RIXC FESTIVAL 2020, THE 5TH OPEN FIELDS CONFERENCE AND ECODATA EXHIBITION
Juan Carlos DUARTE REGINO. “I” : Environmental Media Interface for Sonic Interaction
“I” is an Interface for the real-time sound synthesis of eco data collected in situ, in this paper – talk I will present the design features of the device, including the future scenarios that will enable the use in field recordings on remote locations. Moreover the possibility to use with radio systems to sense electromagnetic fields and use them as a medium to transfer data and other acoustic signals found in specific environments. The interface is designed in collaboration with the Mexican sound artist Mario de Vega, the project emerged as a platform to develop a long term project for an Instrument that takes multiple forms of use and interpretation for sound performance and installation.
Moreover, the interest of “I” as a platform for collaboration between artists and scientists is to enable a common space to explore the materialities of sound connected to planetary energies and signals, space qualities, and resonance. The system proposes a cybernetic approach, enhancing a medium that is deeply intertwined with planetary cycles and the sonic experience with environmental agencies.
Juan Duarte Regino: Media Artist. Creative Technologist http://juanduarteregino.com/
Mexican-born media artist Juan Duarte Regino works on interaction as a tool for generative art experiments. He is part of Pixelache – art and activist group based in Helsinki. Currently a doctoral student in New Media at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland, he reflects on the information society paradigm from the point of view of his background in media art, with a special focus on open source technologies developed in DIY communities and grassroots initiatives. Duarte’s work has been presented in IAMAS, Spiral Gallery, AAVE Festival, Bonniers Konsthall, Rundum Showcase, Ljudmila, Radio, and TV Museum of Lahti, Centre for Contemporary Art – Ujazdowski Castle, Mänttä Art, Generate! Festival.
Mia MAKELA. History of an Impossible Destiny – Honeybee´s journey to the heart of anthropocene
Story about the Into the Wild artwork takes us back in time, to a remote corner of a natural park in Southern Lithuania. By documenting ancient beekeeping activities, Makela tracks down key moments in the relationship between two species, and how this affected the process of subjugating the honey bee into a condition of exploitable natural resource. These kinds of processes eventually led us towards the anthropocene we know today. But what do we see in the future?
Through a sensitive, intimate and prolonged observation Makela discovers surprising behavior inside and outside the hive, which she offers as a set of dialogues that bring humor, poetry, reflection and an insight into the fantastic dimension of this species.
The artist spent three years as a beekeeper, documenting her experiences with an I-Phone. She researched the history of European beekeeping and visited bee centers in Finland, Germany, Slovenia, Poland and Lithuania. She also wrote a historical treatise of the importation of honey bee in Finland. Her theoretical framework is critical animal studies. Into the Wild is part of a 3 channel video installation History of an Impossible Destiny.
INTO THE WILD
Vimeo password: Santiago2020
Mia Makela is a Finnish media artist and cultural historian, whose work explores intersections between art and other disciplines: technology, science, ecology. Makela exhibits chosen themes in the forms of video, audio guides, expeditions, participatory acts, installations, performative lectures, related publications and blogs. Makela, internationally acknowledged pioneer in the field of live cinema, has shown her work and lectured all over the globe.
Her latest activities include History of an Impossible Destiny, a 4-channel video installation, for which she spent 3 years documenting beekeeping around Europe and doing research on the destiny of the honey bee. Zootopia- audio guide for zoos, a posthumanist and feminist research on other species. Artistic expeditions on the strait of Magellan, Patagonia and Chiloe Island in Chile. Cabin Walks&Talks – a guided expedition for tracing interspecial empathy. Green Matters – video handbook for algae gatherers – a two-year exploration in the world of green algae and traditional weaving.
Currently she is doing (artistic) research on minerals and geese.
Christina STADLBAUER. Relocation Training Program for Pinna Nobilis – a video Tutorial for Mollusks
The mollusk Pinna Nobilis or the Great Pen Shell has been used by mankind for hundreds of years as a source of food and to make sea silk – an extremely fine, rare, and valuable fabric made from the long silky filaments, the byssus, secreted by the shells. Recently, Pinna nobilis populations have greatly declined and the animal is presently protected under EU law as an endangered species.
The Institute for Relocation of Biodiversity (IRB)* selected this species for direct assistance in relocating. A video tutorial to communicate the urgency and necessity to migrate to possible future, safe habitats was created and presented to the mollusk in the Mediterranean Sea.
