Rubbing as fieldwork: Workshop on site writing with technologies of captures, with MELT, Shauna Janssen and the Speculative Realities Lab at Kunstgewerbemuseum

Last week, in collaboration with the SpecLab, I had the privilege of inviting MELT (Ren Loren Britton + Iz Paehr) and Shauna Janssen from Concordia University for a three-day workshop/gathering at the Kunstgewerbemuseum, with Claudia Banz as our host. The vibrant group of participants and the museum's cosy atmosphere created a splendid contrast against its spacious and brutalist architecture.
Ren and Iz led the morning sessions, while Shauna unfortunately had to remain at home. However, her insights on “Site Writing” continued to resonate with us throughout the workshop. In the afternoons, the SpecLab team presented multiple resources related to our ongoing research on brain data navigation at Charité. The focal point of this presentation was the early-stage prototype itself, which can be seen in the image above, as neuroscientist Melina Engelhardt interacts with the data.

MELT introduced us to their tools, such as the Collective Conditions, an exercise called "Warming Up to Theory," in which we danced several texts that they had selected, and the "Rituals Against Barriers."

On the first day, we used "frottage" to connect with the area around us. Inspired by Shauna's guidance, we continued with "frottage" and rubbings using technologies like Lidar and photogrammetry scanning apps. This allowed us to rub objects that are usually kept behind glass, like those in display cases. We imported these rubbings into mixed reality glasses and continued rubbing with them.
On the second day, after speaking with neurosurgeon Thomas Picht and our colleagues from the Image Guidance Lab at Charité, we started thinking about brain data and our neurosurgical case study in terms of rubbing. How can we effectively rub with the spatial information to better understand it? We had a productive and relaxing time, and we're eagerly anticipating our next workshops at the Kunstgewerbemuseum. We'll be exploring how to engage visitors with the material processes and the enjoyable work of craft people through immersive installations and score. Stay tuned for more on the "Quasi-Makers" series event at KGM.

Claudia, Lin & Ren enjoying the results of the rubbing during the final public workshop session on the Friday afternoon.

Neuroscientists Melina Engelhardt and Robert Schenk grasping for brain tracts in our prototype at KGM, assisted by creative coder Warja Rybakova ©Maxime Le Calvé

Fieldworking art-science: a tour of the “Yet, it moves!” exhibition at Copenhagen Contemporary with EER

Two weeks ago, I was invited in Copenhagen by the EER project (Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting; Olafur Eliasson Studio + Interacting Mind Center at Aarhus University) to conduct a graphic ethnographic intervention at an idea-seeding experimental workshop. Our stay there started with a tour of the newly opened “Yet, it moves!” exhibition at Copenhagen Contemporary, an ambitious art-science project that a number of EER members helped develop, curated by fantastic curator Irene Campolmi, featuring the work of the fabulous Helene Nymann, and the wizard anthropologist Joe Dumit working his good spells in the background. 

In a low-key synchronicity event prefiguring some of the motion-driven mystics of the afternoon’s theme, I bumped into my new colleagues on the bus to the exhibition after a difficult train trip. The exhibition space opened recently at an ancient shipyard at the end of the bus lines. Crowds were converging there for CopenHell, a festival for heavy metal lovers.  Curator Irene Campolmi opened with a line by Galileo, using a famous sentence of his as a lever, catapulting us instantly to speed: “The earth is in the center of the universe, and yet it moves!” The show brings the visitors to an estranging encounter with the perception worlds of modern science, stretching from the cosmos to the brain and back. At the tip of the artists’ fingers, science data and imaginations of matter commit with each other into cosmic assemblages. They all usher us onto a moving map of what we are in their various ways. The movement of the world – and us in it – becomes the foundation of purpose and cause, cutting together apart the lab and the studio. On the left of the sketch, one can see the piece Helene Nymann created for the show: a sculpture on a pink podium adorned with a QR code etched on brass; a video, and an inquiring web device. That work wants the visitors to remember what to remember. Their remembrances are then located on the “carte de tendre.”

