Art critic and curator, he teaches at the University of Copenhagen in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies. Specialist of bio-art and DIY biology, he was the curator of the exhibition L'Art Biotech' at the LieuUnique de Nantes in 2003 and Wetware: Art, Agency, Animation at the Beall Center for Art + Technology (University of California, Irvine) in 2016.
Art critic and curator, Jens Hauser teaches at the University of Copenhagen in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies. Specialist of bio-art and DIY biology, he was the curator of the exhibition L’Art Biotech’ at the LieuUnique de Nantes in 2003 and Wetware: Art, Agency, Animation at the Beall Center for Art + Technology (University of California, Irvine) in 2016.
Faced with an obsessive questioning about the nature of life, art has tried to understand and recreate the living, developing the myth of “revival” and a fascination with the staging of the living. Having always sought to imagine, represent and imitate, then simulate the living, it now manages to manipulate it directly via wetware. If information technology provided art with a new direction in the seventies, favoring dynamic processes rather than objects, the convergence of synthetic biology and technologies of the living that now allow us to explore this wetware, “wet machines”, blurs the borders between organisms and machines. The creation of “artificial life” goes beyond computer simulations and robotics, giving birth to hybrid and semi-living systems that challenge the boundaries between the living and the non-living, between synthetic and organic life. For the Artificial life art, organic simulation and re-materialization are no longer distinct but rather operations that are compatible with wetware, shifting concepts of art, agency and animation.
Designing an inclusive city implies involving their residents in urban projects, but what is the role of architects and urban planners in this process? For Andrew Freear, the head of the Rural Studio program, they both have the ethical responsibility of getting locally involved via concrete projects. Architectural schools must thus take on training citizen architects by engaging them in learning by doing, and thus have them redevelop a deep connection with context and places, acting as neighbors and activists within communities in order to collectively carry out experimental projects that tangibly improve society and the environment.
The two Lebanese artists and filmmakers were awarded the 2017 Marcel Duchamp Award for Unconformities, a project currently on display at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. This artwork, like their approach, is based on a methodology of investigation and excavation and aims to offer another reading of history and the traces of the past.
Nicolas Nova is a social anthropologist. Inspired by New Media Studies and design fiction, he contends that the future of design lies in recycling and reparation as well as reinventing forms and functions. Did you know that a used flip-flop could serve as a lighter?
The geographer and orientalist Augustin Berque revisits the polysemic dimension of the term “milieu,” and explains the distinction made by mesology—“the area of biology that deals with the relationships between the environments and organisms”—between “environment” and “milieu.” The reality of things differs depending on the environment of each species or culture, the object doesn’t exist in itself but according to its relationship with the subject. In this way, mesology goes much further than the subject/object dualism of modern science. Ontologically “trajective,” the environment is neither objective nor subjective, but firmly between the two theoretical subject/object centers. Berque takes the term “mediance,” meaning the dynamic coupling of the individual and their surroundings, from the Japanese “fūdo,” to which he adds “trajection,” a process that results in the “mediance” of human existence in its concrete surroundings. Taken as a whole, all human environments, distinct from the biosphere through their eco-techno-symbolic dimension, form the ecumene. For architecture, this implies a respect for history and the environment, without mimicking ancient forms, creating from the “mediance” of each place.
Larissa Fassler is a “Neo-Situationist” artist. By exploring places over the course of many hours, she gleans their ephemeral essence, which she then superimposes on the fixed urban master plan. The subjective maps thus generated highlight both urban narratives and history.
Maximum is a design studio that maximizes the value of waste; its material, its form and its engineering. Some materials are transformed in a semi-industrial process while others give birth to unique pieces, such as the glass walls of the Centre Pompidou caterpillar.
Explore More
Eager to share more generously the results of its collaborations and research, PCA-STREAM publishes STREAM VOICES, its online magazine!