Elin Tanding Sørensen

Elin T. Sørensen er utdannet billedkunstner med master i landskapsarkitekt, og fortiden stipendiat ved Norges miljø- og biovitenskapelige universitet. Sørensen har siden 2013 tematisert havrommet i sine kunst- og landskapsfaglige arbeider. Med dette har hun opparbeidet seg spesialisering om marine miljøutfordringer, samt en oppdatering om hvordan det internasjonale kultur- og arkitekturfeltet arbeider med tematikken. Doktorgradsstudien “Fra to verdener til ett landskap — den urbane fjæra som potensielt opplevelseslandskap” tar for seg dagens praksis for utbygging i sjø, og undersøker nye design for den urbane fjæra og undervannslandskapet. Forskningen foregår gjennom en praksisorientert tilnærming til landskapsarkitekturfaget om konkrete løsninger for landskap og marint liv. Studien foregår derfor i tett dialog med marinbiologer ved Norsk institutt for vannforskning (NIVA) og geolog fra Universitetet i Oslo.

Som landskapsarkitekt har Elin 10 års erfaring fra offentlig og privat sektor innen steds- og byutvikling, med spesialisering i urban økologi, vann i by, naturbaserte løsninger og den urbane fjæresona. I tillegg har hun 15 års erfaring med gjennomføring av langvarige, prosessorienterte og brukersentrerte kunstprosjekt i form av utstillinger og kunst i offentlige rom, som interiørene “Biblioteksrom Hamsunsenteret” (2008- 2010) og “Alle verdens elver” — venterom til Utlendingsnemnda (2016-2018). I perioden 2013-2014 utviklet hun kunstprosjektet “Kaurene”  (Stenersenmuseet 2014): En kunstnerisk bearbeidelse om det globale problemet med plast i verdenshavene. Hun er aktuell med verket “Uteklasserom/pyrolab/lava-gulv” som realiseres på Klosterøya, Skien i samarbeid med Growlab Oslo, Skien VGS og Telemark fylkeskommune (2018-2021). Hun er invitert til å delta i ” Konstnärliga avsmyckningar av Norra Djurgårdsstaden”; Sveriges største uavhengige kunstprosjekt i 2019-2020 kuratert av Stella d’Ailly & Holly Keasey.

Annike Flo

c o c r e a t : e : u r e s

From a scenographic perspective aspects of the Anthropocene can be read as a spatial event: Humans encroaching, infringing, even violating the spaces of non-humans. Our touch, sound, light, scent and materials permeate the planet. Consequently, a new awareness of the other, decentering the human and an offering up of space, are all subversive and defiant acts to help us propel out of the Anthropocene

My immersive installation and master production in scenography cocreat:e:ures (16.08.18-14.10.18) tied together senographert and Oyster Mushroom in a trans-species alliance via disused spaces and waste materials at Vitenparken, campus Ås, (NO) in an attempt to conjure up new realities.

The project was run as an aesthetic experiment and investigated what happens when we as artists shift our perception of other beings toward collaboration partner and (odd)kin (Haraway), instead of stranger, prop or material to manipulate.

Bio

Through her practice Annike Flo (NO, b. 1986) investigates what it means to create in the proposed age of the Anthropocene. Flo works with themes of agency, our imagined nature-culture divide and relationship to non-human beings from a scenographic perspective. By bringing others who do their own wording into staged spatial events her work plays with the fusing of reality and performance.

Annike holds an MA in scenography from the Norwegian Theatre Academy (2018) and a BA in costume for performance from London College of Fashion, University of the Arts. After graduating from LCF she specialized in design for immersive and participatory theatre, which she brings into her current artistic practice.

Anne Cecilie Lie

Entangled in the Mesh

Entangled in the mesh is available to experience after the symposium. There will be Ipads and headphones available, or you can download it yourself on your own  smartphone.

