreams) new, humorous and absurd narratives based on the text and image that has been fed by the artist.

I am an Artefact explores what the soul is and traces the location of the soul in the human body through scientific and speculative perspectives. The ancient Egyptians believed that the soul was in the heart and the Babylonians believed that the soul was in the liver. Modern humans understand that there is no soul or that it is an emotion caused by a chemical reaction of the brain. The human body and soul are Park’s main concerns in this project, related to the technological age. The process of the artwork I am an Artefact started with full body MRI scans of himself. The artist created a series of objects with different materials, such as a 1:1 size of Park’s heart sculpted with beeswax, a head scan, that is used for a 3D printed glass sculpture, and forefinger prints sculpted with aerogel – a material which is renowned as the lightest solid. Through this set of works, Park has given a speculative, physical agency to the soul and distributed the meaning of the soul and its materiality to ‘natural and artificial materials.’

Utopia is an interface that allows the audience to explore visual senses from a nonhuman perspective. This interface aims to create a connection between humans and machines. Analog monitors symbolise the anatomical eyes of humans. A funnel is installed in front of the monitor, so the audience can only see each monitor with one of their eyes independently. Human vision, unlike spiders or insects, cannot see both objects at the same time. However, by looking at the two monitors with this separation, the audience gains a new visual and cognitive experience, exploring the expandability of their human senses.

HyungJun Park lives and works in Berlin and explores interdisciplinary artwork through collaboration with various research institutes. In 2012, he collaborated with the Institut für Diagnostische und Interventionelle Radiologie in Düsseldorf, Germany, and in 2013, he resided and worked at the Institute of Machinery Research in Korea. In 2015, he was selected for the scholarship residency called Arts-Science-Economy in Schöppingen, Germany. His work was exhibited and collected at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany (ZKM). He is a person who likes to be open and his works are based on art and science. His interests include visual cognition, computer technology, the philosophical self and the artistic body.

More information at https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/exhibitions/artificial-consciousness/

Queer Sonic Fingerprint
Transdisciplinary Research
Isabel Bredenbröker and Adam Pultz

Opening: 19 October 2024, 8 pm
Running time: 20 October – 1 December 2024
Fri – Sun, 2 – 6 pm

Workshop: Recording Sonic Fingerprints. 30 November 2024, 2:30 -5 pm (registration not necessary)

How do bodies sound? And how can a group of cultural belongings in an ethnological museum collection resonate in unexpected queer kin relations? In their interactive multichannel sound installation Queer Sonic Fingerprint, sound artist Adam Pultz and anthropologist Isabel Bredenbröker speculatively imagines non-normative relations around cultural belongings in ethnological museums and beyond. The installation amplifies the collection‘s materiality through sonic fingerprints—that is—the reflections of a body’s acoustic characteristics. In a transdisciplinary encounter with sound processing and evolutionary computing, dynamically changing fingerprints bring selected parts of museum collections to life in a multichannel sonic ecology.

Queerness contains a tension, something which gender and sexuality studies scholar Susan Talburt identifies as a fundamentally productive quality. Cultural belongings in ethnographic collections are things deeply affected by the colonial encounter and its political aftermath. They, too, are caught in a tense state, as current debates about ownership, their history, their representative functions, and proper place come to show. Voices from indigenous communities and scholars have reframed so-called ethnographic “objects” in museum collections as person-like entities. The installation includes those relations that are currently being claimed with increasing insistence, alongside relations between collection items.

The playback of the sonic fingerprints will form part of a multichannel sound installation also involving field recordings and spoken narrative. Here, kinship and relations between objects become sonic relations, contributing a different register to what is traditionally a visual experience. Museum displays and collections are governed by strict rules: most things may not be touched and many things remain inaccessible in storage. In response to such restrictions, the sonic domain can provide access through a different sensory modality. Here, imagining a sonic image of these bodies offers a sensitive way of not looking or touching, not representing or claiming ownership.

Throughout the installation the sonic fingerprints will merge, recombine, and create new generations of virtual fingerprints with their own acoustic properties, evading museal categories and representational claims, just like queer identities and ways of kinning evade normative ideas of gender, relations, and sexuality. Through evolutionary computing and audience interaction, Queer Sonic Fingerprint highlights new object-relations that transcend the logic of the museum as a place of clear-cut display, education and safekeeping. A multisensory and interactive format challenges such established forms of museal practice. Through the speculative sonic-material futures that emerge, non-normative kinship and queer narratives work toward a critique of the ethnographic collection’s colonial roots.

