A cross-cultural educational media project with the San (Bushmen) on location in the Kalahari Desert. 

The World in a Shell (polliniferous project) is used as a vehicle for intercultural exchange and intellectual cross-pollination underpinned by social and ethical concerns. WiaS explores ways in which technology might assist the adoption of an autarkic and nomadic life-style – something potentially desirable for the twenty first century world citizens.

www.worldinashell.net/concepts/modernnomadism

As a high-tech multi-purpose vessel, WiaS  is based on the dimensions of a standard sea container, yet folds out to be seven-fold of its original size. With a self-sufficient and energy-independent infrastructure, WiaS can function in any climate or geographical environment. It is powered by renewable energy (wind and solar) with an immense energy storage capacity and digital interface.

www.worldinashell.net/datarelay

The lego-like interior accommodates a wide range of facilities, including a multi-media studio, water recycling, and a conventional household set-up (that can be used for feeding, for example, a film-crew). In technical terms it is the world’s most powerful micro-grid technology for its size running on renewable energy. WiaS also utilises technologies that can be used without degrading either the environment or the values and lifestyles of the peoples it visits.

www.worldinashell.net/facts/construction

WiaS has been developed across a period of four years at the Delft University for Technology through a process of practically engaging a wide variety of faculties, received grants, and sponsorship through 75 institutions (and other sponsors). WiaS was also honoured to receive the patronage by UNESCO Paris for this phase. To date, about 50 years of labour from both highly intelligent individuals and engineering companies have been invested in WiaS. The ideas and technology used to develop WiaS are clearly more than 20 years ahead of their time.

www.worldinashell.net/facts/development
www.worldinashell.net/facts/people

Technology advancement for its own sake was not the goal; by contrast, our aim was to develop a vessel that facilitates personal interaction, the sharing of knowledge, and to suggest broad solutions regarding autonomy and decentralisation.

www.worldinashell.net/facts_main

WiaS functions as an artist laboratory in order to both tell and collect stories. On invitation from the San (Bushmen) of a tiny village in the fast Kalahari Desert, we plan to install our “coming of age” interdisciplinary-media project – essentially staged in a swap-shop situation with local people.

www.worldinashell.net/cables/index.php/_cables/location-scouting-d-kar/

WiaS will be remodelled into a cinema, a stage for theatre, and a workshop for film- making. Its aesthetics and interior acoustics are designed to maximise inspiration.

www.flickr.com/photos/worldinashell/6333987215/in/photostream

By installing the project in the village and working together with the locals we aim to uncover contemporary interpretations of myths and real life problems in the lives of indigenous youth ‘in situ’. Essentially, we will offer them handles with which to document their own stories. These stories will be collected, discussed and then transferred onto film. Visions to be understood all over the world, told in the San’s unique and cheerful way, with a view to bringing their tacit knowledge alive. In this context, expressions of joy, smiles and laughter might provide a cross-cultural reference with which to demonstrate social  satisfaction.

www.worldinashell.net/cables/index.php/_cables/tsodilo-hills-location-scouting/

How are happiness and fortune intertwined? To what extent are we able to shape our destiny via our individual input? What makes us differentiate between adopting an  optimistic and a pessimistic outlook? WiaS aims to demonstrate that it is often simply a matter of cultural definition that determines the various ways in which life is interpreted through spoken fables, tales and stories.

www.worldinashell.net/cables/index.php/_cables/building-huts-at-dqae-qare-farm/

Humanity is certainly looking for tools with which to construct new thought. The staging their tales and stories can help to facilitate this. For millennia, the San have dealt with all manner of extreme and unexpected circumstances whilst maintaining a characteristically positive outlook. Aspects of this positive thinking can be seen unfolding in their progressive social cohesion, their relation to the environment, and their preference for a nomadic existence. Nevertheless, younger generations are now facing new challenges. Can they manage to resist the ever-growing pressures and blessings of modernity?

www.worldinashell.net/cables/index.php/_cables/hunting-party-at-dqae-qare-farm/

WiaS is an interdisciplinary project operating within the liminal spaces between art, science and education – with references to environmental/green living and humanitarian issues (specifically disaster management and rural challenges). Significantly, on the 29.10.2012, WiaS – the polliniferous project received the patronage for Botswana by Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO in Paris.

