December, 25 – January, 8. Hackteria LAB at «Art Experiment: Laboratories of Earthly Survival» interactive project at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. Moscow
This year, the eighth annual Garage Art Experiment called «Laboratories of Earthly Survival» will feature immersive installations and workshops by Russian and international artists, scientists, biohackers, and engineers, exploring questions of ecology and future survival. Developed at the intersection of art, science, and technology, this multidisciplinary project allows visitors to experience various imaginary perspectives for our environment and get directly involved in “hacking” life sciences by taking part in alternative biological, genetic, and robot-engineering experiments.
The Swiss scientists, researchers, and artists Marc Dussieller and Urs Gaudenz are among the participants of the «Art Experiment: Laboratories of Earthly Survival» project by the Garage Museum. They will open a temporary Hackteria LAB, a space for reflections and experiments with equipment made from recycled technologies.
Hackteria is a virtual international network of artists working at the intersection of programming, biology, and contemporary art. It aims at a critical reflection of biotechnologies. It promotes collaboration of artists, scientists, and programmers in bio-art outside official laboratories and art institutions.
The visitors of the «Art Experiment» can observe assembling of the lab from scratch. They can also take part in the seminars and other events that the artists hold daily from December 25 to January 8 (Dec 31 and Jan 1 are days-off).
Photo: (c) CC Mechatronicart.ch
Hackteria is an international network active since 2009 in the field of Open Source Biological Art. As a community platform hackteria tries to encourage scientists, hackers, and artists to combine their expertise, write critical and theoretical reflections, share simple instructions to work with life science technologies, and cooperate on the organization of workshops, temporary labs, and meetings. Hackteria is a network of people practicing DIY (do-it-yourself) and DIWO (do-it-with-others) biology with an interest in art, design, and interdisciplinary cooperation. Hackteria operates on a global scale and is based on a web platform and a wiki for sharing knowledge, which enable anyone to learn—and also test—different ways of hacking living systems. Hackteria is not based in a physical space. Its goal is to allow artists, scientists, and hackers to collaborate and test various biohacking and bioart techniques outside official laboratories and art institutions, basically anywhere in the world.
Dr. Marc Dusseiller lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland. He is a transdisciplinary scholar, lecturer for micro- and nanotechnology, cultural facilitator and artist. He works in an integral way to combine science, art, and education. He performs DIY (do-it-yourself) workshops in lo-fi electronics and synths, hardware hacking for citizen science, and DIY microscopy. He was co-organizer of Dock18 (Zurich, 2017), Room for Mediacultures, diy* festival (Zurich, Switzerland), KIBLIX 2011 (Maribor, Slovenia), poolloop festival 2009–2015 and workshops for artists, hackers, schools, and children as the former president (2008–2012) of the Swiss Mechatronic Art Society (SGMK). He has worked as guest faculty and mentor at Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore, India; University of California, Santa Barbara; FHNW, HEAD, and ETHZ (all Switzerland). In collaboration with Kapelica Gallery, he started the BioTehna Lab in Ljubljana (2012–2013), an open platform for interdisciplinary and artistic research on life sciences. Currently, he is developing means to perform bio- and nanotechnology research and dissemination (Hackteria | Open Source Biological Art) in a DIY fashion in kitchens, ateliers, and in the Majority World. He was co-organizer of various editions of HackteriaLab in Zurich, Romainmotier, Bangalore, and Yogyakarta (2010–2014).
Urs Gaudenz (b. 1971, Seattle, USA) is an engineer and interdisciplinary scholar working in Lucerne, Switzerland. He has a master’s degree in microtechnology from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne. He also followed postgraduate programs in international business and innovation management. In 2016, he completed the course Principles and Applications of Synthetic Biology, directed by Georg Curch, Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He is founder of GaudiLabs, a third space for third culture. He is a founding member and member of the board of Hackteria. He is currently on the faculty of the Lucerne School for Applied Science and Arts. In his professional practice, Gaudenz makes use of various forms of work and expression, such as prototype development, open scientific research, and collaborative workshops. He combines his different backgrounds to explore new technological and cultural fields and his works often emerges out of the void in this intersection. His practice covers a wide span from speculative and futuristic to functional and applied. He has led workshops and exhibited at institutions and festivals such as Ars Electronica–Projekt Genesis, ISEA–International Symposium on Electronic Art, Dock18, Kapelica Gallery/BioTehna, Schloss Werdenberg, N/O/D/E festival, Medialab-Prado Madrid, and CYNETART Festival.
