Experiencing the Unconventional

The following sections are included:

• Preface
• Contents

In early 2012, a group of researchers attracted wide attention by showing that the logical components of digital computing could be realized using swarms of soldier crabs. The work implements a theoretical “ballistic” model of computing, where logic is enacted through idealized physical interactions, but intriguingly replaces notional billiard balls with swarms of living crustaceans [Gunji et al., 2012]. Aside from the mad poetry of its central premise – a computer made from crabs – this work strikes a popular chord because it addresses a disjunction that we encounter every day. While the computing machines we spend our lives attached to are on the one hand clearly material things – slabs of glass, plastic and electronics – the process of computation itself is completely obscure and apparently immaterial. The comedic spark of a computer made from crab swarms is a product, we suggest, of short circuiting this disjunction, demonstrating computation happening in the world with us, rather than in some hidden abstract realm…

The following sections are included:

• Introduction
• Diffraction
• Decrystallization
• First discussion
• Recrystallization
• Second discussion
• The Crystal World v.01
• The Crystal World v.02
• Third discussion
• Acknowledgements
• References

The following sections are included:

• Introduction
• Visceral sounds
• Human parts and machine parts
• Alternative embodiment
• Matter of mediation
• Conclusion: so how does it feel to be human?
• Acknowledgements
• References

The following sections are included:

• Performative spaces and the body as interface
• How to redefine the way we understand interaction in contemporary art
• Sensitive to Pleasure
• References
• Project credits

The following sections are included:

• Preface
• Transcript
• References

The connections between art and science, and the potential outcome of cross-linking both, are of great interest. We explore the creative potential of hacking the substrate of the Universe and quantum noise. Art and science should each be evaluated on their own merit, and both are equally important in our quest to understand our world and to enrich our experiences. For the author physics is one of the greatest mysteries of them all, the mystery of understanding the fabric of reality. Creativity and imagination are enormously important in the history of physics because often the hardest part has been having creativity and imagination to question assumptions that everybody else has bought into. Imagination is crucial for imagining how things could be different. The author uses his artistic praxis, art historical knowledge and keen interest in the sciences as a starting point to explore the notions of the hole, randomness, true random number generation, quantum physics, the vacuum and vacuum noise. The first part of the chapter explores scientific concepts; the second part focuses on the arts and artistic output. By setting up a lab experiment to measure quantum fluctuations and applying mathematics in custom-made software, the artist visualizes the invisible and by means of 3D printing materializes his subjects.

Ours has been a dizzying, serpentine journey, plunging into the bottomless mysteries of light. Its intangibility and illusiveness inspired us to enact the most exotic and ephemeral encounters between light and matter that can nonetheless be bound by the straightjacket of a “piece of art”. We intuited that denuding the nature of light, whose mercurial motion might only be exceeded by the distance-free instantaneity of its own entanglements, would enable us to perceive the perpetual impetus of its pervasive flow, insuppressibly transforming everything in its wake, from planetesimals to light-harvesting proteins…

The installation VANITAS MACHINE addresses the desire for eternal life and the potential of life-prolonging measures. Based on a candle, which – by means of technical intervention – burns down very slowly, VANITAS MACHINE creates a contemporary analogy to the endeavour of prolonging the human life span with the help of science and technology…

Hello world o )) ^_^))

I am a human being, an evolutionary process, an integral function of the universe based on planet Earth at the present time. These are the protocols that I found best for my peaceful evolution: community, DIY (do it yourself), DIWO (doing it with others), learn, explore, play, experiment; one becomes one only when there are two who communicate and connect technological and biological organisms through artistic practice…

The fundamental question that invariably dominates today's discussions of new technology is the question of its ability to have a transformative effect on all areas of contemporary life, and on human beings themselves. Obviously, the true qualitative novelty of the technological breakthroughs happening before our very eyes lies not only in the emergence of new practices connected with one or another scientific investigation. Its essence consists in the fact that these practices, as they interact with one another, begin to generate a complicated systemic integrity – a new space of human existence. Technologies that tend in various high-end directions – from robotics, IT and nanotechnology to a whole spectrum of neuro- and biomedical sciences – constitute a key factor of this “assembly”. The effect of this interosculation can be seen in the full use of knowledge about the fundamentals of living and nonliving matter, as well as knowledge of the physical nature of the human being. On the other hand, those powerful technologies that have hitherto changed, for the most part, the world around us, are now targeting human beings themselves. Indeed, the price of these investigations has never been so dizzyingly high: people are beginning to base their own self-formation process on their ideas about human existence and development…

