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/

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).

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/