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LUCY MCRAE

einsames Überlebensfloß
Solitary Survival Raft ist eine Maschine, die einen einzelnen Körper beim Abdriften ins Unbekannte tröstet. Dieses Kunstwerk untersucht, wie wir den menschlichen Drang, neue Grenzen zu erkunden, mit der Tendenz zur Angst in Einklang bringen können. Das Floß ist eher eine Erkundung unseres Standorts als eine Demonstration des Überlebens – fallen Sie vom Rand ab, wenn Sie den Horizont erreichen, oder verschmelzen Sie näher mit der Wahrheit, wenn Sie der Angst die kalte Schulter zeigen?

The Andromeda Strain

Less faithful to the original text than Robert Wise’s 1971 film, the current version, whose executive producers include Tony and Ridley Scott, retains the essential elements of the plot: a government satellite on an intergalactic germ-related fact-finding mission crashes into a small town out West, emitting a deadly pathogen that kills everyone nearby save for an unhealthy older man and a baby whose survival is an epidemiological mystery. The military is called in to contain the disaster, and a team of high-status scientific researchers is assembled to determine the capacities of whatever is causing this plague and thus forestall the end of civilization.

cinema full

Peter Jansen

The Olympics
Peter Jansen (1956) studied Physics and Philosophy at the university.For a number of years he worked as a guide, accompanying groups on survival and canoe trips, after which he dedicated his live entirely to the arts. Based on his ideas on transposition and movement the artist Peter Jansen uses shapes of the human body to create energetic spaces.

Azuma Makoto

Encapsulated environmental system: Paludarium YASUTOSHI
This machine is fully equipped with a mist machine as if wrapping plants in a fog from both sides and drip feed-water system which can be activated depending on the situation in order to maintain the condition of a plant and control inside temperature and humidity. Also the cylindrical shape can fully capture the natural light by 365°angles from glasses, and it can correspond to plant growth by having the series’ largest scale of height. Fans on the ceiling play a role of wind, and a plant can listen music from the waterproofed speakers. The machine takes in essential elements – rain, wind, light and sound – by artificial means and completes a small world where its ecological cycle is condensed. It enables us to admire the beauty of the plants by not being affected by external environment.

Lucy McRae

Solitary Survival Raft
Solitary Survival Raft is a machine that comforts a single body as they drift into the unknown. This artwork explores how we can reconcile the human urge to explore new frontiers, while tending to fear. The raft is an exploration of where we are at, rather than a demonstration of survival – do you drop off the edge when you reach the horizon or merge closer to truth when you give fear the cold shoulder?

Michele Spanghero

Ad lib
The sound sculpture Ad lib. combines a medical machine for automatic pulmonary ventilation with a few organ pipes that play a musical chord to the constant rhythm of the mechanical breath, creating an artificial organ that is metaphorically a mechanical requiem that sounds incessantly. The title of the work Ad lib., an abbreviation of the Latin expression “ad libitum”, is a musical caption that gives the performer discretion of interpretation, allowing for instance to repeat “at will” certain bars of the score. The sculpture aims to refer to the situation in which people, who suffer from critical health conditions, see their survival tied to a breathing machine and, therefore, to the discretion of those who are taking care of them.

Gaspard et Sandra Bébié-Valérian

Viridarium / Bioréacteur de spiruline
Gaspard and Sandra Bebie-Valérian will present Viridis. Viridis is a global project that relies on different modules, the main being an online video game, immersive, plus an installation made of spirulina bioreactors and a set of videos and sounds. While Viridis is mainly available on the internet, the two artists, at this occasion, will present it out of the screen, they will deploy and spread it in several modules.
Viridis is a unique game experience combining adventure, survival, and an actual operating spirulina community management. Through the video game, the community can directly affect and interact with a real operating spirulina farm, managed by the artists.

Ola Maciejewska

BOMBYX MORI
Bombyx Mori alludes to the silk caterpillar, which has become entirely dependent on human beings for survival. Here, the natural body and the artificial process are inextricably linked: a poignant metaphor for this sculptural interpretation of one of the pioneers of modern dance and performance art.more

ALLORA & CALZADILLA

АЛЛОРА И КАЛЬСАДИЛЬЯ
Never Mind That Noise You Heard

Through sculpture, photography, performance, sound and video, Allora and Calzadilla’s works have been informed by questions of mark making, traces, and survival in a way that is simultaneously conceptual, metaphorical and spatial. Their understanding of material and metaphor as a couple is crucial; for them a material is never simply self-evident in its meaning, it is always marked with histories, cultures, and politics that are at once irreducible to and indivisible from the material in question. Another recurrent trope in their work is that of animality, and its unstable relationship to the realm of the human. Most recently, they have created a series of works that explore the interplay between militarism and sound in the context of today’s global state of war.

