Many artists currently explore the scientific, technological and cultural developments of the 21st century and they are engaged in critical and ethical debates. The intention of the AIL program is to share common goals, to broaden the dialogue, generate ideas and raise awareness of the contributions both artists and scientists can make to the larger challenges of our time. Providing a research environment where these experiments can take place makes all the difference. The AIL co-operation with Swiss Science laboratories is a conscious attempt to encourage the development of the primary creative forces shared by both disciplines: the quest for interpretations of nature, matter and human desire as well as the interest to comprehend, explore, reveal, sustain, create and build.
Awards for the Artist-in-Lab Residency Awards 2004
The AIL research team is very pleased to announce the following awards for the Artist-in-Lab Residency Awards 2004. Artists and the labs they will work in are below.
Final Jury Selection
Artists were favoured whose proposals indicated an interest in building bridges between art and science through innovative, interpretive and original conceptual ideas. This included the ability to communicate creative ideas, processes and methodologies.
The following art projects were selectedfor 2004:
[2 Projects] AI-Lab (Artificial Intelligence Lab), at the ifi, Institut für Informatik, University of Zurich
Adrianne Wortzel (USA)
Project Title: "Converse Engineering: Stories of Emerging Differentiation and Otherness in Robotic Entities"
Creation of true-to-AI-Lab phenonema-narrative(s) garnered from the emergence of otherness and differentiation in singular or modular robotic elements to develop a fictive scenario featuring robotic entitles as characters.
Margarete Jahrmann / Max Moswitzer ( both from Austria) Project Title: "Action-Bot-Intelligence, Nonlinear software "toolz" in open source game-engines and recombinant hardware-interfaces" The focus of the project will be to evaluate the surplus of an epistemological view on cultural and technological codes and cultures starting off from an artistic experimental lab situation as arts installation to trigger "mediapoiesis" (generative arts coming out of internal systems processes in optional gaming-networks).
------------------------------------------------------------------------ Center for Biosafety and Sustainability (BATS), Basle
Shirley Sho (Singapore) Project Title: "Food for Thought" To understand the ecological impact of GM agriculture in developing countries with the attendant issues of sustainability, bio-diversity and market needs/distribution. To look at one food grain, rice, as the focus of the study.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ Centre Suisse d'Electronique et Microtéchnique, Alpnach, Swiss Centre for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM).
Margaret Tan (Singapore) Project Title: "Smart Apron" Using wearable computing to create a smart apron to improve the working conditions of foreign domestic workers.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ Computational Laboratory (COLAB) at the ETH, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich.
Tiffany Holmes (USA) Project Title: "Floating Point" Creative visualization of factors influencing water quality. I plan to work on an artistic real-time visualization of water quality in local lakes, rivers, and oceans using five critical water quality parameters: temparature, pH, dissolved oxygen, conductivity, and turbidity.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ Institute for Geobotanics at the ETH, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich.
Thomas Isler (Switzerland) Project Title: "Vietnam Connection" People from Switzerland and Vietnam meet in order to work on genetically modified organisms. What communication structures does this meeting imply?
------------------------------------------------------------------------ Institute of Information Systems, Information Science and Engineering at the ETH, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich.
Axel Vogelsang (UK) Project Title: "Augmented Fairy Tale" How can we turn paper from a rather passive medium into a user experience that includes our physical environment? I want to explore how technologies such as those developed in the ETH Paper++ research can be used to trigger physical events.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2 projects] Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), Villigen.
Sally Pryor / Peter Stronach (Australia) Project Title: "Licht und Schatten" An interactive installation artwork, exploring subatomic investigations and manipulations. A unique collaboration between artists and scientists, focused on the creation of an interactive installation artwork. "Licht und Schatten" will explore the subatomic investigations and manipulations taking place at the Paul Scherrer Institute.
Dominik Bastianello (Switzerland) Project Title:"Il mondo secondo" In collaboration with physicists, similarities between image patterns on video clips, resulting from rotating, swingingor otherwise moving cameras and those known from relativity theory and quantum physics will be studied. By shifting the point of view and experiencing space in a unfamiliar way, the goal will be to set preconditions for new spacial concepts and to obtain a broader view for the interpretation of observations.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ Planetarium at the Swiss Museum of Transport and Communication, Lucerne
Andrew Quinn (Italy/Australia) / Clea T. Waite (Germany) Project Title: "Moon Walk" The proposal is to take a walk on the moon, across the dome of the Verkershaus planetarium, through time and space combining data from the Consolidated Lunar Atlas with experimental and archival film and sound material, myths, poems, and non-fictional texts. This will include 3D- surround sound with a projection system capable of producing high definition digital graphics.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2 projects] Centre for Microscopy (ZMB), University of Basle
Harsha Nandabattlu (India) Project Title:"Room for Degression" This project proposes for a collaborative activity to construct a physical space titled 'Room for digression' using visuals, texts and other materials from the ZMB. The focus would be to discover artistic and social meanings in an "image" from the micro world, which would evolve as a results of scientific enquiry.
Isabel Rohner (Switzerland) Project Title: "Wounds" - or the Search of a Cybernetic System" The project Wounds - or the search of a cyberneticsystem is a research work on the topic how art and science can meet and find new ways of collaboration. My research would use the approach of histology (especially the cell as smallest autonomous unity of life in an organism) as a starting point.
JURY MEMBERS: - Prof. Dr. Ruth Durrer, Theoretical Physics, Département de Physique Théorique, Université de Genève - Beat Gerber, Head of Communication, Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), Villigen - Kaspar Kasics, Independant Filmmaker, Zurich - Dominik Landwehr, Head Science & Future, Migros Culture Percentage - Prof. Dr. Moira Norrie, Director, Institute of Informations Systems, ETH, Zurich - Prof. Dr. Jill Scott, Media Artist, HGKZ, Zürich