Matter. Non-Matter. Anti-Matter delves into the significance of digitality and computer-generated environments in the context of the material understanding of art production and the showcasing of it.
The exhibition presents the digital models of Les Immatériaux (Centre Pompidou, 1985) and Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art (ZKM, 2002) on the newly developed Immaterial Display.
Furthermore, a selection of artworks and artifacts, mainly from the collections of the @centrepompidou and @zkmkarlsruhe, attest to a conceptual dematerialization and digital re-materialization of artworks.
fabric | ch had the pleasure to present our recent works at the invitation of Swissnex China, during an online panel along with Ms. Xi Li, curator and director of the Aiiiii Art Center in Shanghai.
This was in particular the occasion to introduce Platform of Future-Past, a new installation and environmental device realized for the exhibition at How Art Center (Shanghai)
The panel was moderated by Cissy Sun, Head of Art-Science, Swissnex in China.
Art x Science Dialogues: Curation In The Context of Artificial Intelligence
Join the upcoming Art x Science Dialogue, exploring the topic of curation and artificial intelligence with Mr. Patrick Keller, Architect and Co-founder of fabric | ch and Ms. Xi Li, Curator and Director of Aiiiii Art Center.
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When
September 6, 2022
Tuesday
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Where
Online
Edit: the recording of the online presentations can be accessed HERE.
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While the question of whether AI will take over the art world has been raised repeatedly, there seems to be a consensus in the art world that AI is a creative tool and that we should make better use of it. And it is the same with curation. Using algorithms in content curation and spatial design, implementing AI systems in museums, curating on generative artworks and etc. are the new issues facing today’s curators.
In the upcoming edition of Art x Science Dialogue, we’ll invite Mr. Patrick Keller, Architect and Co-founder of fabric | ch, and Ms. Xi Li, Curator and Director of Aiiiii Art Center, to join the conversation on the topic of curation and artificial intelligence.
Patrick Keller will present the works from their Collective – fabric | ch, featuring Atomized (curatorial) Functioning. It is an architectural project based on automated algorithmic principles, to which a machine learning layer can be added as required. It is a software piece that endlessly creates and saves new spatial configurations for a given situation and converges towards a “solution”, in real-time 3d and according to dynamic data and constraints. While Xi Li will present her research on AI art curation and her perspectives and practices in curating the exhibitions at Aiiiii Art Center. It is a brand new artificial intelligence art institution based in Shanghai, aiming to offer insight into the many challenges, practices, and creative modes of artificial intelligence-based art.
Combining experimentation, exhibition, and production, fabric | ch formulates new architectural proposals and produces singular livable spaces that bind localized and distributed landscapes, algorithmic behaviors, atmospheres, and technologies.
Since the foundation of the studio, the architects and scientists of fabric | ch have investigated the field of contemporary space in its interaction with technologies. From network-related environments that blend physical and digital properties to algorithmic recombination of locations, temporalities, and dimensions based on the objective sensing of their environmental data, it is the nature of our relationship to the environment and to contemporary space that is rephrased.
The work of fabric | ch deals with issues related to the mediation of our relationship to place and distance, to automated climatic, informational, and energetic exchanges, to mobility and post-globalization, all inscribed in a perspective of creolization, spatial interbreeding, new materialism, and sustainability.
fabric | ch is currently composed of Christian Babski, Stéphane Carion, Christophe Guignard and Patrick Keller (cofounders of the collective), Keumok Kim and Michaël Chablais.
Patrick Keller is an architect and founding member of the collective fabric | ch, composed of architects, artists, and engineers, based in Lausanne, Switzerland.
In this context, he has contributed to the creation, development, and exhibition of numerous experimental works dealing with the intersection of architecture, networks, algorithms, and data, along with livable environments.
Aiiiii Art Center (Est. 2021) is an artificial intelligence art institution based in Shanghai. The organization seeks to support, promote, as well as incubate both international and domestic artists and projects related to intelligent algorithms. Aiiiii Art Center is committed to becoming a pioneer of artificial intelligence through the discovery of exciting possibilities afforded by the intersections of creativity and technology.
Aiiiii Art Center aims to offer insight into the many challenges, practices, and creative modes of artificial intelligence-based art. Such aims will be achieved through academic conferences and published research efforts conducted either independently or in collaboration with domestic and international institutions and organizations. This organization will also actively promote and showcase the exploratory uses of artificial intelligence-based art in practice.