Entangled in the Mesh is a site-relational geo-locative soundwalk through NMBU Campus Ås and its outskirts. Lie has taken sounds and stories of Ås’ specific landscape, its history, geology, and biology, as the basis for her walk and implemented them through field recordings, sound works, interviews and text writing. The soundwalk can be experienced through a free downloadable app. The audience triggers the carefully chosen sounds by moving through the landscape and the GPS of their smartphones. The audience is part of making the work come to life, each walk being slightly different as the participants choose their own time-frame and trajectory. Accompanying the walk are three dead-wood logs as sculptural ecoventions. Introducing dead-wood to the Campus Park is the quickest way to increase biodiversity, as thousands of species can thrive in dead wood. These natural sculptures will rot and live on through other forms of life, on a timescale stretching far beyond ours. They represent an invitation for a dwelling for and with the other. Lie´s work came into being through collaborations

Bio

Through her work, Anne Cecilie Lie (b. 1983) examines how to create in our current geological era proposed as the Anthropocene, with its accompanying philosophical and ethical questions, as well as for possible futures. She points out blind zones in social and built structures and proposes new alternatives for coexistence to the human-exceptional/centric. Lie works with sound, performance, installation, and text. She works both alone and often in collaboration with others in creative fields and fields of scientific research, with knowledge producers such as educational institutions and libraries, and local communities. Site-specificity and cross-pollination are intrinsic to her work, inspired by Donna Haraway’s theories of tentacular thinking, based on feministic, post-colonial, scientific and fabulating approaches to collaborative futures with humans and non-humans alike. Object-Oriented Ontology and Timothy Morton’s concept of Dark Ecology are also significant influences, where ecology includes all life and “non-life” such as technologies. Though her works are often dependent on research collaborations, Lie is not interested in research dissemination. Creating platforms for critical discussion, it is for her equally important to obscure and complicate. Lie holds an MA in scenography from the Norwegian Theatre Academy and a BA in Fine Arts from the Trondheim Academy of Fine Arts.

Hanna Bjørgaas 

Beetle boxes –Habitat for cavity-living beetles in oak

In this project, we created a new home for the many species of fungi, beetles and other living creatures that live in and depend on hollow oaks. In growing cities, such old trees often loose competition for space, and the density of old trees in many cities is critically low. Many of the species (in particular, big and beautiful beetles) that depend on hollow oaks have declined to such a degree that they are threatened by extinction.

In this project, we want to expose the near-magic process that takes place inside an old hollow oak, where the decomposition of the hard oakwood to soft decomposit wood occurs in cooperation between fungi, beetles and other insects. We have built four large boxes in oak wood, filled them with oak material and wood from other old oak trees, and invited the oak organisms to move in.

We want to show that the decomposition process, which we usually do not (want to) see, can be at least interesting, if not beautiful. A raspberry pi computer and a camera is set up inside a beetle box. The pictures and videos of the fungi, insects and animals living inside the box can be continuously watched via a website. So far we have seen both mushrooms, mice, a bunch of insects and a couple of jackdaw.

Bio

I am a biologist from UiO with a particular interest in urban ecology and urban ecosystems. I am also passionate about the use and preservation of old varieties of vegetables. I like to cooperate with other disciplines and untraditional dissemination methods.

I have worked with small scale farmers in Brazil as well as conservation projects in Norway. Through several interdisciplinary projects, I have worked with understanding and improvement of ecological function in the city, and have written about nature conservation and biology for several magazines and journals.

I am interested in dissemination through traditional and more non-traditional media, and have initiated and worked in interdisciplinary collaboration with artists, architects and landscape architects, among others.

Hege Tapio

Abstract

During my artistic practice the past two decades there has been some questionable activities involving bodymatter. Like; how did I end up having the cancer cells of a woman named Henrietta Lacks in my freezer? Or how did superfluous material from my own bodyfat become a proposal for an effective and economic alternative to fossil fuels? The practicality and point of value for the transgression and interdisciplinary blend between art and science might not be immediately obvious. By sharing my experiences of entering the domain of science and presenting some of the most significant artists within the field I wish to justify why we need to embrace this new collaboration and try to identify what makes it really work.”

