"The Soft, the Hard and the Wet" - Residence
"THE SOFT, THE HARD AND THE WET"
Artist in Residency: Summer 2014 at Eleonore, Linz, Austria
Artists: Afroditi Psarra, Ce Quimera, Robertina Sebjanic
Curated by SHU LEA CHEANG
Organised by Stadwerkstatt
“The Soft, the Hard and the Wet” takes Sergio Leone's "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" as a cue to examine the current media art practices - respectively in soft circuit, open hardware and wet lab.
Making use of soft textiles to embed electronic circuits, conductible materials and Arduino microcontroller, the electronic embroidery maps circuit diagrams with needle point precision and creates own genre of e-textile soft art. The open source culture in FOSS (free and open source software) and open hardware is widely adopted and disseminated through DIY/DIWO workshops, hardware schematics and programming data are made accessible for reconfiguration and resourcing. Appropriating recycled e-trash, off the shelf boards and bolts, the hard artists aims at high notes of glitched sonic expression. Countering the sanitized high-tech biolabs, hackeria style DIY wet labs emerge with chemicals, drugs, body fluids all boiled together under the observation of hand-made microscopes. While Leone's Spaghetti Western features three gunslingers in a plot of chaotic violence for finding a buried fortune in the wild wild west, "The Soft, the Hard and the Wet" situates three artists aboard Messschiff Eleonore parked in the harbor of the Danube at Linz, Austria. The summer residency organized by Linz' alternative culture center Stadtwerkstatt brings together three the three artists - Afroditi Psarra (the soft) , Ce Quimera (the hard) and Robertina Sebjanic (the wet) - who respectively apply soft circuit, open hardware and bioart / wetlab in their installation and performance with a focus on self-exploration and thematic research.
AFRODITI PSARRA (Athens) proposes “Divergence” with a wearable EMF detector. The soft-circuitry garment embedded with a LilyPad Arduino microcontroller and two embroidered coils serving as antennas, intervenes the electromagnetic field that encircles us. The strength of the signals detected manifests itself in the haptic feedback experienced in the form of vibration patterns and sonic feedback in the forms of variant pitches. This formally constructed wearable locates the physicality of human body in perceiving and countering the invisible forces that propagate around us in the form of EM waves. http://afroditipsarra.com
CE QUIMERA (Barcelona) proposes “There is no body without F[R]ICTION”. F[R]ICTION as a DIY electronic device is built on a synthesizer. The mutant body modified with prostheses situates herself within an expandable architectural space littered with recycled electronic devices. The body/space collide, f(r)ictional sound elements generated. Noise makes up the chaotic imaginary, disrupting the narrative linearity. As a member of Quimera Rosa lab, Ce’s work aims to create a new subjective fiction of body, playing on the border between body/environment, reality/fiction, human/machine, flesh/plastic, touch/sound. http://quimerarosa.tumblr.com
ROBERTINA SEBJANIC (Ljubljana) proposes “Hydra reminiscence” with an Eleonore’s own DIY wetlab made up with DIY microscope and biotech tools a la Hackteria doctrine. Featuring Hydra, a biologically immortal fresh water animal capable of self-regenerative, as the research subject under the torrents of the Danube, Sebjani plans to conduct a series of experiments in exploring the regenerative properties of Hydra cells. While her study considers human’s eternal quest for prolonged and healthier life span, she aims to create an ambiental poetic immersive performance. http://wiki.ljudmila.org/Uporabnik:Robertina