Xi Li, curator, director of Aiiiii Art Center. Graduated from Central Saint Martins MA in Narrative Environments and Central Academy of Fine Arts with a BA in Art Management.
Programs: Book of Sand: The Inaugural Exhibition of Aiiiii Art Center (2021); aai International Conference on AI Art (2021, 2022); Ritual of Signs and Metamorphosis (2018); Olafur Eliasson: The Unspeakable Openness of Things (2017);Captive of Love: Danwen Xing (2017); Over Time: The Poetic Image of the Urbanscape (2016).
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ART X SCIENCE DIALOGUES
Art x Science Dialogues is a new webinar series initiated by Swissnex in China in 2020. The webinar series not only presents artistic projects where scientists and research engineers are deeply involved but also looks into new interdisciplinary initiatives and trends. Through the dialogues between artists and scientists, we try to stimulate the exchange of ideas between the two different worlds and explore opportunities for collaboration.
The exhibition Beneath the Skin, Between the Machines just opened at HOW Art Museum (Hao Art Gallery) and fabric | ch was keen to be invited to create a large installation for the show, also intented to be used during a symposium that will be entirely part of the exhibition (panels and talks as part of the installation therefore). The exhibition will be open between January 15 - April 24 2022 in Shanghai.
Along with a selection of chinese and international artists, curator Liaoliao Fu asked us to develop a proposal based on a former architectural device, Public Platform of Future-Past, which in itself was inspired by an older installation of ours... Heterochrony.
This new work, entitled Platform of Future-Past, deals with the temporal oddity that can be produced and induced by the recording, accumulation and storage of monitoring data, which contributes to leaving partial traces of "reality", functioning as spectres of the past.
We are proud to present this work along artists such as Hito Steyerl, Geumhyung Jeong, Lu Yang, Jon Rafman, Forensic Architecture, Lynn Hershman Leeson and Harun Farocki.
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Last but not least and somehow a "sign of the times", this is the first exhibition in which we are participating and whose main financial backers are a blockchain and crypto-finance company, as well as a NFT platform. Both based in China.
More information about the symposium will be published.
"Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.” When Paul Valéry wrote this down, he might not foresee that human beings – a biological organism – would indeed be incorporated into machinery at such a profound level in a highly informationized and computerized time and space. In a sense, it is just as what Marx predicted: a conscious connection of machine[1]. Today, machine is no longer confined to any material form; instead, it presents itself in the forms of data, coding and algorithm – virtually everything that is “operable”, “calculable” and “thinkable”. Ever since the idea of cyborg emerges, the man-machine relation has always been intertwined with our imagination, vision and fear of the past, present and future.
In a sense, machine represents a projection of human beings. We human beings transfer ideas of slavery and freedom to other beings, namely a machine that could replace human beings as technical entities or tools. Opposite (and similar, in a sense,) to the “embodiment” of machine, organic beings such as human beings are hurrying to move towards “disembodiment”. Everything pertinent to our body and behavior can be captured and calculated as data. In the meantime, the social system that human beings have created never stops absorbing new technologies. During the process of trial and error, the difference and fortuity accompanying the “new” are taken in and internalized by the system. “Every accident, every impulse, every error is productive (of the social system),”[2]and hence is predictable and calculable. Within such a system, differences tend to be obfuscated and erased, but meanwhile due to highly professional complexities embedded in different disciplines/fields, genuine interdisciplinary communication is becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible.
As a result, technologies today are highly centralized, homogenized, sophisticated and commonized. They penetrate deeply into our skin, but beyond knowing, sensing and thinking. On the one hand, the exhibition probes into the reconfiguration of man by technologies through what’s “beneath the skin”; and on the other, encourages people to rethink the position and situation we’re in under this context through what’s “between the machines”. As an art institute located at Shanghai Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Industrial Development Zone, one of the most important hi-tech parks in China, HOW Art Museum intends to carve out an open rather than enclosed field through the exhibition, inviting the public to immerse themselves and ponder upon the questions such as “How people touch machines?”, “What the machines think of us?” and “Where to position art and its practice in the face of the overwhelming presence of technology and the intricate technological reality?”
Departing from these issues, the exhibition presents a selection of recent works of Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen, Simon Denny, Harun Farocki, Nicolás Lamas, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Lu Yang, Lam Pok Yin, David OReilly, Pakui Hardware, Jon Rafman, Hito Steyerl, Shi Zheng and Geumhyung Jeong. In the meantime, it intends to set up a “panel installation”, specially created byfabric | chfor this exhibition, trying to offer a space and occasion for decentralized observation and participation in the above discussions. Conversations and actions are to be activated as well as captured, observed and archived at the same time.