There is a heavy orb in the lobby that moves smoothly. Try and set it in motion: the model of the world becomes an empty form that takes meaning only through the dynamic flows of perspective it enables. “Try to get the orb or yourself moving – through movement, you might discover new knowledge.” The pulsations inside us are brought in direct continuity with the vibrance of the universe. Dorte reaches for the binoculars and sets her gaze in motion – a shivering focus can bring things to dance again. 

Datastreams flood through us in the ultra-high-definition audio-video installation of Ryoji Ikeda. The piece Dataverse is displayed in a huge room on three panes, three acts of a spacetime opera shown simultaneously with bombastic data sound triggering macroscopic unfoldings of picture matters throughout cosmos bodies. The feeling of awe turned us momentaneously into a Wagnerian audience process, sitting on the hard floor in the dark. A few members of EER, more inclined to keep moving, probed the work very close up, meeting with the pixels and disrupting the illusion.

The next piece was also monumental as a projection of monumental proportions. It showed us the inside of a glacier’s “throat” shortly before its collapse. Jakob Kudsk Steensen scanned the mighty being and presents video footage, points, and meshes, juxtaposing them into an intricate inner landscape. “My parents were mountaineers,” a subtitle told us as the subwoofers hummed deep subglacial tones. Everything else was dark save for the doorstep to the next enlightening experience.

The next piece was the much expected carte de tendre “Futur Continuous” video poetic piece of Helene Nymann. “Maybe the future is a memory you can remember, something you don’t want to be repeated.” “It’s time to draw a new map.” Situating us into an emotion landscape was an innovation of a female writer in the 17th century: together with friends, they invented a way to place the itinerary of a love journey. Helene crops out the map with a generative AI to remember the future of our human voyage. She stages herself and others into a dark loving affair with our grim perspectives and what we will leave ahead of us. What we will remember of the future. “Try to remember how your memory will make the future feel.”

The last piece of the show is a thinking bowl. The “Brain Pond” by Jenna Sutela is inviting the visitors to touch its rims and the water is keeps. A microphone picks the sound of it, mixed with sounds of prior interactions and whales and cosmos. The sound is not as “live” as the intrically written concept announces it, which makes the piece if yet interactive perhaps more uniformoulsy evocative of cosmic ripples and neural sparks. Kids love to touch its ears, Irene tells us, and we touched and tried to get the heavy brass bowl to sing.

“Yet, it moves!” points at the rich experiential world of science. Movement is one of the ways  It is be deeply erroneous to think science worlds as disenchanted and waiting for the intervention of the artist or humanity scholar to reenchant them, as Natasha Myers points out in her ethnographic notes on how biologists encounter plant-sensing (2015). Much like the popular physics writing on quantum in the 1980s and 1990s, this exhibition pays attention to the emergence of new contemporary languages to articulate mystic experiences between science and art, into slightly grim future that still believe in human potential. 

 EER project

Yet, it moves! 

Curating as Fieldwork: "Stretching Materialities" #TATBerlin #MattersOfActivity

Quick report on the first round of installation of the “Stretching Materialities” exhibition at the Tieranatomisches Theater in Berlin, with the Object Space Agency team: Clemens Winkler, Claudia Blümle, Natalija Miodragovič, Yoonha Kim, Nina Samuel, and the assistants Lara Ladik & Marie Trabandt. After many months of preparation (including creating a virtual tour as preliminary fieldwork), the curatorial team is finally on site. Together, we go through the space that has now become strangely familiar, handling ideas that we have been already stretching in many directions. Things fall into place, as we decide how to curate the common vitrine at the entrance. The discussion is easy, the agreement comes with few words, in an atmosphere of trust which testifies of a long process of working up the materials and space together. Here in green, the fruit of our rapid decision process appears: a projector will beam a texture and the title on a backdrop to the vitrine.