* IRB is an imaginary agency taking the climate crisis and loss of biodiversity and habitat as starting point to reconsider the future environment that humans co-inhabit with a multitude of non-human others.
Christina works as artist and researcher. She develops her practice around other than human life forms, and has launched several long term initiatives – like Melliferopolis, the Institute for Relocation of Biodiversity and Kin Tsugi Transformations – to examine interspecies communication and the relation between culture and nature. Christina’s work is process based and interdisciplinary. She questions our habitual tendencies of how we assign value to the environment and proposes new views on cracks, faults and the impossibility of perfection. Christina obtained a PhD in Chemistry and she works as independent in both art organisations and academia, creating installations, rituals, performances and publications.
http://melliferopolis.net :: http://christallinarox.wordpress.com
Eva-Maria Lopez. We Resist. The Adaptation Of Plants In The Anthropocene
Plants are all around us. In fields, urban areas or in living rooms they tell us about changes induced by climate change and modern agriculture. They testify the frightening loss of biodiversity going hand in hand with the agrochemical industry’s promises of a ‘better world’. In her artwork with living plants and ornaments, Eva Maria Lopez maps these changes. For the artistic research project we resist. plant species have been included that have become herbicide resistant. Their adaption is a naturally occurring process, following Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory, and the spontaneous change of their genetic make-up enables them to survive. As a result of monocultures and herbicide treatment, the number of such resistant plants is increasing worldwide. Most of them have important cultural symbolic as well as medical virtues. we resist. translates the ambiguity of so-called ‘super weeds’ like cornflower (Centaurea cyanus) into a garden composed of motifs reminiscent of the most typical jardins à la française. Lopez aims to create an awareness of our flora, biodiversity in the anthropocene and the need for more sustainable forms of cultivation.
Eva-Maria Lopez is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher working in Karlsruhe and Paris. After receiving her master’s degree in agriculture, she studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe. Based on this double educational background, her artwork is focused on issues relating to nature, society and the environment. In addition to photography, her main and prime medium of expression, she has increasingly moved towards Land Art projects, thus merging material realities and ways of conveying these issues and histories visually. She conceives of her art practice as such as continuous research, combining the interplay of keywords, titles and slogans with corresponding pictures or graphics, and even artistic garden design.
Paul ROSERO CONTRERAS. The revolution will start in the garden
A living species is a creative species, a species that has formed its environment to function in it and to make it functional. The first living organisms completely changed the planet in the Great Oxygenation. Plants have transformed this planet in such a way that it becomes habitable and breathable for all others. In this process, plants are and create images. Biology shows us a way to understand creation as a result of a cognitive process that is beyond-the-human, a neurobiology of plants that assumes them as sentient bodies in an interdependent relationship with the environment, capable of learning and responding by building an imaginary of possibilities.
Seduced by plants as creative beings, I have been developing the project El Pensamiento de las Plantas (How Plants think) as a speculation on the possibility of the visual self-representation of plants from a conscious agency. This photographic series and the sculpture that is included in this project are influenced by indigenous epistemologies, biological concepts and notions of contemporary anthropology that seek to decenter the human as the only one creative species.
Gathering from the history of bio-sensing experimentation and bio-driven technologies, this paper proposes intelligence as a distributed feature among non-human species, acting as creators of eco-aesthetical phenomena.
Paul Rosero Contreras (Quito, 1982) is a multimedia artist working with speculative realism, scientific information and fictional narratives. His body of work intertwines distinct epistemologies, ranging from indigenous thinking to the history of science. It explores topics related to geopolitics, interspecies reciprocity, environmental issues and experimentation on future sustainable settings. Rosero holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts – CalArts and a Master in Cognitive Systems and Interactive Media from Universidad Pompeu Fabra, Spain. His work has received different prizes and grants, and it has been displayed widely at venues and events such as the 57th Venice Biennale, Musee Quai Branly in Paris, Instituto Cervantes in Rome, Museo de Historia de Zaragoza, 5th Moscow Biennale for Young Art, the 1st. Antarctic Biennale, H2 Center, Augsburg, 11th. Cuenca Biennale, 1st. Bienal Sur in Buenos Aires, at Siggraph in Los Angeles, among other spaces. Currently, Rosero teaches and conducts research at San Francisco de Quito University.