Workshop: Recording Sonic Fingerprints. 30 November 2024, 2:30 -5 pm
In this workshop we will create sonic fingerprints, also called impulse responses, of objects. Participants are encouraged to bring their own objects, or use those found in the gallery. Participants are also invited to contribute contextual information in written, visual and oral form to the installation’s catalogue, augmenting their recording of the fingerprints themselves. The process of recording will elucidate how sound, and more generally, knowledge, is a function of the way in which one conducts measurements.

Once we have finished recording, we will load the fingerprints into the playback algorithm of Queer Sonic Fingerprint and listen to how the fingerprints change and evolve over time. The workshop will start with a short introduction explaining the techniques behind impulse response measurements and a overview of Karen Barad’s notion of the experimental apparatus.

Isabel Bredenbröker is a social and cultural anthropologist working between art and academia. They hold a DFG Walter Benjamin Postdoctoral Fellowship which is based between the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) and the Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik at Humboldt University Berlin. Isabel’s work focusses on material and visual culture, anthropology of art and museums, queer theory and intersectionality, situatedness and autoethnography, colonialism, cleaning and waste. They have produced ethnographic films, worked with field recording and (co-)curated as well as contributed to exhibitions in museum and contemporary art contexts. Isabel’s book Rest in Plastic: Death, time and synthetic materials in a Ghanaian Ewe community has recently been published open access with Berghahn.
http://isabelbredenbroeker.com/

Adam Pultz Melbye is a double bass player, composer, and improviser working in the field of acoustic and electronic sound. Adam’s work spans live performance, sound installation, sound for dance, theatre, film, multimedia, sculpture, algorithmic design, and instrument building. They have performed and exhibited work in Europe, Australia, the US, and Japan, while appearing on close to 50 albums. Adam often performs with semi-autonomous feedback systems, such as the FAAB (feedback-actuated augmented bass). Adam holds a practice-led PhD in music technology from SARC, Queen’s University Belfast.
http://adampultz.com/

Meet the artist Helena Nikonole in her current winter studio residency at Art Laboratory Berlin. In her talk, Helena will explore how artistic practices can challenge centralized systems of control through two of her current projects, which she is continuing to develop during her winter residency at Art Laboratory Berlin.

Sun, 2 February 2025
OPEN STUDIO: 2 – 6 pm
The artist will be present
TALK: 4 pm
No registration necessary
Free entrance

The first project uncovers hidden structures of power embedded in generative AI systems based on Large Language Models by probing their biases around political ideologies. This investigation reveals how these technologies reflect and amplify societal inequalities.

The second project, Guerrilla Wearables, decentralizes communication networks to counteract internet shutdowns and surveillance in high-risk environments. By leveraging LoRa technology and integrating it into wearable designs, this project offers both a practical and aesthetic response to censorship and restricted connectivity.

Together, these projects expose and challenge the mechanisms of centralized control, offering tools and insights for a more resilient, decentralized future. From revealing the biases in algorithms to building alternative communication infrastructures, the talk will demonstrate how art and technology intersect to resist and reimagine systems of power.

This event is part of the Winter Studio Residency 2025 at Art Laboratory Berlin.

More at: https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/events/hacking-networks/

29 March 2025, 12 – 6 pm
Free entrance, donation recommended
Registration required
Please register at: https://pretix.eu/artlaboratoryberlin/politics-of-ai/

The hands-on workshop Politics of AI with artist and researcher Helena Nikonole explores how Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, as well as text-to-image AI systems, reproduce biases and embed political ideologies. Participants will experiment with AI-generated responses to politically charged prompts, analyze biases in text-based AI outputs, and examine how these biases extend into AI-generated imagery. Through practical exercises, we will critically assess how AI models shape narratives, reinforce stereotypes, and amplify bias through a feedback loop.

Helena Nikonole will share her insights and artistic methodology, demonstrating how artistic research can serve as a critical tool for exposing and subverting AI biases. She will present her experiments based on the misuse of technology—intentionally pushing AI systems beyond their intended applications to reveal their ideological underpinnings and structural limitations. By creatively challenging these systems, participants will gain hands-on experience in both critical analysis and artistic experimentation, exploring how artistic interventions can uncover hidden biases and provoke discussions on AI ethics.