[1]Karl Marx, “Fragment on Machines”,Foundations of a Critique of Political Economy
Duration: January 15-April 24, 2022
Artists: Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen, Simon Denny, fabric | ch, Harun Farocki, Geumhyung Jeong, Nicolás Lamas, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Lu Yang, Lam Pok Yin, David OReilly, Pakui Hardware, Jon Rafman, Hito Steyerl, Shi Zheng
Curator: Fu Liaoliao
Organizer: HOW Art Museum, Shanghai
Lead Sponsor: APENFT Foundation
Swiss participation is supported by Pro Helvetia Shanghai, Swiss Arts Council.
(Swiss speakers and performers appearing in the educational events will be updated soon.)
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Work by fabric | ch
HOW Art Museum has invited Lausanne-based artist group fabric | ch to set up a “panel installation” based on their former project “Public Platform of Future Past” and adapted to the museum space, fostering insightful communication among practitioners from different fields and the audiences.
“Platform of Future-Past” is a temporary environmental device that consists in a twenty meters long walkway, or rather an observation deck, almost archaeological: a platform that overlooks an exhibition space and that, paradoxically, directly links its entrance to its exit. It thus offers the possibility of crossing this space without really entering it and of becoming its observer, as from archaeological observation decks. The platform opens- up contrasting atmospheres and offers affordances or potential uses on the ground.
The peculiarity of the work consists thus in the fact that it generates a dual perception and a potential temporal disruption, which leads to the title of the work, Platform of Future-Past: if the present time of the exhibition space and its visitors is, in fact, the “archeology” to be observed from the platform, and hence a potential “past,” then the present time of the walkway could be understood as a possible “future” viewed from the ground…
“Platform of Future-Past” is equipped in three zones with environmental monitoring devices. The sensors record as much data as possible over time, generated by the continuously changing conditions, presences and uses in the exhibition space. The data is then stored on Platform Future-Past’s servers and replayed in a loop on its computers. It is a “recorded moment”, “frozen” on the data servers, that could potentially replay itself forever or is waiting for someone to reactivate it. A “data center” on the deck, with its set of interfaces and visualizations screens, lets the visitors-observers follow the ongoing process of recording.
The work could be seen as an architectural proposal built on the idea of massive data production from our environment. Every second, our world produces massive amounts of data, stored “forever” in remote data centers, like old gas bubbles trapped in millennial ice.
As such, the project is attempting to introduce doubt about its true nature: would it be possible, in fact, that what is observed from the platform is already a present recorded from the past? A phantom situation? A present regenerated from the data recorded during a scientific experiment that was left abandoned? Or perhaps replayed by the machine itself ? Could it already, in fact, be running on a loop for years?
Platform of Future-Past, Scaffolding, projection screens, sensors, data storage, data flows, plywood panels, textile partitions
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Platform of Future-Past (2022)
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Beneath the Skin, Between the Machines (exhibition, 01.22 - 04.22)
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Platform of Future-Past was realized with the support of Pro Helvetia.
A new creation, Satellite Daylight 47°33'N was exhibited at this occasion (img. below), which was also acquiredby HeK and enters it's collection at the same time.
Among others, the exhibition displays works by Tega Brain, Bengt Sjölén & Julian Oliver, Bureau d'études, James Bridle, Trevor Paglen, Quadrature, etc. and was curated by Boris Magrini and Christine Schranz.
The exhibition «Shaping the Invisible World – Digital Cartography as an Instrument of Knowledge» examines, through cartography, the representational forms of the map as a tool between knowledge and technology. The works of the artists on view negotiate the meaning of the map as a gauge of our digital, technological and global society.
(Photo.: fabric | ch)
(Photo.: T. Marti)
fabric | ch, Satellite Daylight 47°33'N (2021) at the Haus der elektronischen Künste (photo.: fabric | ch).
Cartography – the science of surveying and representing the world – developed in antiquity and provided the springboard for communication and economic exchange between people and cultures around the globe. At the same time, maps are undeniably never neutral, since their creation inherently involves interpretation and imagination. Today, it is IT companies that drive progress in the field and drastically influence our views of the world and how we communicate, navigate and consume globally. While map production has become more democratic, digital maps are nevertheless increasingly used for political and economic manipulation. Questions of privacy, authorship, economic interests and big data management are more poignant than ever before and closely intertwined with contemporary cartographic practices.