Bio

Hege Tapio was born 1973 in Norway. Lives and works in Stavanger.
Since 2001 her artistic practice has pursued the interest in emerging media interconnecting art, new technology and science. Her work has been exhibited and presented at conferences widely in Norway and internationally.
With a kitchen bench DIY attitude and through artistic practice she has been inspired to how apparatuses and new technology opens to renewed interpretation, creative misuse and critical thinking. Tapio produced the first public interactive electronic art installation in Stavanger consisting of a double sided handmade LED matrix, and has over the years also been engaged as both artist and consultant for public commissioned artworks and done several curatorial projects.
Tapio is the founder and artistic manager of i/o/lab – Center for Future Art where she established and curated Article biennial– a festival for the electronic and unstable art.

Art driven by curiosity, knowledge, ability to convey and contextualize aspects of technology and research, both through speculation and critical attitude, have been the basis for many of the projects.
Art encompassing and intersecting with technology and science has been the main objective for the development of projects for i/o/lab. The core activities has been to

Marietta Radomska 

Promising Futures? On Bioart, the Non/Living, and Ethics

This paper explores the ways in which thinking through the contemporary hybrid artistico-scientific practices of bioart contributes to a more nuanced understanding of life than we encounter in mainstream academic discourse. When examined from a Deleuzian feminist perspective and in dialogue with contemporary bioscience, bioartistic projects reveal the inadequacy of asking about life’s essence. They expose the enmeshment between the living and non-living, organic and inorganic, and, ultimately, life and death. Instead of examining the defining criteria of life, bioartistic practices explore and enact life as processual, differential, and always already uncontainable, thus transcending preconceived material and conceptual boundaries.

In this way, this paper concentrates on the ontology of life as it emerges through the selected bioartworks: “semi-living” sculptures created by The Tissue Culture & Art Project. The hope is that such an ontology can enable future conceptualisations of an ethico-politics that avoids the anthropocentric logic dominant in the humanities and social sciences.

Bio

Marietta Radomska, PhD, is a feminist philosopher and transdisciplinary Gender Studies scholar. For Thinking through matter, she will share with us ideas from her monograph Uncontainable life: A Biophilosophy of BioArt.

Radomska is a Postdoc at the Department of Thematic Studies (Gender Studies), Linköping University, SE, and a Visiting Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Cultures (Art History), University of Helsinki, FI. She is the co-director of The Posthumanities Hub; founder of The Eco- and Bioart Research Network, co-founder of International Network for ECOcritical and DECOlonial Studies and a founding member of Queer Death Studies Network. Radomska is a philosopher and transdisciplinary gender studies and posthumanities scholar. Her current research project focuses on ecologies of death in the context of contemporary art. She is the author of the monograph Uncontainable Life: A Biophilosophy of Bioart (2016), and has published in Australian Feminist Studies, Somatechnics, and Angelaki, among others.

THE ANTHROPOCENE COOKBOOK

With a Meal-in-a-pill performance served by Anthropocene Kitchen

The Anthropocene marks the beginning of a gastronomic revolution. New, humanoid made foods extend how we sense and taste, allowing us to develop and refine what it means to be human.

The Anthropocene Cookbook – Eating for Our Future Survival – is an artistic research and eco-critical project investigating the future cuisine of humanity. To sustain the soon-to-be 9 billion global population -and many more- we cannot count on Mother Earth’s natural resources anymore. The project explores the most innovative and speculative ideas about new foods within the field of arts, design, science & technology. The project rethinks our eating traditions, challenges food taboos and proposes new recipes for great tastes in our age of dark-ecological catastrophes.

