ZKM: Residency
Tallinn Art Hall, Tirana Art Lab – Center for Contemporary Art and the ZKM I Center for Art and Media are proud to jointly announce three production residencies taking place in Karlsruhe, Tallinn, and Tirana.
These residencies are conceived within the framework of the long-term project BEYOND MATTER and will be hosted by either one of the three partner institutions: the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Tallinn Art Hall and Tirana Art Lab – Center for Contemporary Art. On-site, fellows are expected to develop an artistic production or a theoretical concept that builds on the core questions underlying the Beyond Matter project.
Theodoulos Polyviou is an artist living in London. He studied Fine Arts and Visual Communication at Kingston University and the Royal College of Art London. In his work he explores the interfaces between VR technologies, performative and sculptural methods. He focuses on the architectural narratives of queer spaces and their translation into the digital world, in order to reveal new perspectives on the reciprocal relationship between space and gender. Theodoulos has worked as artistic director, filmmaker and visual researcher on projects for Sony Music, Dazed Digital and Tate London.
Eleni Diana Elia is an architect and designer. She uses creative means to question assumptions and ideas about the role of objects for specific social lifestyles. To this end she uses both physical and virtual space to develop what-if scenarios. Eleni studied architecture at the Royal College of Art in London and worked as a 3D and set designer on campaigns for Audi, Apple, Vogue UK and Pitchfork Magazine, among others.
During their two-month stay at ZKM, they will work together with David Kaskel, the founder of the London virtual reality studio Breaking Fourth, on the conception and implementation of a digital exhibition space. As the basis of a resulting online platform, this space will offer artists the opportunity to either develop completely new artworks for the digital space or to translate existing works into digital form. What conditions does digital space bring with it for such a project? What advantages and freedoms does it offer compared to physical space? Can future-relevant connections be derived for application in museum space?
Ami Clarke is an artist and writer working across multimedia such as video, data analytics and VR, within the emergent behaviors that come of human engagement with technology. She is interested in acknowledging and thinking through a subjectivity that emerges in synthesis with its environment, and hence prioritizes a complex intersectionality that includes the multi-temporalities and scales, as well as cognitive states, that coalesce around some new, and some very old power relations, in everyday assemblages such as track and trace.
During the residency she will be developing a »live apparatus« in VR that reveals the complex interdependencies between the unprecedented surveillance of »track and trace«, designed to »manage« risk, via modulating the flow of bodies within a viral environment, and how the accompanying data analysis informs the state and other players, as well as the markets. Questions relating to whether the current coronavirus pandemic is part of an increasing dynamic in animal-to-human virus transmissions have already revealed many underlying threads, not least xenophobic tendencies that have come to the fore. Drawing upon earlier work who’s title epitomized the era of the Great Depression »Low Animal Spirits«, and recent phenomenon, whereby, due to the absence of humans, a »cornucopia of animals« returns to the cityscape, she will explore how emergent properties within a VR environment, and their failure, might reveal something of the data analytics influencing them, as a critique of the new dynamics of post-pandemic power.
