ZKM: Residency
From September 2021, writer Jazmina Figueroa and artist Carolyn Kirschner will each spend two months in residency at ZKM Hertz-Lab. The selected residents, chosen from over 240 applicants, will develop new works that reflect on Virtual Reality contributing artistically to the discourse generated by the BEYOND MATTER project. The residency programme is part of the large-scale cooperation project BEYOND MATTER – Cultural Heritage on the Verge of Virtual Reality, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. It is dedicated to novel, digital approaches to exhibition revival, documentation and dissemination, as well as the artistic, curatorial and museological development of the opportunities presented by virtual representation.
Jazmina Figueroa
For her residency, Figueroa has proposed to show how consequences (or imaginaries) correlate with chaos in or around the oceanic. Through language, critical analysis, and prose, Jazmina will concentrate on oceanic dynamism and the ocean as a site of metaphor and material technological lineages. Jazmina will develop performance lectures for virtual realms in the subversive and radical traditions of expanded cinema’s approaches to information exchange including experience-based apparatuses as didactic tools. Her work is anecdotal, combined with prose to produce latent imaginaries based on the affective potentials of technology. Accompanied by graphics, written works, and sonic interventions, the body of work produced during this residency will be based on present-day notions of myth structures that uphold material infrastructures in relation to chaos.
Carolyn Kirschner
Kirschner’ project intends to develop a digital curatorial experiment using the mechanisms of ASMR to trigger an embodied, physiological response to museological content. ASMR, which stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, is spine-tingling sensation that many describe as similar to being gently touched or like a mild electrical current running across the skin, but which is stimulated by indirect auditory and visual triggers. In a time where connection, touch, and physical presence are curtailed by a global pandemic, ASMR offers a chance for a physiological sense of closeness—even a sense of touch—artificially mediated through online streams and digital browsers. In its uncanny ability to overcome physicality and temporality until the moment it seeps into a human body, where it returns to physical form, ASMR presents an opportunity to test provocative new ways of mediation, distribution and production. Using ZKM’s permanent collection and exhibition archive as the original source material to generate ASMR content, the project will culminate in a multi-sensory installation, which spans across physical and virtual environments, and sets out to create deeply visceral sensory experiences that explore questions of proximity, materiality, and ecological entanglement.
Carolyn Kirschner is a digital artist and researcher with a background in architecture. Her work explores the entanglements of humans, non-humans, bits, bytes, delicate ecologies and emerging technologies. Using art and design as an investigative tool, her projects contend with complex technological shifts and draw on different disciplines to materialize fragments from alternate or expanded worlds–in the form of writings, surreal artifacts, simulations, images and installations. She currently holds teaching positions as Associate Lecturer in Design at Goldsmiths University in London, and as Adjunct Professor within the School of Design Strategies at Parsons in New York. Previously she held a postdoctoral design fellowship supported by a Sawyer Seminar grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Carolyn’s work has been published and exhibited internationally. She completed her Master of Architecture at the Royal College of Art in London. Her most recent exhibitions include Neurons, Simulated Intelligences at Centre Pompidou with the project “An Archive of Impossible Objects: Globes” realized in collaboration with Dunne & Raby. Publications include a forthcoming article NO_POLE: Data-Scapes & Digital Ecologies for Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal vol. 54, MIT Press and The Algorithmic Wilderness for the volume Visual Ecologies of Placemaking, Bloomberg Press.
