Watch the video documentation of the HYBRID MATTERs Symposium which took place 24th and 25th of November at the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki.

HYBRID MATTERs investigates hybrid ecologies, the convergence of our environment with technology and essentially the intentional and unintentional transformation of our planet through human activity. In a hybrid ecology biological actors like humans, animals and plants share a life-world with machines, networks and increasingly also genetically altered organisms and other post-natural actors. A hybrid ecology is a thought vehicle which enables us to expand our concept of the environment, to re-evaluate our idea of an external nature and to rethink our relationship to the world. As we humans drive this process of...

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SYMPOSIUM: Thursday 09-16h, Friday 08:45-17h - SCHEDULE, Live Stream

SYMPOSIUM address: Theatre Academy Helsinki Haapaniemenkatu 6, 00530 Helsinki

Exhibition opening at FORUM BOX: Thursday 17-19h Ruoholahdenranta 3a, 00180 Helsinki, the last stop of tram 6

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The HYBRID MATTERs Symposium will be streamed live.

Thursday 24th of November 09:00-16:00

Friday 25th of November 09:15-17:00

You can find here a detailed schedule.

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The third HYBRID MATTERs exhibition will open on the 24th of November at Forum Box in Helsinki. The exhibition will presents artworks that exist in the conceptual landscape of HYBRID MATTERs. It will show the HYBRID MATTERs commissions given to Hanna Husberg and Lawrence Malstaff, works by HYBRID MATTERs partners Laura Beloff, Jonas Jørgensen, Christian Brems and Malena Klaus of IT_University Copenhagen and Åsa Ståhl and Kristina Lindström from Malmö and Linneus University. The exhibition will also feature works by Antti Tenetz, Kristiina Ljokkoi, Johanna Rotko, Anyte Greie and Mari keski-Korsu.

Read on at the Forum Box exhibition site.

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INVESTIGATIONS/INSTALLATIONS

Arising from the initial research we performed on the ultrasonic acoustic emissions - and hence possible communication - in plant roots, that materialized in the video-work Dialogue with 02.205, (reference1) we decided to continue this exploration. This now with the overarching goal of creating a form of live installation where the roots acoustic emission will be registered, amplified, down-sampled and played back to an audience so that they can have a physical experience of the possible sonic communication within plants.

The initial studies stem from the relatively new scientific field of bio-acoustics; “the branch of science concerned with sounds produced by or affecting living organisms, especially as relating to communication." (reference2) Research...

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We cordially invite you to attend the HYBRID MATTERs Symposium which will take place 24th and 25th of November at the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki.

Keynote speakers are Jussi Parikka - Professor in technological culture & aesthetics at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton), Jennifer Gabrys - Reader in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London and Steen Rasmussen - Professor at the Center for Fundamental Living Technology (FLinT), University of Southern Denmark with a response by Cecilia Åsberg - Professor and chair of Gender, Nature, Culture, Linköping University.

The HYBRID MATTERs Symposium is a collaboration between the Bioartsociety and the MA in Ecology and Contemporary Performance, Theatre Academy of the University...

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The video-based work 02.205 is done by Christian Brems in collaboration with Laura Beloff and with scientific advice by Frank Veenstra. The work has been produced under the umbrella of Hybrid Matters and exhibited in the Hybrid Matters exhibition at Kunsthall Nikolaj in Copenhagen.

02.205 is an artistic-scientific videowork that investigates, speculates and broadly communicates recent findings in the field of bio-acoustics; “the branch of science concerned with sounds produced by or affecting living organisms, especially as relating to communication. (reference 1)

Here is a short extract of the 7-minute video:

The conversation between the tree and computer is facilitated through novel research in bio-acoustics:

Computer talking to plant: Recent research has shown that plants are...

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The second HYBRID MATTERs exhibition will open on the 19th of May at Nikolaj Kunsthal. The exhibition will presents artworks that exist in the conceptual landscape of HYBRID MATTERs. It will show the HYBRID MATTERs commissions given to Hanna Husberg and Lawrence Malstaff, works by HYBRID MATTERs partners Laura Beloff, Jonas Jørgensen, Christian Brems and Malena Klaus of IT_University Copenhagen and Åsa Ståhl and Kristina Lindström from Malmö University. The exhibition will also feature a new work by Hege Tapio, Rosemary Lee and Jens Lee Jørgensen and Carl Emil Carlsen.

Read on at the Nikolaj Kunsthal exhibition site

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The version Fly Printer - Extended is created within the Hybrid Matters project, and also the final development for the Fly Printer - Danish Crown. This on-going project presents my interests into a merger of biology and technology.

