This year, the Open Fields Conference, part of the RIXC Art Science Festival in Riga, addressed symbiotic senses and explored how each of us depends on interactions with lives and intelligences that are often radically different from ours. The keynotes and dozens of talks by researchers, artists, curators, media theorists, philosophers and scientists from different fields illustrated how these complex, albeit often invisible, connections challenge us to reassess the boundaries and essence of our human existence.
I discovered many intriguing ideas and artworks during the conference. Here’s a small selection of them:
Carolyn Kirschner, Rug in the Shape of the Shadow of a Polar Bear
REUTERS/Reuters TV, Arktika, 2017
Map of territorial claims over the Arctic seabed. Photo via No Pole
Designer and researcher Carolyn Kirschner‘s talk, titled Imaginaries of the Far North: Machine Senses and Digital Ecologies, was one of the most interesting i’ve heard in a long, long time.
She explained how the Arctic Ocean remains one of the least accessible but also least understood spaces on the planet. The region’s harsh conditions mean that we have to outsource information gathering to an array of remote sensing instruments and infrastructures. Satellites, airguns, radio balloons, biochemical sensors, hydrophones and probes observe and record data as diverse as wildlife, undersea topographies, atmospheric data or underwater sounds. Even narwhals have been fitted with radio transmitters and recruited as remote sensors that collect data from beneath the ice sheets. The Arctic is also a region of immense importance for ecology and for energy prospecting. As a result, sensing technologies have become geopolitical tools. They are deployed to influence climate policy, territorial disputes, resource extraction, trade routes, etc.
In case of a dispute between some of the countries vying for a slice of the Arctic seabed (Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the US), the disagreement is fought via geological data, not by display of military force. As a consequence, remote sensing imagery of the region is often skewed and shaped by the agendas of the extractive industries and nation states that produce the images. These agendas provide us with different versions of the Arctic Ocean.
No matter how much data is collected, Kirschner continued, the polar ecologies are too complex to be captured by abstract digital models. Even the monitoring instruments are imperfect. To the eyes of the satellites, the Arctic is a sea of pixels. Satellites monitoring shipping routes can only detect big vessels. Bears also confuse them.
Carolyn Kirschner, Rug in the Shape of the Shadow of a Polar Bear
Rug in the Shape of the Shadow of a Polar Bear is one of the works that Kirschner developed to reflect on gaps and glitches in sensing machines. The work asks, “What does a polar bear look like to the eyes of a satellite?”
The dense fur of the polar bears absorbs portions of the electromagnetic spectrum, which can make them difficult to detect for infrared satellites tasked with wildlife observation. The cooler region created by their shadows on the ice might be their only visible trace. Like a strange hunting trophy from the worlds of machine vision, the rug – made from semi-transparent urethane – looks as if it, too, is a shadow on the ground.
Maximilian Prüfer, A Gift from Him (trailer), 2018
Another brilliant contribution to the conference was by curator and researcher Yindi Chen who presented a series of artworks that looks at how the queerness of plants disrupts humans’ difficulty to think outside of the binary format.
Maximilian Prüfer documented how farmers in Sichuan are now pollinating fruit trees by hand as a result of the drastic decline of insect populations that accompanied the overuse of pesticides in the region. Using bamboo sticks with chicken feathers attached to the ends, workers distribute pollen to individual blossoms.
As part of A Gift From Him, Prüfer brought a pear that he pollinated himself back to Germany, photographing it against a red background, a colour associated with luck, joy and happiness in China. The project comments on humanity’s cultural evolution characterised by, on the one hand, technological and mechanical achievements and, on the other, the boomerang effects that these same achievements can bring about.
Candice Lin and Patrick Staff, Hormonal Fog (detail), 2020. Mixed media installation. Photo: Hong Xiaole.
Candice Lin and Patrick Staff vaporised a tincture of hormone-altering herbs – liquorice root, hops, black cohosh, among others – into the air to affect hormones and raise visitors’ levels of estrogen.
“Hormones – often understood as a stable determinant of binary sex, with estrogen and progesterone seen as female, and testosterone coded male – in fact fluctuate constantly both in and around us, linking the gendered body to synthetic substance; the natural world to the history of class, race and sex,” Staff and Lin wrote.
Isadora Neves Marques, Linnaeus and the Terminator Seed (video still), 2017
Isadora Neves Marques’ film-essay, Linnaeus and the Terminator Seed, asks whether there is a deterministic, evolutionary line connecting modern botany to contemporary transgenics.
Gathering botanical drawings by European naturalists in Latin America and Southeast Asia, plant genome representations, documents about transgenic seeds, as well as modern depictions of the reproductive systems of flowers and humans, the film explores the sexual imaginary of botanists such as Carl Linnaeus, to consider the post-natural conditions governing current biotechnology, the colonial management of reproduction, as well as the representation and indexation of life forms both past and present.
Beyond the Hybrid. Narratives, New Media Experiments and Speculations Touching Art and Science (Open Access PDF here)
Jean Dupuy, Heart Beats Dust: Cone Pyramid, 1968. Photo
While presenting the release of Beyond the Hybrid. Narratives, New Media Experiments and Speculations Touching Art and Science (Open Access PDF here), Lily Diaz-Kommonen from Aalto University showed us a remarkable interactive artwork that was exhibited in 1968. To experience the work, a viewer would place a stethoscope on their heart. The heartbeats would then be amplified by a loudspeaker placed under a latex membrane covered with Lithol Rubine, a brilliant red pigment that has the ability to remain suspended in air for long periods. The rubber membrane vibrates to the rhythm of the heartbeat, thrusting red dust up and down in a cone of light.