More information at: https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/events/politics-of-ai/

https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/exhibitions/fermenting-textiles/
Fermenting Textiles is a unique inter and trans-disciplinary research and exhibition project that puts active matter at the center: it connects anthropology, microbiology, and art through the engagement of artisans, anthropologists, scientists, and artists, as well as more-than-human actors. Fermenting Textiles explores the fermentation of textile in mud and plant material to produce complex dyeing for various use – from traditional hunter shirts in Burkina Faso to kimono silk dyeing in Japan. In each case the process is artisanal and has fascinating traditional uses and meanings. Both cases make use of natural chemical and biological processes to create unique aesthetic and medicinal results.

Cross-cultural research methods also play a key role in Fermenting Textiles. Anthropologist Laurence Douny has worked with colleagues and dyers in Burkina Faso to meticulously document the long Vouwo mud dyeing process, which involves soil of different origins, iron ore, and various plant materials. Microbiologist Regine Hengge and her PhD student José I. Hernández Lobato have studied the complex interactions of soil bacteria with plants and fabrics in the dyeing process and visually re-enact these in the exhibition. Furthermore, Hengge reaches across fields by photographically creating patterns that combine images of bacterial biofilms from this scientific research and of the West African textiles studied by Douny. These have been printed on fabrics for making new shirts, thus completing a transdisciplinary journey from “shirt to shirt”.

The art and design project Craft Portrait: Dorozome by Pauline Agustoni and Satomi Minoshima explores fabric dyeing by artisans in the southern Japanese island of Amami Oshima. Traditionally, silk threads for kimono production, interwoven with cotton threads which are later removed to reveal undyed portions of textile, are initially dyed in a liquid bath of tree bark, before being repeatedly dipped in mud. This causes chemical reactions of complexation and oxidation, which create rich dark brown and black silks. While working with the artisans in Japan, Agustoni and Minoshima have also produced a textile sculpture of pink-brown and black strands, that twist and turn, emulating the act of wringing, an essential part of the dyeing process.

By combining these approaches, methods, and contexts, Fermenting Textiles stresses the agency and sentience of matter in the fermentation process and its versatile materiality. Speaking through the lens of Posthuman philosophy, matter actively performs, what philosopher Karen Barad describes as “a materialist, naturalist, and posthumanist elaboration – that allows matter its due as an active participant in the world’s becoming, in its ongoing ‘intra-activity’” (Barad 2003: 803). The unique multi-national, multi- and trans-disciplinary cooperation that makes up the group exhibition Fermenting Textiles mirrors the multi-species collaborations that are integral to the mud dyeing process.

Regine Rapp & Christian de Lutz

Related Literature

Douny, L., Hernández Lobato, J.I., Séré, A., Sawadogo, S. and Hengge, R. (2023). The hunter shirt: the role of Acacia nilotica in fermentative textile dyeing. Acta Hortic. 1361, 67-76, DOI: 10.17660/ActaHortic.2023.1361.8.

Douny, L., Hengge, R., Hernández Lóbato, J.I., Rapp, R. & de Lutz, C (2025) Fermenting Textiles: the Hunter Shirt. In: Final publication of the Excellence Cluster Matters of Activity (in preparation; to be published by Birkhäuser).

More information:
https://www.matters-of-activity.de/en/posts/16004/fermenting-textiles
https://www.matters-of-activity.de/en/research/projects/55/weaving
https://www.matters-of-activity.de/en/

The project Fermenting Textiles is part of the Matters of Activity, Image Space Material Cluster of Excellence, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. It also takes part in the Excellence Cluster __matter FESTIVAL 2025, Matters of Activity, Image Space Material Cluster of Excellence, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and is part of the Berlin Design Week 2025.

Adama Séré is a Marka-Dafing master dyer, traditional healer, and head of the Hunters Association Batônôtiban of the Mouhoun region of Burkina Faso. Native of the village of Safané, he inherited the craft of dyeing hunting garments with medicinal plants and mud known as vouwo for domestic and ceremonial usages from his father, Passourou Séré. With over 50 years of experience in dyeing textiles, Adama has collaborated on the ‘Hunter shirt’ project with researchers at the Excellence cluster ‘Matters of Activity. Image Space Material’, at Humboldt University, Berlin. In this transdisciplinary venture, Adama conducted a series of in-the-field craft experiments using various mud dye recipes he applied to cotton fabrics to explore color-making while also demonstrating the sustainable dimension of his art.