Here is the story how it all started with the Fly Printer:

The Fly Printer has been an on-going project since 2014. The concept and the first version of the work was created in collaboration between Laura Beloff and Maria Antonia González Valerio in the summer 2014 within a residency at Cultivamos Cultura that is organized by Marta de Menezes. The first exhibitable version was titled: The Fly Printer; Prototype No. 3. The piece included fruit flies in a spherical habitat, food for them that was mixed with printer inks in cyan, magenta, yellow and black, and...

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-cloned Nordmans fir trees, earth, acrylic, electronics, network, computer, growing lamps - 2016

The Condition installation merges two modes of existence and two different intelligences within non-terrestrial micro-gravity condition. The biologically evolving existence of the cloned fir trees, and artificial intelligence behind the self-organizing rotating system that is fed with data from space weather satellites. It is a speculative model for a future forest consisting of typical Danish Christmas trees.

CREDITS:

• Laura Beloff & Jonas Jørgensen - concept, development, design, hardware, etc.
• Simon Asger Gjerløv-Christensen - software development
• Christian Ravn Brems - overall support in various details and aspects

THANK YOU:

• Jens Iver Find and El Bihrmann from Copenhagen...

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In the part of HYBRID MATTERs called invitations Lindström and Ståhl have during 2015 and 2016 invited participants to explore hybrid matters. The invitations to public engagement events across the Nordic countries have started off with a couple of recent academic articles that deal with plastics - one on plastiglomerates (Corcoran et al 2014) and one on common meal worms that can biodegrade Styrofoam (Yang et al 2015). Based on the ethnographic material and interventions Lindström and Ståhl have written an imagined dialogue between a ragpicker who collects plastiglomerates and a composter who tries out domestic plastic composting. The speculative fiction is called Plastic Imaginaries - the ragpicker meets the composter and can be read in its entirety in the HYBRID MATTERs exhibition....

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The first HYBRID MATTERs exhibition will open on the 19th of March at Kunsthall Grenland. The exhibition will presents five artworks that exist in this conceptual landscape of HYBRID MATTERs. It will premiere the HYBRID MATTERs commissions given to Hanna Husberg and Lawrence Malstaff, new works by HYBRID MATTERs partners Laura Beloff and Jonas Jørgensen of IT_University Copenhagen and Åsa Ståhl and Kristina Lindström from Malmö University. The exhibition will also feature a new work by Hege Tapio.

Read on at the Kunsthall Grenland exhibition site

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Part 1

Leena & Oula Valkeapää, Alia Malley, Charli Clark, Judith van der Elst, Avner Peled, Stephan Dudeck, Matthew Biederman, Marko Peljhan, Netta Norro, Jose Marcos Perez

The following was the brief around which this group gathered and conducted its investigations:

Complex ecological networked systems can be observed, read and navigated by employing Intuition and Technology. Artists, hunters and herders, tactical media workers and scientists will be joining forces to develop, deploy, use and question enhanced sensing systems and methods. This could lead to new and surprising insights and construction of semantic territories, in which the gaze and measurement become knowledges and are projected back onto the land in order to structure completely new vectors of meaning,...

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The Condition – cloned Christmas trees

What kind of life forms will survive with us or without us in other kinds of conditions than what we currently have on planet Earth? What kind of conditions and organisms are forming at the intersection of technological and biological evolution and human agency?

The project (in progress) investigates Normann fir Christmas tree as a postnatural organism and exposes it to changing conditions, such as micro gravitation with continuous rotational movement. The underlying idea speculates whether or not Christmas trees can survive in changing environmental conditions; on a different planet, on a polluted place or in an environment that has experienced drastic changes.

In this project the actual tree in question is no longer a natural species, but has...

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by Maren Richter

‘Hybrid Species’ was introduced by Antti Tenetz, the host of the group Encounters in a Layered Landscape (‘my probands’), on our first walk together. For him the wolf has become such a hybrid species, once being useful for the herders to keep the animals together, but since herding technologies have changed, the wolf has turned into a threat. Social hybridity, as the wolf example could be also called, turned out to be a key term for the Second Order Group (SO) of the third edition of Field_Notes on Hybrid Matters.

The gentle landscape in the North of Lapland around Lake Kilpisjärvi itself is quite poor of animals, at least in autumn. One can find a lot of blue(berried) bird shit but rarely birds. Seeing a Hawk Owl on our first day was therefore quite an encounter. I...

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Thanks everyone who came and took on the responsibility of caring for common mealworms and plastics alike! About 20 composting kits are now spread around the Öresund region. They can be found in domestic settings, workplaces and communal spaces. Some will be handed over from carer to carer until we meet up again in a couple of weeks to share experiences of living with this composting kit.

