For 2 months Hackteria was present as part of the group show “Raus aus dem digitalen Unbehagen – Escaping the Digital Unease” in Kunsthaus Langenthal, curated by Raffael Dörig, Fabio Paris and Domenico Quaranta.
“Since the beginning of the web, artists have built their own spaces and channels there. They have created artworks that reacted to commodification and restrictions in a critical way. The exhibition presents works from over 30 artists and collectives tackling these topics, raising awareness to the unease, showing its causes or possibilitites of an escape from it.” read more…
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with essays by Marie Lechner, Paul Feigelfeld, Felix Stalder and texts on all works by Raffael Dörig and Claire Hoffmann, with numerous images (Christoph Merian Verlag).
Download exerpt from the book: kh_unease_50
In Switzerland, India, Indonesia and lots of other locations, artists, scientists, musicians and nerds have been working together since 2009 on the ‘Hackteria’ network. Founded by Marc Dusseiller (Zurich), Yashas Shetty (Bangalore), Urs Gaudenz (Lucerne) and Andy Gracie (Barcelona), with the goal of embedding animate material such as bacteria in artistic processes, ‘Hackteria’ has grown into a hub for the free exchange of knowledge in the fields of biotechnology and bio-hacking, thereby spawning hundreds of workshops, instruction manuals, and experiments spanning several continents. Biotechnology is generally associated with major pharmaceutical companies or universities but, here, it is made tangible and easy to grasp, not least because talk is often of traditional biotechnologies, such as the art of fermentation. Projects range from making cheese to mobile laboratories, from robots to malaria vaccines, to say nothing of advances in genetics and nanotechnology. One long-standing attraction, for example, is a digital microscope from a converted webcam, which has played a role to date both in audio-visual performance and academic research laboratories, and is still under constant development by the community. Hackteria is a lively example of what can happen when knowledge production and exchange are respected as a common resource, accessible to all; and it thus marks a major contrast to the covetous concentration and commodification of knowledge by a handful of corporate giants, such as Google & Co.
Text by the curator Raffael Dörig
Photo Impressions
Photos by hackteria.org cc-by-sa
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