About the project:

http://www.shareable.net/blog/building-the-old-world-in-a-shell-of-the-new
http://www.mtschaefer.net/entry/world-shell/
http://inhabitat.com/wind-and-sun-powered-shipping-container-unfolds-into-traveling-cultural-exhibition

http://popupcity.net/2011/01/world-in-a-shell-the-polliniferoused-container/

https://intranet.tudelft.nl/index.php?id=58190&L=1

About the artist:

http://www.worldinashell.net/concepts/artist.html

http://v2.nl/archive/people/hans-kalliwoda/
http://www.and.org.uk/journal/people/hans_kalliwoda.php

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAmcB3DlvZQ

Image for public dissemination (please download here):
http://www.worldinashell.net/press/hires/Westerpark_night.zip

Image credits: Michi Maier (courtesy of Blindpainters Foundation)

Yucca Mountain Repository, Nevada; HADES, Mol, Belgium; Gorleben, Germany; Forsmark, Sweden

1.

This site documents and activates an ongoing series of audio field recordings made in deep geological repository sites (for the storage of nuclear waste) deeptimecontagion.tumblr.com

Open it to transform your receiving device into a virulent surface for the transmission of sound from indefinitely sealed-off spaces, designed to outlast the human.

In fact it is already open, inaudible to your ears perhaps, it has begun.

To brush the ears and then enter them, wraith-like, not with a hook but with stealth. I hope you find this largely indiscernible.

2.

The deep geological repository is designed to store nuclear waste securely deep underground, sketching an ongoing and incomplete struggle to demarcate humans from contagious materials that would eventually destroy them. At the same time, defined as providing containment ‘without future maintenance’, its thinking and construction is fundamentally premised upon imagining conditions not dependent on the human. The site and its practice, then, necessarily allude to a ‘deep time’ span, exterior to and indifferent to that of the human. This work performs the sonic fiction of capture and viral transmission of the affect of deep time through blocks of recorded sound – A kind of pyroclastic soaked chrono-dread chewing at the edges of the skin like a Burroughs tape experiment melted into rock. These recordings, entwined in deep time, act as figure for twisting this ‘outside’ into experience, camouflaged gestures toward an earworm-thought without limit. To transmit this gelatinous entanglement is to ask a paradoxical question – how a world radically inassimilable to experience can be included within it, how it can be manifest as non-manifest- Its tentative response – as excavation of abandonment; as virulent surface; as unnoticed intrusion on your ambience; and as duration of exposure to deep time.

3.

The next stage of the project extends the work beyond figure, fiction and metaphor to produce real acoustic models of deep time. This involves working collaboratively using techniques of acoustic fossil oscillation detection, a system used by theoretical cosmologists to infer properties of the early universe through modelling sound waves, and combining this with the use of computer simulations to model the material effects of stored nuclear waste over an extended time period beyond human life. Together this method can be used to simulate future acoustic oscillations, turning deep time into sound. I’m working on modes of presentation for the work that refuse a re-prioritisation of subjective experience through affect and interpretation, or impose a limit to artistic knowledge through an aesthetics of opacity or the sublime.

Andy Weir http://andyweir.info

The molds bear a 1:1 relationship with their place of origin. This indexical relationship is comparable to yet different from photography.  The project is essentially global in scope, and aims to create a plastic experience that might address the immediacy of our deeply networked reality.  For Baird and Ahmed, the question becomes: Can we produce a replica that is even better than the original? 

This ever-growing inventory becomes a vocabulary for the artists to construct their own sentences out of the ‘grammar of ornament’. The bust of a Taxila Priest-King (2000 b.c.), Corinthian capitals, Islamic geometric ornaments cast from molten tanker ships, the Chicago gravestone of architect Louis Sullivan, and a horse head taken from Moscow all sit next to one another. The vocabulary includes elements from across the US and Europe, Moscow, and Pakistan, with more to come. The origin of each element is mapped online.

Our website (LINK: www.HasTheWorldAlreadyBeenMade.com ) is not only a place of presentation but a place where the exchange between the artists essential to this project is made public.

If we can literally make anything then what do we select of the fragmented past to continue into the future? 

Industry produces new forms of sensual experience but only distributes consistency. Massive global infrastructures are directed towards distributing huge amounts of redundant forms or concentrated to assemble homogenized sites.