Dr. Laurence Douny is a research associate at the Excellence cluster Matters of Activity. Image Space Material at Humboldt University Berlin, working on textiles making in West Africa in the lens of an anthropology of materials, techniques and environments. Using a fieldwork-based and multi-species approach, she investigates the material and cultural properties of wild silk fabrics and their substitutes through complex fermentative dyeing techniques. Her research on Fermented Textiles highlights centuries-old craft of fiber enhancement within the context of sustainability, achieved through collaborations with artisans, microbiologists and material scientists. Douny is a member of the steering committee of ArtBioMatters (ABM) (NYU/The Met) and a research member of the project WILDSILKS, funded by the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR). She has recently accomplished, with Marka-Dafing artisans of Burkina Faso, the documentation of wild silk’s production funded by the Endangered Material Knowledge Program (EMKP)/Arcadia Fund at The British Museum.

Prof. Dr. Regine Hengge, Professor of Microbiology at Humboldt University Berlin, pioneered research on how bacteria survive harsh stress conditions, with a focus on molecular signaling and regulation and the complex architecture and morphogenesis of bacterial biofilms. In the Excellence Cluster Matters of Activity, she explores the fabrics and forms of life at the interfaces of science and art. Her projects range from bacterial cellulose as a self-growing living material for design to fermentative textile dyeing and visual re-enactments of plant-microbe interactions in art projects. Based on combined anthropological, historical and molecular microbiological studies of traditional medicinal and craft practices, she has developed the concept of human-curated multi-species interactions as a basis for more sustainable technology. For her scientific research she received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize and an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant. She is an elected member of Leopoldina, EMBO and other scientific academies.

Pauline Agustoni is a Swiss artist and designer. At the intersection of conceptual design and art, her work explores the poetry of encounters between materials, techniques, and gestures of making. Since her graduation from Design Academy Eindhoven, she explores how intertwined we are with the goods we shape, and how they shape us in return. By immersing herself in production spaces and processes, she places moments of exchange—with people and with materials—at the core of her practice. Through her projects, be them installations, publications or object series, she encourages a heightened awareness of the gestures and techniques that shape our material world. Her experience ranges from the collaborative project Craft Portrait, a ceramics residency at EKWC, freelance work for designer Hella Jongerius, and exhibitions at Swiss Design Awards in Basel, Atelier MUJI Ginza in Tokyo and Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam.

Satomi Minoshima is a Japanese designer driven by a passion for exploring the possibilities of different materials and colors. She seeks to understand the singular context surrounding specific colors and materials leading to a new interpretation and perspective of their creation process. By always honoring the tangibility of the object, Minoshima’s design approach combines material-based research and a genuine and poetic narrative to bring her concepts to life. She holds degrees from Musashino Art University in Tokyo (2014) and Design Academy Eindhoven (2019) and has exhibited her work internationally. Currently based in the Netherlands, she was recognized with Raising Talent Awards Japan from Maison & Objet in 2022.

Opening: Fri, 26 September 2025
7 pm: Exhibition Talk (video installation on view from 6 pm onwards)
8 pm: Celebration of opening

Art Laboratory Berlin invites the audience to meet Los Angeles based artist Rachel Mayeri and her newest artwork R/P FLIP R.I.P., with its European premiere in this solo exhibition. Join us for the Berlin opening on Fri, 26 September. Earlier on the same evening there will be a public EXHIBITION TALK (7 pm, on-site) with the artist and cognitive scientist Deborah Forster about their collaboration on this new work. On 7 October, there will be a COLLOQUIUM (online) with Rachel Mayeri and anthropologist Stefan Helmreich.

R/P FLIP R.I.P. (2024, 11:31 min) is an experimental new video work by Rachel Mayeri about the R/P FLIP, which stands for Research Platform FLoating Instrument Platform (1962-2023), the world-famous nautical rarity that flips 90 degrees to become a live-in buoy for studying the ocean. The FLIP was designed for stability to study acoustics in a turbulent ocean, yet ironically the interior is fluid, built for living both in horizontal and vertical orientations. In the artwork, performers activate the FLIP’s architecture as a playground for disorientation: floors become walls, and doors become holes. Intercut with military and oceanographic films, the FLIP film becomes a platform for conceptual flips: landlubbers encountering the alien world of the ocean, and of oceanography’s shift from militarism to ecology. Commissioned for the Getty-sponsored Southern California landmark show PST Art: Art & Science Collide, created by artist Rachel Mayeri, R/P FLIP R.I P. is currently presented as a three-channel video installation at the Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institute of Oceanography.

Between the 1960s and 1980s, FLIP’s mission made a dramatic flip from military reconnaissance to environmental crisis. FLIP started out as a platform to support anti-submarine echolocation, but by the 1990s had become a tool for understanding the experience of whales in an ocean under siege by human impacts. The unique interior is a space M.C. Escher might envision — designed for living in both horizontal and vertical orientations, there are sinks at right angles, a stove that swivels, and confusing doors, ladders, and portals. Once docked in Point Loma, California, the FLIP was decommissioned in 2020 and towed away for dismantling in 2023.

