October 10, 2020
Zoom Webinar (conference) + Live Stream: Youtube
Programme will feature artistic interventions, screenings, virtual bio/eco-artworks and performances by young artists from Riga, Liepaja, Basel, Karlsruhe and Boston.
20.00 – 22.00 Screening Programme, Performances and Concert:
PLA(N)Tform – virtual exhibition (27 min)
and Forest Garden Greenhouse Concert (45 min)
PLA(N)Tform: Virtual Biosensing
PLA(N)Tform is a collaborative ‘Virtual Biosensing’ platform for growing, sensing and making ‘human-plant kin-ship’ experiments and artistic explorations transforming the ‘biological’ into the ‘digital’.
Julia Ihls. “Virtual Rhizone. 3D/VR environment, PLA(N)Tform, 2020.
… PLA(N)Tform is a synthetic organism in which virtual as well as analogous actors grow together… In the darkness of an infinite space of potentialities, a living cosmos of subtle relations and accumulations unfolds – like delicate spider threads, but apparently interwoven without any recognizable pattern… The PLA(N)Tform grows in decentralised rhizomatic proliferations while it is nourished by luminous seeds, which in turn contain their own virtual worlds… By juxtaposing the different realities in a heterogeneous plurality, the PLA(N)Tform is understood as a speculative experiment of terrestrial co-existence, in which epistemological and aesthetic practices, far removed from hierarchical mechanisms, merge into a space-time of Planthropocene…
Artists and artworks:
Julia Ihls. VIRTUAL RHIZOME
Kira Ellen Adams. NATURE NOSTALGIA
Jung Eun Lee. HOMESICK FARMING
Isabella Münnich. IMMERSED GARDEN
Carmen Westermeier. AA Alt 12 APIPA Cave II. Humans Plants Kinships
Margrethe Emilie Kühle. BIO-SENSING FOREST
Alejandra Miranda Janus in collaboration with data scientist Patrick Scislowski. PLANTBLINDNESS.
Eleanora Pfanz. COALESCO. BUTTERFLY STILLEBEN
Christina Vinke. FLOATING WOODLANDS
Credits and Support:
The PLA(N)Tform at Ars Electronica Garden Riga/Karlsruhe is co-produced by RIXC Art-Science Center Riga and Virtual BioSensing project group at HfG, in collaboration with BioDesign Lab HfG Karlsruhe – for Ars Electronica Festival 2020: Kepler’s Garden program September 9–13, 2020.
Forest Garden Greenhouse Concert
The artists, that take part in the Forest Garden Greenhouse performance programme, are: composer Platons Buravickis, sound artist Ivo Tauriņš, young musician Lauris Šmits, RIXC residency artist Daniel Hengst (EMARE / Germany), and the authors of this project – artists Rasa Šmite and Raitis Šmits together with VR artist Kristaps Biters. However, new media artists Andris Vētra and Artis Kuprišs participate in the programme with their jointly developed concert robot – as a representative of urban culture, in the concert it will encounter nature for the first time; in the greenhouse where the concert will take place and which is home to both tomato seedlings and a young pine tree, it will reveal an artistic techno-ecological clash.
Forest laboratory concert “stage”. RIXC publicity photo
In the Forest Garden Greenhouse performance programme, composer Platons Buravickis plays his composition Red Wave, which reveals information as fluctuations. Fluctuations form various shapes that resonate. Tracing the fluctuations, how they resonate with each other, it turns out that the sound and colour are not much different, that a person is not much different from a tree – they are either alive or not. The composition does not study colour, but the meaning of waves (fluctuations), which would stimulate to be united with all living things.
Generated forest by sound artist Ivo Tauriņš is a composition and multi-channel sound installation created this summer at the RIXC Fields residence. The artwork deals with the relationship between nature and technology. In nature, everything happens cyclically – life on Earth is provided by continuous geological and biological energy exchange processes.Today’s challenge could be how to maintain a balance between man, nature and technology, as man-made technologies could be the basis for fundamental changes in the normal course of order of things.
Rivers in the Sky by young musician Lauris Šmits explores the global water cycle, how water travels from trees into the atmosphere and then back down to Earth. Every tree in the forest is a fountain, sucking water out of the ground through its roots and releasing water vapour into the atmosphere through pores in its foliage. In their billions, they create giant rivers of water in the air – rivers that form clouds and create rainfall hundreds of kilometres away.
German artist Daniel Hengst, who is currently residing in Latvia at the RIXC artists’ residence EMARE, performs a multimedia performance, providing an insight into his upcoming Virtual Reality artwork – Blooming Love. The artwork leads the viewer into a seemingly strange and unfamiliar immersive VR environment. Here, unusually colored leaves and fantastic flowers intertwine with unusual plant shapes and sizes. Plant stems pierce the human body without injuring it. Initially, the slightly vague tension caused by the shape, colour and sound of the surroundings will intensify the intimate, original love affair between the viewer and the nature of these plants.
The concert also featured Ungreen Field Radio sound art program by MIT ACT, curated by RIXC.
More info: ecodata.rixc.org/ungreen-field-radio/