Problems are handled one by one as we go through the space, each of us describing again in a few sentences the concepts and practical configurations that were adapted to the rooms in the last couple of weeks. Here the computer scientist and literature scholar Christian shows where the VR goggles station would stand according to his plans — a member of the staff will equip the visitor with the head-mounted displays at the entrance of the rotunda. The architect Natalija anticipates a series of difficulties: that’s the best angle for a picture of the most impressive view of our exhibition, this stand shouldn’t be in the way. An alternative is quickly suggested and adopted.

As we scatter to keep working on our scenes and processes, Natalija draws with her hands in space the shape of the rattan structure that she is currently weaving with her team, for Clemens and Claudia. (Why is neon green so often the color of virtuality? asks Yoonha, looking over my shoulder while I’m drawing this)

With our site-specific installations being actually installed on-site, some surprising effects are showing. Here, the cloud installation of Clemens Winkler can enter into an impressive “post-production style” vibration as the huge membrane of the daylight ceiling appliance is set into vibration. Nina Samuel climbs on the ladder to try it out.

Team Object Space Agency is conferring around the ever stretching concept of the exhibition “Stretching Materialities” — what a performative title! That was all before the two last days, during which the whole process took a leap forward — more coming very soon!

Join the fun on the 29.06.2021! (or see our theatrical 360° soft opening in replay accessible on this page:

https://www.matters-of-activity.de/en/activities/5902/exhibition-stretching-materialities

Fieldwork at Zoologische Lehrsammlung #StretchingMaterialitiesExhibition #MattersofActivity #HumboldtUniversity

A few days ago, Nina Samuel and I were invited to visit the pedagogical collection of the Zoological Institute at the Humboldt. As a preparation for the exhibition “Stretching Materialities” at TA T, we are conducting fieldwork on the activity of the materials of collection objects, attending to the ways humans try to passify them – and how the materials keep counteracting their efforts. Gerhard Scholtz, who directed the institute for a few decades, and Ines Drescher, a trained biologist who is taking care of the collection since 1999, brought us around and told us the stories of the place. We were also witnessing a passage for the collection, as our cluster colleague John Nyakatura is officially taking over the direction of the collection.

This collection is a “Lehrsammlung”, a pedagogical one. Unlike a research collection, it is an everyday companion to the many people who work and study at the institute of Naturkunde. Huge glass vitrines in the hallway keep the bulk of these objects, which are both exhibited and stored away, always at the visual reach of passers-by. They are supports to tell zoological stories, stories of evolution, reproduction, and anatomy. They document and convey the immense diversity of animal life in its many realms. They express a great variety of the many inventive ways that artists and scientists have been trying to preserve their shape and colors or to copy them at other scales.

Many specimens are kept bottled up into “schnapps glasses,” with preservative liquid keeping the bodies away from oxygen and from the passage of time. Some of the glasses present the same animal dissected in thematic ways, to highlight the nervous system or the digestive one. All glasses are labeled with the Latin name of the species and an inventory number. The first thing that escapes is color, says Gerhard Scholtz. The “schnapps” has to be refilled regularly too, because it escapes as well, however tight the glasses might be. This escaping of color brought me to think of the concept of the fugitive that Trudi Lynn Smith and Kate Hennessy have been working out in the ethnographic collection of British Columbia, which they retrieved from a tour in the archives: “Fugitive objects, for Ann, are the things that cannot be preserved because of their inevitable material deterioration, their obsolescence as techno-logical systems, or their precarity as orphaned or unclassified residents of the archive” (2020, 115). Color photographs turning magenta over the years bear witness of the impossibility of the preservation mission that ethnographic documentation came to be imbued with – which is here mirrored in the zoological collection. Animal diversity and their kaleidoscopic colors are fading away out there too.

The glass contents seem to have least suffered from the passage of time: they become protected from air, from insects, from vibrations, and… from inquisitive hands. Other ways to preserve include various substances that are now considered poisons, and cannot be left laying around into a pedagogical collection. Our hosts tell us many stories related to this or that object. We get to weigh a tooth of an elephant, to observe closely wood carved by castors, get a look at glass or plastic models.

