Works
The Immaculate Misconception
In collaboration with 0xSalon as part of the S+T+ARTS ‘Repairing The Present’ Residency at Art Hub Copenhagen, initiated and funded by the European Commission
The Immaculate Misconception is a browser-based game that considers the drastic impact of bitcoin on the environment. Players assume the role of different stakeholders, including activists, investors and miners. During the game – as they head into the distant future – they pursue various increasingly reckless strategies: from energy produced by volcanoes and the instigation of a riot all the way to the cult-like adoration of a potential machine god.
The game addresses “worlding” as a core activity in digital culture: an emerging category of constructed reality that has to face its own particular challenges and contradictions in relation to sustainability as the blockchain economy appears to be going through a crucial period of self-awareness.
Plapperlament
Workshop at the Digital Worlds Festival in Frankfurt
Parliaments are places where the future is created and decisions are made. Yet at the same time they are exclusive places to which not everyone can gain admission and not every issue is given a hearing. Based on the concept of “Plapperlament”, a play on the German words “plappern”, which means to prattle on, and “Parlament” for parliament, coined in 1873 by the German revolutionary Friedrich Hecker originally to express his frustration at “Bismarck’s parliament of yes-men”, young people experimented with contemporary forms of chitchat: not as an inferior form of communication, but as an alternative means of political engagement.
In this workshop, with the help of the social media platform Mozilla Hubs and 3D software Blender, the young people devised their very own fictional Plapperlament of the future: our Plapperlaments are not made of brick, but are virtual. We do not enter them physically, but as avatars. The weapons in our debate are emojis, chat acronyms, GIFs and memes. Plapperlaments are collaborative future machines, places with their own laws and mechanisms for debate, but more than anything they are building blocks for a possible place where everyone has a voice.
The Outside Inside
In collaboration with Johanna Schmeer (installation) & Sam Conran (sound /electronics). This work is in the collection of the Futurium Museum in Berlin
In 1880, Darwin identified in his laboratory experiments – later recorded in his book “The Power of Movement in Plants” – an oscillatory movement ostensibly typical for all plants that he believed to be the universal reaction of these organisms to any conceivable external stimulus.
Physical design as the basis of any creature’s range of motion not only offers a space of possibility within which it interacts with the outside world, but also produces it.
“What role do certain patterns of movement have in the creation of new worlds, and what hybrid constellations do living beings form in order to extend their repertoire of movement?” Addressing this question, the work examines the non-anthropogenic terraforming practices of lichens, amaranths and oyster mushrooms. Using 3D animation, it speculates on novel mechanisms of distribution and reproduction, and suggests landscape constellations that might emerge from these activities under extrapolated climate conditions in 2100. In doing so, the work not only enhances Darwin’s “circumnutation” on these theoretical mechanisms, but also procedural L-systems developed by the biologist Lindenmayer and used in the modelling of plant growth processes.