Paul Vanouse, Labor, 2019 – ongoing. Photo: Francesca Bond/Buffalo News
In his keynote, media studies scholar and art curator Jens Hauser looked at how Lynn Margulis’ concept of the holobiont inspires performative artistic practices that attempt to blur the boundaries between self and other, biological and technological realms, hence contributing to shifting discourses from ‘identity’, ‘individuality, or ‘difference’ to ‘cohabitation’ and ‘entanglement’. These artistic practices are presented in the forthcoming book Lifve is Other: A/Biotic Entanglements in Art and Curating.
One of the artworks Hauser discussed in that context was Labor by Paul Vanouse.
The art installation re-creates the scent of people exerting themselves under stressful conditions. The “smell manufacturing” is delegated to bacteria propagating in bioreactors. Each bioreactor incubates a unique species of human skin bacteria responsible for the primary scent of sweating bodies: Staphylococcus epidermidis, Corynebacterium xerosis and Propionibacterium avidum. Their scents combine in the central chamber containing a white t-shirt. The scent intensifies throughout the exhibition.
“Labor reflects upon industrial society’s shift from human and machine labor to increasingly pervasive forms of microbial manufacturing. Today, microbes produce a wide range of products, including enzymes, foods, beverages, feedstocks, fuels and pharmaceuticals. They literally live to work. These new industrial activities point to a deepening of the exploitation of life and living processes: the design, engineering, management and commodification of life itself. In Labor, the microorganisms ironically produce the scent of sweat, not as a vulgar bi-product of production, like in factories of the 19th and 20th centuries, but as a nostalgic end-product.”
Anne Yoncha, in collaboration with Hannah Selin, Brian Givens and Tuira Chamber Choir, Suon laulu (Song of the Swamp)
Anne Yoncha presented Re:Peat, an artistic research project looking at post-extraction peatland in Finland. The artist’s research explores how plants survive in extreme conditions such as the near-Arctic environment of Northern Finland. She focused on Sphagnum, a type of moss that engineers peatland. The plant can absorb 20 times its weight in water, creating an environment where only Sphagnum moss can survive. A small shrub or a tree trying to grow on the peatland can drown itself with its own weight as it grows.
Finland has been using peatland for electricity and heating. Even though this is a biofuel, it is not renewable, as it takes too many decades to regrow peatland. Finnish scientists are now studying this novel ecosystem and trying to make the soil productive again in some way.
During a residency at the Natural Resources Institute Finland in Oulu, Yoncha worked with restoration ecologists and used art to materialise their data and reveal what is hidden under the ground or in time scale we find it difficult to comprehend.
Suon Laulu (Song of the Swamp), one of the works she created during the residency in Oulu, is based on the analysis of a soil core sample taken from one of the post-peatland sites. The data of the soil (water level, temperature, soil respiration, etc.) was transformed into a musical score, which was then performed by a choir.
The St. Nicholas Cathedral, Karosta
Anna Priedola, from the Liepaja University Art Research Laboratory, shared her research about Karosta, a vast compound of military and fortification buildings in Liepāja, on the shores of the Baltic Sea. The massive territory, built in 1890-1906 by order of the Russian Tsar Alexander III and his son Nicholas II as an ice-free naval port, also features green spaces with a forest, wetland, a beach, a lake, etc. The military infrastructure is currently in ruin and taken over by species like bats. While Karosta remains mostly inhabited and is often seen as a recreational destination, the municipality of Liepāja plans to turn it into a special economic zone where commercial companies are encouraged to settle and benefit from a series of tax incentives.
Esteban Agosin Otero gave us the lowdown on M(ol)AR, a sound art installation that investigates whether it is possible to create new technologies using non-invasive resources and materials.
The artist made antennas using seawater electrolytes and salt crystals (instead of copper) as electrical conductor. “An Arduino-controlled and automated water pump flows water up and down, adjusting the frequency at which the antenna is more efficient in picking up radio signals. The signals come from natural phenomena occurring in the ionosphere, as well as human activities, such as satellites, Bluetooth signals, Wi-Fi and electrical current.”
Oleksandr Sirous showed the evolution of the area bordering the Dnipro River with this aerial view of the region in November 2023 and 4 months later
Oleksandr Sirous, Jade Apack and Svitlana Usychenko commented on the drastic environmental transformation the Dnipro River has been experiencing since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. For Sirous, the Dnipro river is a symbol of Ukraine’s fight for survival. It is also one of the biggest and most artificial rivers in Europe. Until its explosion on June 6, 2023, the Kakhovka reservoir was the main source of water supply for southern Ukraine. The collapse of the dam had tragic consequences on the environment, creating new swamps and making the environment in Ukraine less predictable.
The group mapped the Dnipro River to illustrate the scale of the impacts that human events, and in particular Russia’s brutal invasion, have on ecosystems forming around the Kakhovka Reservoir after the dam collapse. In light of the findings, their research asked an important question: Should we rebuild the power plant, should we allow nature to reclaim the territory, or should we look for a middle ground?
They also discussed Dnipro River Integrated Vision. The project, published by Greenpeace and Ro3kvit, combines research, scenarios and proposals to encourage collaboration and dialogue about the river’s future in spite of Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.
Zane Zelmene, A Guide to the Invisible Landscape, 2022
Zane Zelmene, A Guide to the Invisible Landscape, 2022
Līga Vélina gave us an overview of Transhuman art practices in Latvia. Among the projects she described, i was particularly interested in Zane Zelmene’s A Guide to the Invisible Landscape, an artwork that depicts landscapes from dream experiences using VR installation and objects in the gallery space.
The Open Fields conference is over but the Symbiotic Sense(s). RIXC Art Science 2024 Festival Exhibition remains on view until 7 December 2024 at the National Library of Latvia in Riga.
