Speculative Evolution, Prototype 1

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival
Speculative experiment on a future ecosystem under strict control. The narrative takes place in a simulation, 30 years in the future, where artificial intelligence and synthetic biology collaborate to optimize an environment for cultivated species. An AI-powered simulator helps visitors generate new species to balance the ecosystem. Inspiration comes from the book Under the White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert and artists’ stories about life on a damaged planet.

Bio

Marc Lee is a Swiss artist focused on real-time rendered audiovisual installations, AR, VR and mobile applications, critically exploring creative, cultural, social, ecological, political and speculative themes. His work has been exhibited in important museums and new media art spaces. Shervin Saremi is an Iranian musician and audio engineer specializing in sonic computing, procedural sound design and production. Currently researching immersive audio at UdK Berlin.

Aerial Assemblies
Self-Assembly is a process by which disordered parts build an ordered structure through local interaction. We have demonstrated that this phenomenon is scale-independent and can be utilized for self-constructing and manufacturing systems at nearly every scale. We have also identified the key ingredients for self-assembly as a simple set of responsive building blocks, energy and interactions that can be designed within nearly every material and machining process available. Self-assembly promises to enable breakthroughs across every applications of biology, material science, software, robotics, manufacturing, transportation, infrastructure, construction, the arts, and even space exploration.

Symbiosia
With the premiere of ‘Symbiosia’ we give two trees in the iconic garden of Fondation Cartier a visual voice about one of the most important topics of today, climate change. The work addresses the relationship of the trees with the visitors, the environment and each other. The real time data installation is a collaboration between artist Thijs Biersteker and world renowned botanist and scientist Stefano Mancuso and his International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology in Florence. As a pioneer of plant neurobiology he is an advocate of the concept of plant intelligence. Mancuso provided the science behind the artwork.

Art of the Cell

Beneath our everyday world there is a miniature universe of cells, trillions of tiny worlds, unseen and beautiful. Here is our latest 3D medical demo reel, including clips from many of the projects we’ve worked on, such as “Biology:How Life Works”, and “The Inner Life of the Cell”. We hope that you enjoy this two and a half minute tour of the Art of the Cell.

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Art de la cellule

Sous notre monde quotidien, il y a un univers miniature de cellules, des trillions de mondes minuscules, invisibles et beaux. Voici notre dernière démo médicale en 3D, comprenant des extraits de nombreux projets sur lesquels nous avons travaillé, tels que «Biologie: comment fonctionne la vie» et «La vie intérieure de la cellule». Nous espérons que vous apprécierez cette visite de deux minutes et demie de l’Art de la cellule.

Parasitic endeavours
Simon Christoph Krenn’s 3D animation, Parasitic Endeavours, initially started out as the creative wanting to explore distorted perspectives on human evolution. “I think my main inspiration came from nature and its creative forces themselves. I used to study zoology at university and was especially fascinated by evolutionary biology and the development of animal morphologies. I realized the video’s strange and somehow creepy potential and decided to push the animation even more into this direction.”

Glass Microbiology
Avian Influenza, commonly known as Bird Flu, refers to “influenza caused by viruses adapted to birds”. The first version, made in 2005, is one of Jerram’s earliest Glass Microbiology artworks. As such it is more abstract than the later 2012 artwork. In 2009, The Mori Museum, Tokyo exhibited this work in an exhibition called Medicine and Art, with works from Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol, Marc Quinn and Leonardo da Vinci.

Self-contained II
A neural network, trained to see the world as variations of the artist’s body, enacts a process of algorithmic interpretation that contends with a body as a subject of multiplicity. After training on over 30,000 images of the artist, this neural network synthesizes surreal humanoid figures unconstrained by physics, biology and time; figures that are simultaneously one and many. The choice of costumes and the movements performed by the artist to generate the training images were specifically formulated to optimize the legibility of the artist within this computational system. self-contained explores the algorithmic shaping of our bodies, attempting to answer the question: how does one represent themselves in a data set? Building on the first iteration of the series, the synthetic figures in self-contained II proliferate to the point of literally exploding. Through the arc of self-contained II, this body that grows, multiples, and dissolves never ceases to be more than a single body.

Syntopia

With ‘Syntopia’, Iris van Herpen explores the new worlds that arise within synthetic biology and the intertwining relationships between the organic and the inorganic. ʻSyntopiaʼ acknowledges the current scientific shift in which biology converges with technology and visualizes the fragility and power within.

photo: Morgan O’Donovan

Devil’s Flower Mantis
“Ten years ago I decided to change my field of research to one that is more in tune with my naturalist’s interests. Neurobiology is the study of cells of the nervous system and the organization of these cells into functional circuits that process information and mediate behavior. Insects, having a relatively simple and hence easier to study, nervous system, are commonly used as models, the premise being that on the most basic level of relatively simple neuronal networks we have a lot in common. It was my extracurricular expertise in invertebrate anatomy and macro photography that made the transition possible.”

Electric retina
The Electric Retina is a “neuromedia” sculpture which combines retinal research with interactive media art and metaphorical associations in order to explore the complexity of visual perception. Based on her residency in Neurobiology at the Institute of Zoology, University of Zurich, Scott gained a deeper insight into the genetic control of visual system development and function by analysis of zebra fish mutants, which are used as the main phenotypes for human eye disease research.

The birth of the night
Heavily influenced by mythology, biology and astronomy he creates characters which tell stories about life. All of his projects have the same simple core that is something, a small part, of the daily routine, of the emotion. And when emotion is created they, the characters, have the opportunity to venture inside themselves and to feel‚ without anything stopping them, led only by the simplicity and purity of the dream, of the new story.

gookeyes
Timothy graduated, with high honors, from Wesleyan University, having majored in Neuroscience and Behavior, Studio Art (with a concentration in drawing), and Biology (Developmental). Originally intending on attending medical school after graduation in hopes of becoming a physician, Timothy quickly dropped this ambition upon realizing his true passions, which lay in art. However, the impression from years of scientific training is clearly visible in the way he approaches his artwork.

Emu Flag
The reproductive organs of insects come in all different shapes and are actually quite beautiful. Some look like intricate flowers, others like exotic coral. Most look as though they belong to the biology of some distant planet. Maria Fernanda Cardoso has made her fascination with the natural sciences the basis of her art for many years, with the help of her husband and artistic collaborator Ross Harley.

Turbulent Topologies
This exhibition explores turbulence as both a formal principle and as a condition of the global metropolis. Through a variety of means, both visible and invisible, it examines the turbulent topologies of mixed layers and crossed currents, hidden links and sudden connections, flow networks and perturbed stratifications. Using both high and low technologies, it proposes a continuum between actual, virtual, and transactive space, form, and inhabitation. Drawing upon diverse fields such as particle physics and biology, logic and geology, and lived histories as they are alternately formed by and trapped in the webs of culture, it offers a series of formal propositions in response to the critical acceptance of turbulence as a condition of twenty-first century life.

Glass Microbiology

THE INNER LIFE OFF CELL
Harvard University selected XVIVO to develop an animation that would take their cellular biology students on a journey through the microscopic world of a cell, illustrating mechanisms that allow a white blood cell to sense its surroundings and respond to an external stimulus. This award winning piece was the first topic in a series of animations XVIVO is creating for Harvard’s educational website BioVisions at Harvard.