In Baird and Ahmed’s work, elements from 3D prints to traditional plaster casts coalesce to form a single artwork, effectively blurring the distinction between the contemporary, the replica, and the experience of traditional sculpture. Consequently, the past is cast as one massive anachronism. The present is the site of reproduction, a threshold through which all things can then be judged to pass into the future.

How can we make good on the labor of distant others—dead or alive?

Every object ever made describes the conditions of its own production- it eventually describes the shape of the human hand. In this sense, there is a knowledge of a distant other inscribed in each object. This can be decoded and used with or without knowing the original intentions. How can we come to know another through their work, to use it so that the world does not need to be constantly reproduced in its own image?

Can we produce a replica that is even better than the original?

This project reproduces problematics from the nineteenth century imperial and industrial age. Nineteenth century European archeological and emergent industrial design techniques, such as those evident in the works of Owen Jones and William Morris, emerged out of the attempt to reconcile the influx of disparate traditional aesthetics from the far reaches of empire coupled with new techniques of mechanical reproduction designed to meet the demands of the first industrial working class and it’s disposable income.

Today, a new Third Industrial Age is widely heralded with the emergence of print on demand, rapid prototyping, and desktop 3D printing widely available for homes and small offices. The idea is that industry and the consumer experience will change when the means of design and production are in the hands of potentially any individual. Yet once again, we are faced with the same question and problematic as that which emerged in the nineteenth century First Industrial Age - if we can make anything than what should we produce? By recognizing that the world reproduces itself in its own image over time, can we break this repetition by producing a replica that overcomes its origins?

Why is the project global in scope?

The scale of this project has always been global, and therefore the project itself must have an internationalized form. We can only understand something in so far as we act upon it. And our final object is the deeply networked totality under capitalism that conditions our lives today. This is not to smooth-over the art market problem presented as ‘translation’ to artists and at so many biennales, but rather it is to take the universality that the art market insists on at its word to see just how many fractures and antinomies of totality it can contain and to mark the points of rupture created by these forms and their collective repulsion and magnetism. Our collective reality has come to be deeply networked and characterized by immediacy. Time has become Space. If this is how our global economy and the conditions of production has come to function and shape our lives then why can’t we create an art object that is just as networked and yet does not lack the immediacy necessary to an open aesthetic experience?

Aside from your global mold making trips- where will your installations take place?

During the upcoming year, works will be produced at Roots and Culture in Chicago (US), Recollets in Paris (FR), the Kunsthalle Leipzig (DE), and Hedah in Maastricht (NL), as well as works in New York (US), Lahore (PK), and Leeds (UK). The project is centered on the poles of Maastricht (NL) and Chicago (US) where the artists live and work.

Why is your project based on the twin poles of Chicago (US) and Maastricht (NL)?

Just as any point might form the center of our spherical world, so too can Chicago and Maastricht. These two cities become centres of artistic production primarily because each member of the collaborating duo live and work in these cities. Chicago and Maastricht as points of exchange have been particularly formative for this project in terms of offering up their particular idiosyncrasies as material. Maastricht, as a provincial capital is famous as the site for signing of the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 that inaugurated the unifying currency of the European Union. Molds have been taken of the commemorating plaques. Chicago is located at the center of the American Mid-west and is the largest city for thousands of miles. It also contains the largest financial exchange for commodities in the US (i.e. porkbellys and crude oil).  This of course changes slowly, for US hegemony relies on its stability (i.e all is quite in the eye of the storm). Significantly, Chicago was re-produced in its own image after it was burned to the ground at the turn of the century whereas Maastricht consumes its own history to survive its post-industrial condition as a touristic center. These cities are not New York, Paris, or Berlin. Their qualities of neutrality and centrality are of interest to our project. Just as ornament in a room cognition continues to be altered without any direct gaze or awareness of their continual function on the senses.

What does the work consist of?

This work is founded upon experience in the world – both individually and collectively. Through a shared understanding, the artists have developed a special eye that recognizes fractures, fragments, anachronisms, and projections. From layers of paint on Ant Farm’s Cadillac Ranch, to the airplane graveyards of the American Southwest, to repurposed German bunkers or Rococo appearances of Europe, to the transference of the plastic arts to the Internet via 3D scanning – disparate contexts inform the duo’s sensibilities. The artists go into the world with our Poyo (a silicone mold making material for architectural conservation), and using a guerrilla approach, work to produce a mold of selected elements. Consequently, we produce ‘reverse-site-specific installations’ that are essentially an amalgamation of these collected fragments. The artists perform textual and photographic research on the role of replication in art, both at present and historically, together with other fields.