As part of the lecture, Anthropocene Kitchen will serve you the future as the Meal-in-a-pill. This three course meal is a mouth watering experience consisting of three pills: the starter – energy pill (synthesized caffeine), the main dish – protein pill (insect infused powder) and desert – edible PLA microplastics coated with sweetened cellulose. The concept is rooted in the classic bio-utopian visions of future staple foods.

www.anthropocenecookbook.com

www.anthropocenekitchen.com

Artist Bio

Zane Cerpina (NO/LV) is Oslo based artist, curator and organizer working within experimental new media and electronic arts, focusing on the themes of the Anthropocene, environmental awareness, ecological criticism, interactive technologies and embodied experiences.

Zane works at PNEK (pnek.org), TEKS (teks.no) and EE Magazine (eejournal.no).

She has lectured and presented her works at: ISEA (CA 2015, HK 2016, BR 2017), STRAND (Serbia 2016), LABVERDE (Brazil 2017), UK, Lithuania, Latvia, Norway, Netherlands, etc.

www.bezane.net / cerpina.zane@gmail.com

Stahl Stenslie (NO) works as an artist, curator and researcher in experimental media art, interactive experiences and disruptive technologies. His artworks question ordinary ways of perceiving the world. In his practice he looks for the questions we tend to avoid – or where the answers lie in the shadows of existence. He is also the Head of Research and Development at Arts for Young Audiences Norway (Kulturtanken).

www.stenslie.net / stenslie@gmail.com

-Statistrikk by Kathrine Frey Frøslie

–Design for Society by Antony Joseph Martel, Idil Akdos and Abel Crawford

Cecilia Jonsson

Abstract

Over the past number of years, Cecilia Jonsson has developed a large series of works, each revealing how mineral, iron and water intercedes the cycles of matter, fluid, life and meaning. As a result, her research has encompassed different industrial side-effects to how the ‘iron-loving’ species are transformed by and in-part transform mineral cycles as sculpting forces.

In this lecture the artist wishes to continue within this context with the intention to delve deeper into the magical and reality where connections of the social and nature collides. Jonsson will present and share insight into her long-standing exploration of the three separate, while thematically related lines of work, including projects from a wide range of scientific disciplines and how this fluctuation informs and pleats the modes of operation recurrent in her practice. The artist will anchor this presentation in the materiality, collaborations and processes behind the works.

Bio

Cecilia Jonsson is an artist based between Bergen and Amsterdam. Her research-based work is informed by scientific methods and often consists of site-specific, artistic interpretations of phenomena and processes of nature. The projects are developed as investigations of physical and ideological properties of the raw materials that form the basis of human existence, from origins deep down in the earth, to the extraction, transformation and global exploitation. By coordinating objective research methods with personal subjective experience, her work fuses biology and history with a materiality that intersects arts, sciences, social-culture, environmental politics and technology in a contemporary alchemy.

Jonsson’s works have been exhibited widely and include venues such as Schering Foundation, PERMM Museum of Contemporary Art, Science Gallery Melbourne, Artefact at Stuk and National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. She has been awarded international art prizes such as VIDA 16.0 Art and Artificial Life International Awards (2nd prize 2014), Bio Art & Design Awards (2016), an honorary mention in the Prix Ars Electronica, Hybrid Art (2017) and a nomination for the COAL Art and Environmental Prize (2018).

-Oslo Apiary and Aviary by Marius Presterud. Marius Presterud runs Oslo Apiary & Aviary, an art practice specializing in performance and ecoventions. For Thinking Through Matter he will reflect on his embedded experience from working in the overlap between art and urban husbandry – feeding birds, growing worms, keeping bees, growing trees.  More on Marius’ practice here

–Bioart: Complex Interactions by Nora Sørensen Vaage

– Sci-art Expanded: Practice in the Lab, the Clinic and the Field by Merete Lie

–FeLT- Futures of Living Technologies, a Lighthouse project from OsloMet, Faculty of Technology, Art and Design by Kristin Berghaust