"Side Effects" - an Art of Molecule exhibition

"Side Effects" - an Art of Molecule exhibition in cooperation with Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (Zurich University of the Arts)

The Colour of Repetition, 2017

Gabriel Flückiger & Esther Mathis

Video loop, 10:19 min


‘The Colour of Repetition’ is the fruition of a collaboration between scientists Raffaele Altamura and Bartolomeo Angelici with Mathis and Flückiger. This collaboration was based on extensive discussions and exchanges through visiting each others places of work: the science labs and the artists studios. These encounters provided an approximation, exchange of knowledge and a critical interrogation of one another serving as the basis for the cinematic and experimental portrait of the scientists Altamura and Angelici. The focus within the frame of the video is placed on gestures and manual procedures in the laboratory and their anonymous and aesthetic dimensions. On an acoustic level, however, the field of experience of the laboratory is abandoned and instead replaced with personal reflections on social rituals and their relationship to one's own life.

While we try to incorporate models, there's haziness fading in at the edges. Facing active substances - synthesis - not to generate sense, yet. Of powerlines and birdflocks.

Thomas Knüsel

Mixed media


Implementing self-will. 

We are constantly abstracting the world, producing prototyped model realities, contexts which are supposed to support our thinking and delineate fields where our mind may flow.

In this installation different models are connected to each other forming an abstract system. Each model in itself embodies its own truth. When combining these model realities, realities shift and new worlds are formed. The models are actors in our perceived construct of the world. They are sensuous parts of our body?

Im Labor

Maria Pomiansky

Marker pen on paper, 21 cm x 29 cm
Marker pen on paper, 24 cm x 31 cm
Acrylic on canvas , 25 cm x 25 cm
Oil on canvas, 200 cm x 400 cm


Maria Pomiansky has created drawings in various forms while at the NCCR Molecular System Engineering laboratories; through observing the labs and reflecting on the spirit of our times, the current zeitgeist.

The focus of the drawings has multiple strands: capturing the maximum details in the labs, not knowing precisely what the scientists were working on, the focus moved onto their personalities and also to the questions: Who are the scientists of our times? How do they look? What is their everyday life? And what does the image of the scientist in the European (in particularly Swiss) society mean?

Gasthaus: Fermentation and Bacteria


Maya Minder‘s Gasthaus: Fermentation and Bacteria combines artistic, curatorial, and activist interests into communal culinary events at various locations. Fermentation repeatedly features as a central aspect of her work, not only in a literal outcome but also as a metaphor for social ferment, agitation and incitation to resistance. Minder opposes the structures of the food industry by promoting local self-organization, ecological sustainability and the importance of community. She resuscitates traditional food production methods with a certain relish while helping to save them from otherwise being forgotten. Her interests span the fields of art, politics, and biohacking often inviting other protagonists from various other fields to participate in the process of communal exchange.

12.1 MB Evidence

Aljoscha Thomas

Audio loop

 


The starting point of the work were sound recordings of various technical devices that are used everyday for scientific research in the laboratories of the NCCR in Basel. 

The audio loop was developed based on direct and indirect connections between art and science. In other words, if someone were to ask me how art and science were different from one another and at the same time connected to one another, I would answer: The former is produced and the latter is the first witness of it.

Glorious Failures IV

Lara Russi

Installation


Through discussing with researchers, the topic of parallels in contemporary art and science arose: the pressure placed upon oneself to obtain results, show work and to achieve success. This topic highlights, within both fields, the gap between daily work experiences and the big goals of institutions and systems and the counter influence this has on daily work. The title ‘Glorious failures’ is with reference to this dialogue. For researchers in a lab, gloves are an everyday working material. They protect and act as a border between the skin and the materials and substances the researchers work with. Glorious Failures, like in a lab, is a situation, an installation, an excerpt of working with a material in a performative way raising questions such as: Is there a certain glory to failure? Does success stay as long as a pair of gloves?

ICMSE: August 27-29, 2017