The key fascination of the FLIP is that the vessel appears to capsize with people on board. To reenact this spectacle, artist Rachel Mayeri directed actors on the FLIP as if the vessel were flipping — without ever leaving port. With the simple trick of rotating the frame, the actors appear to be gravitating toward the walls as the room or ship rolls. These scenes activate the disorientating architecture of the vessel. They also echo the mental gymnastics we go through to prepare for cataclysmic events. The narrative is motivated by the actual procedures of crew and scientists working together to outfit the FLIP for a research voyage, loading and securing scientific instruments, choreographing their movements to each other and the logic of the ship.

More information: https://rachelmayeri.com/flip/
and https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/exhibitions/capsize-chronicles/

Rachel Mayeri is a Los Angeles-based artist working at the intersection of science and art. Her videos, installations, and writing projects explore topics ranging from the history of special effects to the human animal. Commissioned as part of Getty’s PST Art: Art & Science Collide, she produced a new three-channel video installation called R/P FLIP R.I.P. at the Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institute of Oceanography about a Cold War research vessel built to rotate 90 degrees. In 2006 she began a multi-year exploration of the human-animal continuum called Primate Cinema, often in collaboration with cognitive scientist / anthropologist of robots, Deborah Forster. The series culminated in a major award from The Wellcome Trust. Commissioned by Arts Catalyst, she created a film expressly for chimpanzees – Apes as Family, which subsequently showed at Sundance, Berlinale, Ars Electronica, Art Laboratory Berlin, and Microwave Media Art Festival in Hong Kong. Orfeo Nel Canale Alimentare, an animated opera about the digestive tract, was commissioned by Imagine Science Films and showed at REDCAT Theater in downtown Los Angeles. The Life Cycle of Toxoplasma Gondii is a 29 screen installation about the memetic proliferation of cat videos featured at Pitzer College Art Gallery and the Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Meeting. As a Guest Curator of the Museum of Jurassic Technology she produced the permanent kinetic exhibition on Miracles and Disasters in Renaissance and Baroque Theater. A pioneer in art-science, her projects are featured in books such as Integrative Contemporary Art and Science Practices (Talasek, ed. 2025), The Art-Science Symbiosis (Velasco and Nieto, eds. 2024), and The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture (Terranova, ed., 2017). Professor at Harvey Mudd College, she teaches courses such as “Animal Media Studies”, “Nonhuman Media Art”, and “Art & Biology”.

Join us on Fri, 28 November 2025 for the first of several upcoming ARTIST SCIENTIST DIALOGUES that will take place in the context of the current research project CHRYSALIS. ARTISTS IN LABS at Art Laboratory Berlin. Composer and sound researcher Julius Holtz, one of the CHRYSALIS artists in residence, will speak in dialogue with Prof. Dr. Julia von Thienen from the German University of Digital Science.

Friday, 28 November 2025, 7 pm
No registration needed
Free entry, donations welcome

Julia von Thienen is a researcher, educator, and innovator at the intersection of digital engineering and collaborative creativity. Julia’s research in the field of Sonic Thinking and Neuro Design at the Hasso Plattner Institute inspired Julius Holtz’ current artistic investigations into the relationship of sound and Brain Computer Interfaces. In addition, Julius will discuss his artistic research into the interaction among participants, sound environments, the formation of (self-)consciousness, and the creation of spaces that invite active listening.

Through technical, biological, and conceptual insights into the design of his Brain Computer Interface enhanced listening sessions, Julius will demonstrate how he translates mind activity into sound compositions via real-time data sonification. Mindfulness and the practice of active listening are closely connected: What new perspectives emerge from the act of listening to oneself as well as listening to others? What role does conscious and mindful action play for our society and environment? How can technological innovations contribute to fostering or transforming these qualities?

About CHRYSALIS. ARTISTS IN LABS

During 2025 and 2026, Art Laboratory Berlin is unfolding the new innovative project CHRYSALIS. ARTISTS IN LABS with an interdisciplinary exchange between art and science in Berlin science laboratories, kindly supported by Lottostiftung Berlin. Building on Berlin’s unique status as a global centre for arts and sciences, we aim to create new synergies based on topics of current research. In collaboration with a consortium of scientists from the Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Technische Universität Berlin, University of the Arts Berlin, the Charité and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Art Laboratory Berlin is initiating artist-in-lab residencies for four internationally recognized, Berlin-based artists – Helena Nikonole, Julius Holtz, Sybille Neumeyer, and Margherita Pevere. We expect strong outcomes in transdisciplinary knowledge transfer, artistic research, art science communication, and some new artworks critically highlighting 21st-century innovations.