Today’s maps not only depict, but also document, negotiate and visualize subjective views of the world. But are these maps more democratic? Who benefits from self-determined productions and what consequences do they lead to?
The strategies in digital mapping and cartography employed by the artists presented in Shaping the Invisible World – Digital Cartography as an Instrument of Knowledge are subversive. Their spectacular panoramas and virtual scenarios reveal how the digital technologies culturally affect our understanding of the world.
Navigating between subversive cartography and digital mapping, the exhibition puts the spotlight on the fascination of maps in relation to the democratization of knowledge and appropriation. By uncovering hidden realities, scarcely visible developments and possible new social relationships within a territory, the artists delineate the evolution of invisible worlds.
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Artists: Studio Above&Below, Tega Brain & Julian Oliver & Bengt Sjölén, James Bridle, Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács, Bureau d'études/ Collectif Planète Laboratoire, fabric | ch, Fei Jun, Total Refusal (Robin Klengel & Leonhard Müllner), Trevor Paglen, Esther Polak & Ivar Van Bekkum, Quadrature, Jakob Kudsk Steensen
Note: an online talk with Patrick Keller, lead archivist and curator Sang Ae Park from Nam June Paik Art Center (NJPAC) in Seoul, and Christian Babski from fabric | ch.
The topic will be related to an ongoing design research into automated curating, jointly led between NJPAC, ECAL and fabric | ch.
How would Augmented Reality change exhibition curating and design in the future? Join our June Science Club and learn how the ECAL and Nam June Paik Art Center are collaborating to develop a novel range of museums. This talk program is hosted by Swissnex and Embassy of Switzerland in the Republic of Korea. All talks shall be in English.
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Date
June 24, 2021. 17:00 – 18:00
Venue
Zoom
Panels
Patrick Keller (Associate Professor, ECAL / University of Art and Design Lausanne (HES-SO))
Sang Ae Park (Archivist, Nam June Paik Art Center)
Christian Babski (Co-founder fabric | ch)
Note: during the long shutdown of the museums in Switzerland last Spring, fabric | ch has nevertheless the chance to see Public Platform of Future Past (pdf), one of its latest architectural investigations, integrated into the permanent collection of the Haus der elektronischen Künste (HeK), in Basel.
We are pleased that our work is recognized by innovative and risk taking curators (Sabine Himmelsbach, Boris Magrini), and become part of the museum's collection, along several others works (by Jodi, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Olia Lialina, Christina Kubisch, Zimoun, etc.)
It is also the first of our work whose certificate of authenticity has been issued by a blockchain! (datadroppers)
A second work - currently in production - will enter the collection in the spring of 2021, which will be documented at that time.
Note: 2017 was very busy (the reason why I wasn't able to post much on | rblg...), and the start of 2018 happens to be the same. Fortunately and unfortunatly!
I hope things will calm down a bit next Spring, but in the meantime, we're setting up an exhibition with fabric | ch. A selection of works retracing 20 years of activities, which purpose will be also to serve in the perspective of a photo shooting for a forthcoming book.
The event will take place in a disuse factory (yet a historical monument from the 2nd industrial era), near Lausanne.
If you are around, do not hesitate to knock at the door!
During a few days, in the context of the preparation of a book, a selection of works retracing 20 years of activities of fabric | ch will be on display in a disused factory close to Lausanne.
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Information: http://www.fabric.ch/xx/
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Opening on February 9, 5.00-11.00pm
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Visiting hours:
Saturday - Sunday 10-11.02, 4.00-8.00pm
Wednesday 14.02, 5.00-8.00pm
Friday-Saturday 16-17.02, 5.00-8.00pm.
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Or by appointment: 021.3511021
Guided tours at 6.00pm
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Pendant quelques jours et dans le contexte de la création d'un livre monographique, accrochage d'une sélection de travaux retraçant 20 ans d'activités de fabric | ch.
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Informations: http://www.fabric.ch/xx
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Vernissage le 9 février, 17h-23h
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Heures de visite:
Samedi - dimanche 10-11.02, 16h-20h
Mercredi 14.02, 17h-20h
Vendredi-samedi 16-17.02, 17h-20h00
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Ou sur rendez-vous: 021.3511021
Visites commentées à 18h.
This blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research.
We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings.
Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations.
This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.