Navigating the Sky

Navigating the Sky

Navigating the Sky

A short meditation in two parts about how ideas and knowledge shape and order what we find in the sky. It was commissioned for the traveling exhibition Atmospheres: Art, Science, and Space Research, within the Austrian state exhibition Diversity of Life: Showing Styria 2023; it will be on view from March 23 – April 4 at the Mobile Pavillion at the Heldenplatz, Vienna, and from April 29 – May 11 at the Tierwelt Herberstein in Austria.

Manu-o-Kū

The first part is based on a narration by Polynesian navigator Nainoa Thompson who describes how stars, clouds, waves, and living beings form an interconnected system of orientation that can be read, felt, heard, and smelled. This celestial knowledge is not a product of the human mind alone but shared with animals such as the seabird Manu-o-Kū, which indicates the proximity of land. Thompson’s Hawaiian voyaging canoe played a central role in the revival of traditional Polynesian non-instrumental navigation techniques in the 1970s. The close entanglement of celestial knowledge and cultural ideas is also reflected in the visuals generated by an artificial neural network that has been trained on millions of images representing contemporary visual culture.

SIMBAD

The second part traces how scientific knowledge is shaped by instruments and human culture. SIMBAD, alluding to another mythical seafarer, is the name of an astronomical database maintained by the Université de Strasbourg. It maps every celestial object described in scientific literature to its corresponding place in the sky. Looking at the composite image of all astronomical references, one is struck by distinct geometrical patterns – rectangles, circles, and other complex shapes appear in the map of all known stars and galaxies, revealing the imprints of instruments, publication formats, and changing cultural interests. Sounds and visuals are generated from 28 million bibliographic references extracted from the database.

by Azra Akšamija & Dietmar Offenhuber

Technical Notes:

Manu-o-Kū was created using Stable Diffusion 1.5 and the deforum animation script – upscaling to 7200×1200 with Topaz Gigapixel.

The SIMBAD data set used in the visualization consists of 22 million records downloaded via SIMBAD’s TAP query language. The visualization was created in R using the rgl package, the sonification was created using inverse-fourier transformation of the visualization.

 

Research and project development assistance: Merve Akdoğan, Jehanzeb Shoaib; AI animation: Merve Akdoğan; Data visualisation and sonification: Dietmar Offenhuber Stimme / Voices: Franz Wenzl (Deutsch) und / and Nainoa Thompson, Polynesian Voyaging Society; SIMBAD Astronomical Database, Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg. Thanks to: Hōkūleʻa Polynesian Voyaging Society; Thomas Boch, Université de Strasbourg, Prof. Alyssa Goodman, Peter Williams, Alberto Pepe – Harvard University

New Elements Exhibition

New Elements Exhibition

New Elements Exhibition

with Laboratoria Arts & Science Foundation
New Tretyakov Gallery Moscow
Curated by Daria Parkhomenko & Dietmar Offenhuber
In partnership with Kaspersky

The exhibition NEW ELEMENTS explores an unusual perspective on data and computation, centering on the physicality of information and its implications for how we make sense of the world. 12 works by artists from different countries show how to close the gap between data and the world.

Artists: Memo Akten (Turkey – UK), Ralf Baecker (Germany), Erich Berger (Finland), Ilya Fedotov-Fedorov (Russia), Thomas Feuerstein (Austria), Forensic Architecture (UK), Ryoichi Kurokawa (Japan), Tuula Narhinen (Finland), Anna Ridler (UK), Tomas Saraceno (Argentina), Theresa Schubert (Germany), Aki Inomata (Japan)

Curatorial text
website

 

Berlin_Lokal_Zeit

Berlin_Lokal_Zeit

Berlin_Lokal_Zeit

BERLIN_LOKAL_ZEIT is a participatory project that aims to capture and jointly reflect on experiences of everyday life in the city during the pandemic. Which phenomena appear, how do they change and how do our attitudes towards them change over time?

30 participants documented and processed the many small changes that have taken place since the beginning of the pandemic in images, text, and audiorecordings. Using CLB Berlin Moritzplatz as a hub, artistic works and performances explore the experiential space of the city.

With: Kim Albrecht | Sam Auinger | Ingrid Beirer | Peter Cusack | Eliot Felde | Maren Hartmann | Martina Huber | Almut Hüfler | Susanne Jaschko | Max Joy | katrinem | Udo Noll | Dietmar Offenhuber | Nika Radić | Ursula Rogg | Sven Sappelt | Holger Schulze | Paul Scraton | Georg Spehr | Zoe Spehr | Hannes Strobl | Linh Hoang Thuy

Link to the Project website

Foto by Nika Radić

Staubmarke (dustmark)

Staubmarke (dustmark)

Staubmarke (dustmark)

Staubmarke is a public space installation for the Drehmoment Festival in Stuttgart – a city affected by airborne particulate matter pollution.  Controversies between public health advocates, the city, and the local industry often manifest in disputes about proper methods of measurement and the veracity of citizen-collected data.

The project visualizes air pollution by calling attention to the patina on the city’s surfaces. The dustmarks are executed as reverse graffitis, making the accumulated pollution visible by partially removing it. By calling attention to dust as a material rather than an abstract value, the project contextualizes the sensor measurements with their physical basis.

Over the following months, the dustmarks will fade, as new dust will accumulate in the cleared areas of sign. Ultimately, the project is about the limits of objectivity – just as the dustmarks are no accurate representation of pollution exposure, the quantitative metrics are subject to political debates and at the same time only able to capture a limited aspect of the complex phenomenon of particulate matter.

Project website: http://dust.zone

In collaboration with Luftdaten.info, thanks to Lara Roth, Jan Lutz, Michael Saup, Pierre-Jean Gueno, Annekatrin Baumann/HLRS, Fa. Diezel

Operant Conditioning

Operant Conditioning

Operant Conditioning

Following the commission to create a sculpture that serves as a birdhouse to be installed in a psychiatric hospital, the project reconstructs a so-called Skinner Box for ‘operant conditioning,’ referencing the dark history of psychiatry and the colloquial association (in German) between birds and psychiatric conditions. In his experiments, Psychologist Burrhus Frederic Skinner conceived of behavior as a mere function of external stimuli over which the subject’s will has no influence. He is best known for his conditioning of pigeons, which he trained to play ping pong or develop superstitious behavior. The implication was that with the appropriate stimuli and reinforcements, people could be programmed to adopt any desired behaviors. Our birdhouse is a reconstruction of a historic Skinner Box for pigeons. Here, however, it is not the birds that are conditioned. Instead, the birds condition their human feeders by triggering a visible signal when the birdhouse runs out of food.

The object was produced within the project For the Birds / Pour les oiseaux, a collective aeronautic sculpture garden displayed on the premises of the Landesklinikum Hollabrunn in 2019, commissioned by the Art in Public Space department of Lower Austria government and the socio-psychiatric department of the clinic Hollabrunn. For the Birds is a public space art project by Claudia Märzendorfer, produced with the support of Jeanette Pacher and Katrina Petter (KÖR Niederösterreich), including contributions by many international artists.

Concept and artistic direction: Azra Akšamija and Dietmar Offenhuber

Prototypung and fabrication: Natalie Bellefleur