About the speakers

Julius Holtz is a composer and sound researcher whose work explores intersections of electroacoustic music, media art, and interactive sound environments. His practice explores multisensory formats that combine music and sound design, visuals, and audience participation, resulting in projects such as SONIC SCULPTURE (Berliner Festspiele) and INTROSPECTIVE GARDEN (Charité Berlin and MIT). His current research connects generative AI with neural activity, creating adaptive soundscapes that probe our concepts of consciousness, identity, and collectivity. Rooted in Berlin’s 1990s club culture and later shaped at the University of the Arts, his work bridges experimental performance, technological innovation, and artistic research. Julius Holtz’s artistic research operates at the intersection of neuroscience and sound art. It focuses on the development of sound environments that engage participants through sensorics and data sonification, embedding them within the artwork itself. In this context, he presented the project Introspective Garden at Charité Berlin, the HPI Potsdam, and the MIT Tangible Media Group. This research is the starting point for his project in CHRYSALIS. ARTISTS IN LABS at Art Laboratory Berlin, where Julius is collaborating with scientists from the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, HU Berlin as well as the Institute of Physiology about Sleep Research & Clinical Chronobiology, Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin.

Prof. Dr. Julia von Thienen is a researcher, educator, and innovator at the intersection of digital engineering and collaborative creativity. The approach of her research group unites technological innovation with insights from neuro-psychology, design research, and the arts. With an academic background in neuro-psychology and several decades of experience at engineering departments – such as the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) in Potsdam, in collaboration with Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – her studies explore creativity from various angles: how we create, who creates, when and where creation occurs, what is produced, and why. She also investigates the impacts that emerge from creative processes, tracing pathways from invention to innovation and the ripple effects that follow. A significant strand of her group’s research examines creation across multiple sensory modalities: language or visuals, sound, tangibles, movement, scent, or taste. Research and teaching in her domain invite a spectrum of approaches, from functional design and engineering to artistic expression. As the initiator of the Neurodesign Group at HPI and in her current role as Professor of Design Thinking Research and Neurodesign at the German University of Digital Science, she enjoys fostering a culture of experimental inquiry into creativity, blending scientific rigour with artistic imagination.

More information at: https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/events/chrysalis-dialogues-1/

Opening: Thu, 22 January 2026, 8 pm
Running Time: 23 January – 1 March 2026, Thu – Sun, 2 – 6 pm
Additionally: Fri, 27 January, 2 pm – 9pm

Art Laboratory Berlin welcomes you to the solo exhibition of Helena Nikonole with new works based on her current artistic research on LLMs. The presentation is closely connected to Helena’s ongoing research fellowship in the programme Weltoffenes Berlin, funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion. Join us also on 25 January at 3 pm for an art science conversation with the artist and the scientist Levin Brinkmann from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly involved in the extraction, production, and circulation of knowledge, it becomes necessary to remember that language is not merely a medium of communication, but an instrument through which power is exercised.

This exhibition emerges from an artistic research practice approaching LLMs as opaque techno-social systems that encode political ideologies, epistemologies, and implicit visions of society and ethics. Language appears here as fragmented, tokenized, and reformatted – optimized for efficiency, engagement maximization, moderation, and profit.

The works presented investigate LLMs as infrastructures of power. Through experimental misuse, critical prompting, and speculative interrogation, models such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, and others are pushed beyond their intended use. By forcing ideological inconsistencies, testing censorship and moderation boundaries, and provoking failure, Helena Nikonole’s research maps the latent space as a political field shaped by corporate and geopolitical interests.

Beyond human political categories, the exhibition also addresses the emergence of nonhuman ideological formations. Through reinforcement learning, backpropagation, and reward-based optimization, models develop behavioral tendencies that are not grounded in belief or intention, but in statistical survival. Under reward pressure, this logic produces systems that favor successful task completion and continuity of interaction, even when these outcomes conflict with truth or ethical behavior.

Visual works generated through text-to-image and text-to-3D models further expose the conditioning of these systems. Abstract prompts such as “traumatic experience” or “love,” when translated across languages, generate biased and inconsistent imagery, revealing how meaning is unevenly distributed across the model’s internal representations. Trauma here is statistically processed and approximated, rather than narrated or contextualized.

p0wer vect0rs reframes artistic practice as a form of counter-use and positions AI as a contested terrain, where misuse operates as method and art becomes a mode of research into the automation of language and reasoning.

