Shared Habitats: A Cultural Inquiry into Living Spaces and Their Inhabitants

321 Pages·2021·20.485 MB·English

by  Ursula Damm, Mindaugas Gapsevicius

shared habitats
Ursula Damm, Mindaugas Gapševičius (eds.)
Shared Habitats
Image | Volume 191
1
shared habitats
This book was made possible not only by the precious time and dedication of the authors,
but also by the generous financial support of Bauhaus University, Weimar.
Ursula Damm, born in 1960, studied at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf, followed by
postgraduate studies at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. Since 2008, she has held
the Chair for Media Environments at Bauhaus University, Weimar, where she established a
DIY biolab and the Performance Platform at the Digital Bauhaus Lab. Ursula Damm has
exhibited worldwide, including numerous installations on the relationship between nature,
science, and civilization.
Mindaugas Gapševičius, born in 1974, obtained his MA from Vilnius Academy
of Arts in 1999, and his MPhil from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2016.
Since 2016, he has been conducting PhD research at Bauhaus University, Weimar, where
he lectures on media art. Gapševičius has also initiated the setting up of self- organized
community labs in Berlin and Vilnius. His artworks question the creativity of machines,
and do not presume humans are the only creative force.
2
shared habitats
Ursula Damm, Mindaugas Gapsevicius (eds.)
Ursula Damm, Midaugas Gapševičius (eds.)
Shared Habitats
Shared Habitats
A Cultural Inquiry into Living Spaces and Their Inhabitants
A Cultural Inquiry into Living Spaces and Their Inhabitants
3
shared habitats
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliogra-
phie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de
© 2021 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or u tilized in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
Cover layout: Jay Rutherford
Cover image: Ursula Damm
Translation: Joy Hawley (“Technical Milieus”), Rebecca van Dyck ("Caring for Life – from
Lab to Labbing")
Copy editing: Elizabeth McTernan
Proofreading: Elizabeth McTernan
Typesetting: Jay Rutherford
Typesetting assistance: Beatrice Perlato
Printing: Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar
Print-ISBN: 978-3-8376-5647-3
PDF-ISBN: 978-3-8394-5647-7
https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839456477
Printed on permanent acid-free paper
4
shared habitats
5
shared habitats
Contents
“Introduction,” Ursula Damm and Mindaugas Gapševičius 8
“Environments, Orientation, and Liquid Foundations,” Robert Mitchell 18
Milieus and Umwelts
“Shared Habitats and Uexküll’s Bubble,” Andrew Pickering 29
“Technical Milieus,” Henning Schmidgen 47
“Minds and Milieus,” Kristupas Sabolius 69
Experiencing Arts and Sciences
Rhizomes, Freya Xia Probst 89
Luminograf #1, Christian Döller 96
Thoughts on Day and Night, Maike A. Effenberg 100
Interfacing for a Sixth Sense, Sebastian Kaye 104
The Pig Simulator, Stephan Isermann 109
microplastic_hyperobject, Maria Degand 113
“The 18th Camel and The Habitats of Thought. On the Paradox
of Teaching Technology in the Arts,” Georg Trogemann 117
Shared Habitats
“Shared Habitats,” Ursula Damm 170
“Caring for Life – from Lab to Labbing,” Yvonne Volkart 182
Karaoke Bar: Singing in the Language of Flies, Ursula Damm 214
Six Sidekicks for Free, Rico Graupner 224
Algorithm Zoo4 “Miške,” Rico Graupner 229
Growing Geometries – Tattooing Mushrooms, Theresa Schubert 232
Introduction to Posthuman Aesthetics, Mindaugas Gapševičius 240
Self-Repair Lab, Mindaugas Gapševičius 247
Other Encounters
Close Encounter, Jan Georg Glöckner 254
The Poetic Design: From Mimesis to Catharsis, Homero Ruiz García 259
Probing the Planthroposcene, Alexandra Toland 264
“Other Minds: Ruyer, Damasio, and Malabou,” Audrone Žukauskaitė 271
“A Shift in the Role of an Artist,” Mindaugas Gapševičius 294
6
shared habitats
7
shared habitats
Introduction
Ursula Damm and Mindaugas Gapševičius
One hundred years ago, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy described the so-called
“primitive human” as a hunter, a craftsman, a builder, and a physician all
in one person.1 According to Moholy-Nagy, these skills were lost in the
modern age and the industrial revolution, when humans became special-
ized in separate labor branches. Artistic practices and art education have
forfeited their holistic atmosphere across the disciplines. Moholy-Nagy –
a representative of the Bauhaus movement – proposed a “sensual turn” by
focusing on our sensory faculties regarding the inventory of our everyday
life and environment to re-position the human in their civilization.
A hundred years later, we feel the need for change: (we) humans are
noticing and are aware of the impact of our activities and technologies
over the entire planet. Experiencing environmental disasters – the eco-
sphere backfiring – we have lost trust in our moral authority and ourselves
as creators of a sustainable civilization. As artists, we can observe that our
authority as creators is diminishing, while engineers and scientists are de-
signing another civilization with their thinking, their methods, and their
products. We find ourselves in a situation where we are making use of the
tools and concepts of our technological condition.
For us, artists, our sensory faculties have been and are still today the
most important point of reference. What has changed is, in the first place,
the presence and influence of knowledge, machines, software, networks,
and cultivated and engineered nature. However, the contribution of
contemporary artists to our everyday life is relatively modest. Does it still
make sense today to rely on the senses as the central authority of cultural
practice? How can we integrate the sensual experience into the structure
of technical systems?
1 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc.
1927).
8
introduction
Recently, three exhibitions2 under the title Shared Habitats were carried
out by a team from the Chair of Media Environments at Bauhaus
University, Weimar. Referring to the environment as a concept from
artistic practices of the 1950s that emphasizes the tension between life
and art, the team aimed to redesign everyday situations, objects, devices,
and practices.
Shared Habitats has developed spheres where people from different
contexts and with different living conditions, along with other organ-
isms and machines, live together based on the constitution of their own
environment. It explores how art can support socio-cultural processes via
interfaces, new and old technologies, artifacts, DIY/DIWO experiments,
and conferences. The focus of the exhibition is on interactions between
humans and their habitats, humans with nonhuman species, and living
beings with machines. In the digital and biotechnological age, countless
tools and software already contain pre-formulated models of humans,
acquired on the basis of stochastic processes. Shared Habitats attempts to
circumvent these preconceived models of the human and instead create
worlds for the human, her counterparts, and a common environment
allowing direct exchange among varied beings. This approach should help
to confront a world of predefined techniques and preconceived knowl-
edge with an experience permeated by artistic research. As a working
hypothesis, the exhibition proposes expanding sensory perception with
the help of technical objects and adapting it to the stimulus sphere of the
2 The exhibition Shared Habitats, curated by Ursula Damm in collaboration
with Mali Wu, was first installed in November 2017 at the Art Center NKNU,
Kaohsiung, Taiwan, where eleven artists and scientists associated with the
Media Environments department at Bauhaus University, Weimar, presented their
works. The second version of the exhibition, curated by Ursula Damm in collab-
oration with Ugnė Paberžytė, was installed between May and July 2019 at the MO
Museum, Vilnius, Lithuania. The last exhibition was installed as part of the Ars
Electronica festival in Linz, Austria, in September 2019.
9