After the presentation of the vitrines, we head to the back room of the collection. I take out my 360° camera to give you a glimpse of the peculiar atmosphere of the place.

This whole space used to be only one vast room, Ines tells us, it was hosting the museum of the Tieranatomisches Institut (the veterinary anatomical institute). It used to have a gallery hanging on its wall. After the war, the Marxist Leninist made this space into their office, divided the space, evacuated the collection, and put up typical East German wallpapers. The pedagogical collection took again possession of the premises after the fall of the communist regime. Poorly funded, the collection and its guardians have been trying their best to maintain the objects into the best possible conditions, fighting the best they can against invisible and mighty enemies such as moth, dust, and clumsy student fingers. According to Smith and Hennessy, the fugitive brings the object into a zone of indeterminacy, between the archival and the unarchival – and here between the pedagogical and the unpedagogical perhaps (ibid.)

The collection entails a huge amount of wall charts, which are still in use despite the hegemony of the PowerPoint presentation. “Some people will show 80 slides in a session. But when you have these on the wall for one hour and a half, you watch them also in moments of inattention. That’s called impregnation learning,” says Gerhard Scholtz. Some of them are printed in color lithographs, others by hand with Indian ink and color pencils. As one can see in the video, several rooms are now full with them, as the team decided to salvage the collection of the Freie Universität Berlin by accepting to store them, showing a dedicated affection to them. An exhibition at the TA T was curated by Gerhard Scholtz a few years ago to show a selection of them (2019, Zoology in Pictures. The Wall Charts of the Zoological Teaching Collection) – many of them have highly decorative value too. “Name a price!”, jokes Gerhard Scholtz. Nina and I wished we could acquire a few but the collections of the university are secured out of the grasp of visitors by their passionate guardians.

However, the minuscule scale of some of the visitors makes the collection difficult to guard. Looking around the collection for testimonies of material activities, Gerhard and Ines fish out a bat whose wings and skin got eaten up by moths. One can now see the cotton filling that replaced the muscles of the creature. Collections are ecologies by themselves, as my colleagues Tiziana Nicoletta likes to remind us, in her ethnographies of the insects at work behind the scene and actually under the floor paneling (2017). The chemicals that used to repel and exterminate them are now forbidden to use, complains Ines. In many boxes, provisions of adhesive moth traps testify of the desperate effort to limit their disastrous scavengings.

Ines shows us another example of the damage made by moth to the specimen. However, she confides that the main decaying force to this collection remains human: the many generations of students who have handled the samples keep flowing in and out of the institution. The “digital natives” may not understand the value of these analog knowledge sources of this fragile collection: “I want to do genetics anyways”, they would say. One of the most important bodies of objects, which is still in use, is the collection of tissues, which sits in several large wooden cabinets. Each of them encased in glass sheets to be inspected by the microscope, they are highly vulnerable to mistakes in instrument manipulation (see Scholtz 2011). Before we leave, we get a peek at the huge teaching hall, which comes in handy in Covid crisis time, as many students can sit together while respecting the necessary social distance.

Generations of students have used up the collection – they are the reason for its existence and a factor of its decay.

Bonus: did you ever wonder how the Greeks had the idea of the cyclops? It hit Gerhard Scholtz once, as he was doing a research stay at the collection of Paris Natural History Museum.

The nasal cavity of the skull of an elephant can be misinterpreted as a giant eye socket. During the epoch of Homer, it is possible that the skulls of elephants could be found in the Mediterranean. "I wasn't the first to have the idea," he says humbly, there was already a text about this from the beginning of the early 20th century. An imaginary skeleton picture collaging together that animal skull to a human body, a small cardboard with an excerpt of the Odyssee, and an illustration of the cyclops: The huge skull that adorns the hallway stands for the ambiguity of the zoological remnants and the imaginary they trigger. It seems also displaced in time, directly imported from a mythological past of the golden age of a colonial era, into which animals still played an active role in everyday locomotion and real anxiety for the explorer. What's your story, cyclops? Today your name is "nobody."