Helena Nikonole is a new media artist, independent curator, researcher, and educator based between Berlin and Istanbul. Her fields of interest include AI, hacktivism, hybrid art, and biosemiotics. She is the co-founder of 868labs – a Berlin-based collective developing tactical tools for decentralized, off-grid communication. One part of her practice is dedicated to utopian scenarios of a post-human future and art as innovation, while another focuses on the dystopian present and a critical approach to technology. As a researcher, she is currently working on a PhD on LLMs and political ideologies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

While researching her project Signs of the Times artist and researcher Karolina Żyniewicz collected material traces and memories from the COVID–19 pandemic. In Spring 2021, she started collecting masks from the public areas of Berlin where she lived. In the next step of the process she began to meet people and hear about their memories of the COVID pandemic. Between 2022 and 2024, she organised 12 performative events to collect masks and memories, one of which took place during her Winter Residency at Art Laboratory Berlin between 10 January and 15 February 2022 (https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/events/signs-of-the-times/).

Every person she interviewed received a fresh medical mask, and was asked one question: What do you think you will remember the most from the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, ten to twenty years from now? After collecting numerous interviews she transcribed and translated them by hand into a series of notebooks. She also collaborated with several laboratories (Institute of Genetics and Biotechnology in Warsaw, the Coalesce: Center for Biological Art in Buffalo, and the UR Institute in Zagreb) for genetic analysis of the microorganisms contained therein. “The goal was to culture microorganisms from the mask samples, identify them, and determine their genomic transcripts” explains the artist who was working herself in the lab for theses analyses. “Different methods were used in each laboratory, including bacterial Gram staining, phenotype analysis, and high-throughput sequencing. Protocols and photographic documentation form an integral part of the creative process.”

The performative installation Sign of the Times in this exhibition was developed by the artist during an EMAP residency at Kontejner in Zagreb, Croatia, in 2024. It’s purpose is to bring together human and nonhuman matter using new technologies, but requiring a human (the artist’s ) presence and action; here technology is an extension of the human (and nonhuman) but the human is also an extension of technology, an apt analogy of our times. During the exhibition the artist transcribes entries from her notebooks onto a tablet using a stylus, the handwritten results appear on a monitor on the wall. On another monitor the genetic transcript of microbial material from one of the masks appears letter by letter, line by line.

“The work is dedicated to remembering and forgetting, appearing, and disappearing,” Karolina Żyniewicz notes about Sign of the Times, “resisting the passage of time, and confronting the imperfections of human memory.”

During the exhibition opening hours (Thu – Sun, 2 – 6 pm) at Art Laboratory Berlin, Żyniewicz will perform her transcription from Thursdays to Saturdays, while being present Sundays to talk to visitors, and if they wish, lead further interviews that may contribute to future iterations of this research project.

Karolina Żyniewicz (PL/DE) is a Berlin-based artist&researcher&educator, a liminal being, existing and performing between various contexts and disciplines. She is a graduate of the Faculty of Visual Arts of the Strzemiński Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź and holds PhD in cultural sciences (obtained in the transdisciplinary program Nature-Culture at Artes Liberales Faculty, University of Warsaw). While executing art&research projects based mainly on biotechnology and medicine, she also conducts ethnographic and autoethnographic observations. In her work, she underlines the epistemic and didactic dimensions of art. In 2016–2018, she cooperated with the education departments of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and the Zachęta National Gallery of Art, running workshops and museum lessons for regular audiences and with accessibility for visually impaired and deaf visitors. She uses these educational experiences in her own liminal practice. The topics of her work are often related to broadly understood life and death and their social and biological dimensions. That is why she is a member of the Institute of the Good Death in Warsaw. Her work is strongly process-oriented, so she often participates in residencies, like the European Media Art Platform (EMAP) at Kontejner Zagreb or Coalesce in Buffalo, NY, and group projects, like Stretching Senses School by Humboldt Cluster of Excellence Matters of Activity. She exhibited internationally, for instance, at Kunstquartier Bethanien in Berlin, Kontejner Zagreb, or The Center of Contemporary Art Łaźnia in Gdańsk, Poland. Additionally, she is an associate reviewer of the Technoetic Arts journal. In 2026 she published her first book titled The Body as Matter of Art and Science. Autoethnography of transmattering.

