The exhibition shows a broad perspective of Tabakalera’s line of work at the crossroads of art, science, technology and society, and the various ongoing collaborations between artistic collectives and scientific organisations since 2020. One of these prototypes is Clouds of Pollen, by the Grow Your Own Cloud collective (Monika Seyfried and Cyrus Clarke), in collaboration with physicist Steen Rasmussen and the Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC). Aiming to address the same problem as Compost computacional, this work explores one of the most innovative lines of research for the future of digital storage: the conservation of data in synthetic DNA molecules.
In addition to the previously mentioned Exografías, two other prototypes have been developed with the company Tekniker that explore the field of HCI (human-computer interaction) for innovation in the design of industrial machinery. One is Dream Painter by the Varvara & Mar collective (Varvara Guljajeva and Mar Canet) in collaboration with Medialab Tabakalera, consisting of a robotic arm that translates the dreamlike narratives of the participants into pictorial representations. Another is Holobot. Social Garden by VR Kommand in collaboration with Kuka, in which the device creates an installation with holograms and light components based on people’s behaviour on social media.
In the exhibition, these previous prototypes are shown through audiovisual documentation, except for one of them, which is also exhibited in an installation format. This is the work Supraspectives, produced by the Quadrature collective (Juliane Götz and Sebastian Neitsch) in collaboration with the Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC) and the Ars Electronica Festival. Using data from 590 spy satellites, a third of which are space junk because they are obsolete or damaged, the work calculates their trajectories in real time and speculatively reconstructs the images of the Earth that the satellites could be capturing.
Vídeo (making-of): Morgancrea