This project investigates the transformative capacity of temporal rhythms offered by the nonliving physical environment. The basic law of inert matter consists of reacting immediately to being affected, the reaction taking up the same rhythm and continuing through the same duration. With regard to living beings, it would be fair to say that the independence of their effect on surrounding matter is strengthened to the extent that they break free from the rhythms immanent to nonliving matter…

Contemporary art has taken different directions and one of the most recent artworks of the Mexican artist Gilberto Esparza deals directly with micro-organisms, environmental issues and electronic media, all focused on different kinds of transformations and implications. In his last project entitled Plantas Nómadas (Nomadic Plants), up to date technological developments are integrated into an artwork that navigates through the waste of everyday life – proposing emergence of a new urban ecosystem. Based on the recycling of consumer technology and human waste and the installation of a robotic mechanism his work gets powered by already utilized sewerage waters and recatalysed solar energy. The complex system obtains its nutrients from bacteria contained in polluted water. These bacteria are temporarily lodged in a microbiotic chamber within an aesthetic robot, which together with two flexible solar cells, provide the necessary energy to allow the machine to function as well as produce extra processed water to feed a green plant. The hybrid machine–nature ecosystem tries to adapt itself to an altered state of nature. The fourth and last step of this riveting project was developed at the University of Guanajuato in Mexico and can be seen at the web page www.plantasnomadas.com.

After breakfast, he takes some modafinil and a double dose of Ritalin. Without them, one is only up for the jobs that are fun. With them, one can do anything. Power of deduction, motivation and attention override side effects such as sleeplessness and self doubt. Someone who works does not need a self, only confidence. The citizen sacrifices today to tomorrow, the proletarian sacrifices tomorrow to today and the self-employed subject sacrifices everything. Sneak feels like a crab in the ocean's surf. He looks for cover, does not want to be swept away. In order to fully awaken, he bites into a lemon and Sacculina races through his head. Sacculina, the parasite that affects crabs, drills into their flesh and sprouts tendril-like networks throughout the blood vessels and the brain. “There is no I, there is only Sacculina”, Sneak muses. “Something drives me to do things that I never thought of”…

The following sections are included:

• A New Year Greeting
• Cross-disciplinary research: balancing imagination and the extraordinary with factual technical knowledge
• Microbial facts
• Microbes in context
• Social networks
• Metabodies
• Reflections/ongoing research
• Acknowledgements
• References
• Reference for the laboratory diary, Thursday, 30 May 2013

Carbon-based life, as we know it today, could not have developed without membranes. All living cells are universally enclosed by a selective permeable barrier: the plasma membrane. This liquid boundary is a necessary prerequisite for maintaining life's integrity. Its fundamental role is to separate and mediate between the inner milieu of the cell and the external hostile environment. Hence, membranes are the most abundant biological structures in living matter…

“bodymetries – mapping the human body through amorphous intelligence” is a generative projection environment and interactive application for body-morphology computation based on the behaviour of the spatially extended disorganized single-cell organism Physarum polycephalum. This artistic research project roots in Theresa Schubert, the artist, personal question of what would be the shortest paths to connect moles on her body. Through genetic heritage and environmental factors the artist developed a great number of melanin spots, which she wanted to explore in terms of genesis and visualization of their distribution. Researching these topics, she learned about the living organism P. polycephalum, which is known best for its decentralized intelligence and its abilities to construct optimal spatial networks. Known as true slime mould, this huge yellow amoeba possesses some fascinating characteristics. In this sense bodymetries (body and geometry) explores possibilities of mapping the human body using the spatial logic of this acellular slime mould.

The following sections are included:

• Introduction
• Crisis of representation
• Metropolitan technocompanions
• Fluctivagus conifera
• SwC, towards the social life of a lab
• Clangocactaceae
• Design systems for institutional experimentation/representation
• Microsoftcolumbiformes
• Fragropapilionoideae
• Endosymbiopolitics
• The agential role of play
• Closure
• References

The best way to describe this work is as an autonomous object that proliferates throughout the space it's in. It's a physical object whose purpose is to feel its way around and to articulate the relation between its own shape and its surroundings…