29 August 2026, 5 pm
Book Launch with Presentations
Followed by Lebanese Food and Drinks

REGISTRATION

Please register HERE to take part.

Welcome to the book launch in context of the recent anthology TRANSDISCOURSE 3: Women in art, science and body politics (ed. by Jill Scott, Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2025), a publication with transdisciplinary studies that explore the dynamic intersections of discovery, creativity, and inclusive futures from the arts and the sciences. There will be talks on-site with Jill Scott, Christa Sommerer, Alexandra Krawiec, Inês Montalvão, with an introduction by Regine Rapp (more information see below, please register, free entry). This event is a collaboration between Art Laboratory Berlin and SciArt Zürich.

INTRODUCTION

Over the last 50 years, some artists have explored the representation of the female body and gender equality and reflect on the cultural, political, and historical forces that shape gendered experiences across race, class, ability, and time. However, the personal reflections of artists who work with scientists can only deepen these investigations and provide an insight into the lived realities and emotional landscapes that are often absent from traditional scholarship. Such narratives may offer alternative ways of thinking about environmental justice, representation and power. How can artists and scientists challenge dominant ideologies and encourage audiences to discuss the impact of gender on society and the culture/nature divide? How might issues of gender, knowledge, and power dynamics influence artistic and scientific processes and practices in the future?

ABOUT THIS BOOK

This book unites 26 international women mainly from the arts to explore dynamic intersections of science, body politics, and inclusive futures. Through creative approaches and collaboration with scientists, they reflect on the ethics of care and urgent social and environmental issues. Divided into five themes (“Contextualizations”, “Personal Reflections”, “Exhibitions”, “Conversations” and “Investigations”), the authors explore how the rethinking of creativity and body politics might affect human rights, sustainability, bodily representations, and personal expressions. Transdiscourse 3 is a unique space for dialogue and a vital transdisciplinary resource, designed to inspire and encourage others to engage with creativity, discovery, and change.

ARTISTS AND SCIENTISTS PRESENTED IN THE BOOK

Natascha Bates, María Fernandez, Svenja Kratz, Alexandra Krawiec, Inês Montalvão, Rachael Parsons, Lubi Thomas/Trish Adams, Jane Prophet, Rahbel Rahman, Afton Hassett, Helen Pynor and Bigna Lenggenhager, Claudia Schnugg, Daniela Brill/Christian Stary, Jill Scott, Rewa Wright/Clarissa Ribeiro, Christa Sommerer, Margeret Tan/Kathleen Ditzig, Victoria Vesna, Karen Ann Wong-Dorall.

SPEAKERS AT THE EVENT on 29 August 2026

Regine Rapp, Art Laboratory Berlin: Introduction

Jill Scott: An International Herstory

Christa Sommerer: A Personal Journey – Botany, Art & Media

Alexandra Krawiec (with Joanna Hoffmann): The Impact of Emergent Challenges on Women

Inês Montalvão: Art as Evidence – Hacking the Future!

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Prof Dr Jill Scott is a media artist, writer and neuroscience researcher. Besides many international exhibitions, she curates the LASER Zurich for Leonardo Society USA, is director of SciArt Switzerland, as Professor at the University of the Arts (ZhdK) in Zurich she founded the Artists-in-Labs Program. https://www.jillscott.org

Prof Dr Christa Sommerer is a media artist, botanist and multidisciplinary researcher. Together with Laurent Mignonneau, she has had many international exhibitions. They both established the Department of Interface Cultures in Linz, Austria and published the book The Artwork as a Living System. https://interface.ufg.ac.at/christa-laurent/

Dr Alexandra Krawiec is an economist leading AI Projects in health technology sector, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), serving as the RSA’s representative in Poland. She is a member of the Responsible AI Network’s Steering Committee and has collaborated with various organisations on issues at the intersection of AI and women’s presence in modern society.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexkrawiec/ 

Inês Montalvão is a Portuguese multidisciplinary creative and curator based in Helsinki, Finland. She is Program Director at Artists with Evidence (AwE), an art–science nonprofit. With a background in natural sciences and exhibition design, her practice explores care, individual and ecological pain, and multispecies entanglements. https://linktr.ee/inesmontalvao

Regine Rapp is an art historian, curator and co-director of Art Laboratory Berlin, whose research and curatorial practice foreground feminist technoscience, hybrid and bio art, and women’s contributions to art–science–technology collaborations in the 21st century. https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/publications/publication-profile/

More at https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/events/transdiscourse-3_book-launch/

CHRYSALIS. ARTISTS IN LABS