ALLORA & CALZADILLA

АЛЛОРА И КАЛЬСАДИЛЬЯ
performative ellipses

Through sculpture, photography, performance, sound and video, Allora and Calzadilla’s works have been informed by questions of mark making, traces, and survival in a way that is simultaneously conceptual, metaphorical and spatial. Their understanding of material and metaphor as a couple is crucial; for them a material is never simply self-evident in its meaning, it is always marked with histories, cultures, and politics that are at once irreducible to and indivisible from the material in question.

Paula Perissinotto

As We May Feel
file festival

“As We May Feel” A parody of the 1945 text “As We May Think”, by Vannevar Bush What enduring benefits did science and technology bring to human beings? First of all, science and technology have extended the humans’ control on their material environment, helping them to perfect their food, their clothes, their dwelling, and gave them more security, allowing to live above the level of mere subsistence. Later on, they have permitted a wider knowledge of the biological processes that occur within our bodies, allowing the control of a more healthy and lasting life, always promising an enhancement of mental health. Finally, they contribute to the effectiveness of our communication. We have therefore a reason to live beyond survival — abundant health and efficient communication. And how do we deal with our existential feelings and conflicts? We don’t have time for our feelings, we can no longer ruminate them. We bury them in secret wishes without bigger consequences. Should we care more for our feelings? Negligence has been our way of cleaning our lives of sentimental values. When we cannot sweep them, we zip them and eventually access them to solve conflicts and/or to organize our thoughts. This project offers the access, through a click, to a central that points to a series of paths toward “As we may feel”. The content of this simulation of a phone center has as its aim to create an encyclopedia of existential feelings and conflicts that represent human life in contemporary society. Welcome to our call center!

Camille Henrot

Endangered Species
Best-known for her videos and animated films combining drawn art, music and occasionally scratched or reworked cinematic images, Camille Henrot’s work blurs the traditionally hierarchical categories of art history. Her recent work, adapted into the diverse media of sculpture, drawing, photography and, as always, film, considers the fascination with the “other” and “elsewhere” in terms of both geography and sexuality. This fascination is reflected in popular modern myths that have inspired her, such as King Kong and Frankenstein. The artist’s impure, hybrid objects cast doubt upon the linear and partitioned transcription of Western history and highlight its borrowings and grey areas. In the series of sculptures Endangered Species, for example, the artist has created objects inspired by African art by using pieces from car engines; placed on tall pedestals, these slender silhouettes with zoomorphic allure make reference to the migration of symbols and forms as well as to the economic circulation of objects. This survival of the past, full of misunderstandings, shifts and projections (as shown in the slideshow Egyptomania, the film Cynopolis, drawings of the Sphinx, and even in the photographs of prehistoric flints) troubles cultural codes and conventions. In this way, Camille Henrot’s work questions mental resistances and the past’s resonance, whether it be drawn from myth or from reality.

PHILIP LÜSCHEN

Waiting Room Survival

A ‘Sneak in front tool’, ‘Incognito nose stand’ and ‘Waiting Room Survival Book. Philip Lüschen has designed these objects as part of his project on waiting rooms, Waiting Room Survival. The Incognito nose stand seduces us to wait incognito in waiting rooms in places where we would prefer not to be recognized, such as a clinic for sexually transmitted diseases. And if you want to be seen by a doctor as fast as possible, Philip Lüschen has got the answer: The sneak in front tool, with which you can make everyone else in the room disappear behind the empty waiting room chairs.‘’Although the objects were designed as practical implements, when not in use they function as icebreakers. They stimulate the imagination and break through the tension and passive dynamic of waiting.‘’ The objects displayed are the result of the many studies drawn in waiting rooms, which also served as the basis for the ‘Waiting Room Survival Book’. A guide with useful illustrated strategies on how to survive a waiting room visit.
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GILBERTO ESPARZA

Nomadic Plants
Vegetation and microorganisms live in symbiosis inside the body of the Nomadic Plants robot. Whenever its bacteria require nourishment, the self-sufficient robot will move towards a contaminated river and ‘drink’ water from it. Through a process of microbial fuel cell, the elements contained in the water are decomposed and turned into energy that can feed the brain circuits of the robot. The surplus is then used to create life, enabling plants to complete their own life cycle. As Gilberto wrote in our email conversation, “The nomadic plant is a portray of our own species. It also deals with the alienated transformation of this new hybrid species that fights for its survival in a deteriorated environment.”