What is the criterion for the selection of molded objects?

This sensibility forms the criterion for selecting the fragments that are collected and reproduced within the final installations. The selection is also shaped by the limitations of the artist’s bodies. After all, the artists can only mold quickly those things that they can actually reach. They also perform these tasks without permission. Consequently, these installations form part of an attempt to create a reconciliation of an incoherent present without smoothing over the fractures that might attract initial selection.

What does the term ‘Reverse Site-Specific’ mean?

Significantly, this is the first time that the artists have encountered this term. Their respective post-conceptual art educations invariably brought them to the work of Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta-Clark, and to re-investigate the debates between Tony Smith and Micheal Fried on the character of form in relationship to context or performativity. The artists also found earlier evidence of these debates in Adorno’s discussions of the false-dichotomy ‘committed v. autonomous art’. While the artists both had sublime experiences when encountering NASA launch site at Cape Canaveral or the Altar of Zeus in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, they still struggled with the particularity of production in their respective studios and galleries. This experience has informed their approach to reconciling the disparate yet powerful experiences anonymously produced by the world ‘as we know it’ and in their own production as artists. The artists conceive their ‘reverse site-specific’ installations as a mode of making and unmaking at once. Consequently, it presents a way of addressing the plastic world of elements that are thoroughly socialized as we encounter the same elements (i.e. the anatomical model of a eighteenth century police officer) in Chicago or Maastricht or Lahore. The installations are thus also universalized spaces.

Isn’t universalized space antiquated?

Yes, it is an old idea – but should it be? Has it been dismissed within post-colonial critiques alone while the imperial global economy that brought it about has only intensified? How old is old anyway? This project forms part of an attempt to expand the register of time through sensual experience – perhaps as a means with which to counter 200 years of accelerated accumulation. How might we relate to the character of our ‘species-being’? Is it actually necessary to prove our present through destructive overcoming if we might potentially co-habit with the ‘dead nature’ that we love?

Has the world already been made?

Well has it?

At its core, this project is based on William Wyler’s 1966 film “How to Steal a Million”, in which an art theft is staged inside a Paris museum. The plot reflected a new spirit and  a performative, rebellious dynamic in treatment of the Masters – both institutionally and artistically. From a museum stuffed with fakes, a thief successfully steals his own forgery, and consequently reveals the hollow prestige of the museum’s revered masterpieces: a “Classical” Benvenuto Cellini is substituted for a bottle of brandy, and the technology of the latest surveillance system is tricked with a boomerang.

This project takes the form of  a series of museological performances in which contemporary art might challenge the borders of static display. Six artists will be invited, for a one-night show, to reformulate and re-interpret a museum’s display of objects, effectively inserting their own work alongside the existing display. The remains of these performances can then be kept by the museums as temporary exhibitions.

Just as the seductive performance of the two thieves in “How to Steal a Million” unveiled issues connected to value attribution, and also imported new movements and ideas into the restrictive spatiality of the museum, the participating artists will reveal the latent temporality of the objects of display, effectively deconstructing – with a contextual gesture – museological construction.

The project will also allude to another key aspect of the William Wyler film – the fiction of a new and rejuvenated museum that comments on the power of media. The fixity of the dusty architectural abode of the masters is brought back into circulation through the mobility of the film – effectively infusing it with “the real” – that is bringing the immediate and ethically dubious presence of the outside world back into the museum. Significantly, there is also a subtle differentiation between the anarchic but professionally impeccable actions of the thieves (transmitted via film) and the outdated (although technically equipped) incorporation of tradition in the architecture.

Working in this mode, this series of one-night performative interventions will occur in different countries and museums. Artists will be invited to explore the territory between the relentless architectures of established institutions and the performative pluri-medial possibilities of interventions within them. In introducing a “foreign eye”, artists will be invited to experiment with historical transformation across past and future. The first stop in this nomadic project is Lisbon, a city containing genuine “museums of museology” that carry a particular material presence due to their modalities of display and the proximity of the viewer to objects of display.

Stay tuned to Project Anywhere for updates as they occur during 2013.

Hobart, Tasmania, 21st November 2012.

In an action that pitted endurance against farce, I climbed Hobart’s Mount Wellington as the creature “Schleimgurgeln”. In this context, Schleimgurgeln might be initially understood as representing an imagined incarnation of the European Other within the Australian landscape. Just as Europeans once projected their desires upon the Antipodes in the form of various perverse and grotesque creatures, Schleimgurgeln can be understood as performing a strange inversion of this historical tendency. In this sense, in the aim of climbing Mount Wellington was to re-illuminate the historical importance of the mountain and its various representations. Most notably, Mount Wellington figured prominently in intitial conceptualisations of the Australian landscape through the work of British born colonial painter John Glover and the diary entries of Charles Darwin during his voyage on the Beagle in the 1800s.

During a one-day epic journey, I ascended the mountain within the guise of Schleimgurgeln. This was not a simple task. What would otherwise have been a relatively peaceful and invigorating hike soon became a challenge of farcical proportions. Partially blinded by eggs, protected by only a thin layer of feathers, and with no protection on my feet, my ascent would take more than eight hours. Consequently, a strange fissure in space and time unfolded. This fissure was made particularly manifest through the incongruity of the Schleimgurgeln body against the natural environment, which potentially created a new perception of the mountain and the landscape painting genre.

Behind Schleimgurgeln’s unusual appearance lies a serious critique of the idea of the Australian landscape. In climbing Mt Wellington, Schleimgurgeln illuminated the manner in which Antipodean space has been pictured, painted, narrated and imagined, not only from the time of physical European “discovery”, but also from
the time of Ancient Greek imagining.

To see the full video documentation click www.vimeo.com/56193214

www.markshorter.com.au/home/song-for-glover/

Song for Glover (2012) Documentation from performance (excerpt) Camera: Jurgen Kerkovius from MarkShorter

WetNet explores the relationship between contamination, bioremediation and sustainable systems. This work in progress features the creation of “contaminated” wet sculptures in the form of disposable science equipment. Sculptures are, for example, modelled after the sterilized plastic flasks commonly found in the laboratory and used to conduct experiments. In this case, the flasks are made of agar (a seaweed base commonly used to create assays), mycelium (Lions Mane mushroom), and human viral cells (HeLa and Lentivirus). The interaction between the mycelium and viral cells generate a transpecies network extending both inside and out of the flasks. The interaction between fungi and human viral cells challenge the logic of aseptic technique and sterile containment that justifies the need for plastic disposable materials in the lab. The prototypes “feed” microbes and communicate with them through the process of decomposition and remediation. The combination and interaction between organisms is explored as a living and undead network system and architecture that provokes a rethinking of the materials used to produce knowledge in the science laboratory. What happens when microbes are no longer the subject of experimentation, but become the network and material for knowledge creation? In this scenario, notions of contamination and contagion are radically altered. Rather than restrict movement between microbes and human, the human must re-imagine relations with the microbial worlds.

WetNet is produced for the exhibition Emergencies2012 curated by Marta de Menezes especially for Guimarães 2012 European Capital of Culture. Part of the project has been produced during an invited artist-in-residence at Ectopia in collaboration with Cultivamos Cultura, the URIA-Centro Patogenese Molecular, Faculdade Farmacia at the University of Lisbon and Joao Goncalves. Additional support and collaboration on developed includes Form lab at Université de Montréal, Metacycle labs at Concordia University and Fluxmedia also based at Concordia University. WetNet is part of the larger three year research-creation project entitled Viral BioreMEDIAtion funded by Le Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture.

See: Emergencies2012
http://www.guimaraes2012.pt/index.php?cat=191&item=28901

URL showing WetNet in progress: http://vimeo.com/36352853

• Please do not use words or voice
• Please do not read or write
• Try to make as little noise as possible
• Please do not interact with personal technology
• Stay with it for at least 2-3 hours

To find out how to attend a Silent Dinner Party please visit: www.silentdinnerparty.com

To request a Silent Dinner Partyin your locality please contact Honi Ryan: honi@hedonics.com.au

Silent Dinner Parties during 2012 included: 

January 19, Zico House, Beirut, Lebanon

January 28, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

March 14, 15, 16, Adelaide Fringe Festival, SA, Australia

May 12th, Newcastle, NSW, Australia

August 6, 8.30pm, Splatterpool Artspace, Williamsburg, New York, USA

August 21, 20.30, Condesa, Mexico City (location to be confirmed), Mexico

October 4, 5 and 6, Melbourne Fringe Festival, Victoria, Australia