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Would you like to try composting plastics in your home? You are invited to join domestic experiments in Copenhagen between 4th and 18th November. For more info>>

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Reflections from the plastiglomerate walks and making in Osthrobothnia are now online. Scroll down to read about Replot and Vaasa.

We are very grateful for all the participation - from near and afar. Thank you for joining us, whether you were in Vaasa, in Bolivia or somewhere else! This hybrid matter seems to be engaging across geographies and times.

In just a few weeks we’ll start another kind of engagement with plastics as hybrid matters - from walking with fire to composting - in the Öresund-region.

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The Owls are not what they seem – second, third and fourth order observations

Lea Schick, Jens Hauser, Anna-Katharina Laboissière, Maren Richter, Hannah Star Rogers, Miguel Santos, Tiina Prittinen

First day on the Field_Notes trip: We are hiking through layered landscapes with one of the groups at the Hybrid Matters Field_Notes. Still strangers to each other we are talking, listening, photographing, recording, and pointing out and gathering things as we walk along the human-reindeer carved paths towards a World War II plane crash site. Suddenly we stop, bodies and voices are lowered and assembled, and gaze at a naked birch tree where an owl is posing nicely for us. Cameras are clicking and binoculars are generously traveling from eyes to eyes. Nine people, who are not yet familiar...

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Mapping Hybrid Ecology

Antti Tenetz, Theun Karelse, Maia Iotzova, Lori Hepner, Anssi Laiho, Piibe Piirma, Peter Flemming

This group explored the landscape around Kilpisjärvi. Part of the focus of our group was to find and study the layers of Hybrid ecology; where biological, technological and cultural layers are coexisting and influencing each other in the landscape. Our team set out on several days of fieldwork in the Kilpisjärvi environs. Each group member uncovered layers of the landscape through their own perspective and practice, exploring the sonic, political, microbial, visual, and invisible aspects of the layers.

On the first day, the group's host Antti Tenetz guides us on a walk through sites that show traces of human influence in what we would normally perceive as pristine...

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PostNatural Field_Notes

Richard Pell, Lauren Allen, Laura Beloff, Åsa Ståhl, Andrea Roe, Cathrine Kramer, Zack Denfeld, Erik Sandelin

We envisioned our week at the Kilpisjärvi Biological Research Station to be one of exploring and questioning what it means to draw a line around a biological entity or grouping. As the founders of the Center for PostNatural History (www.postnatural.org) in Pittsburgh, PA, we have found it useful to set a very clear definition for what we mean by ‘PostNatural’: living things that have been heritably and intentionally altered by humans. This includes organisms that have been domesticated and changed through processes of selective breeding, such as dogs, chickens, and agricultural crops, as well as organisms that have been genetically modified, such as many...

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Antye Greie-Ripatti, Till Bovermann, Dinah Bird, Anja Erdmann, Kristina Lindström, Vygandas Simbelis, Caspar Ström

As humans we inhabit a hybrid ecology and so are also a part of the biological and technological ends of our world. If this is so, one can also say that it is our responsibility to connect both peripheries in order to develop ethical and respectful forms of co-existence and ideally beneficial interaction.

During the field_notes field laboratory, the (sonic) Wild Code Team investigated notions of coexistence, communication and potentials for interaction in the hybrid ecology surrounding Kilpisjärvi. By immersing ourself into the vast and raw landscape of Lapland around Kilpisjärvi, we researched and tested for possibilities to enable the landscape to speak for itself.

After...

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This blog post was first published in Makery by Netta Norro

Field Notes Hybrid Matters is a bi-annual arts & science field laboratory organised in one of the northernmost corners of Finnish Lapland, Kilpisjärvi. We asked Netta Norro, the coordinator for Changing Weathers, for her field notes.

Finnish Lapland, correspondence

This year’s edition brought together 40 artists and scientists from 15 countries to work on pre-selected sub-themes. The field laboratory was organised by The Finnish Society of Bioart at the University of Helsinki Kilpisjärvi Biological Station, in collaboration with the Changing Weathers project.

Hybrid Matter is anything that has a physical and technological aspect and as such is a product of intentional and un-intentional human activity. People with...

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HYBRID MATTERs invite you to the second iteration of plastiglomerate walks! They will be held in Osthrobothnia, Finland, on Friday 9th and Saturday 10th October. Please, join us for one or several of the walks where we look for this new geological entity that consists of both stone and plastic! You can follow the event here! /Kristina Lindström and Åsa Ståhl

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Sweet Machines and Phantom Tastes

28th August, 12am-1pm

IT University Copenhagen Room 3A20

Rued Langards Vej 7, 2300 Copenhagen, Denmark

Orkan Telhan's research focuses on bridging theories of design and computation with artificial life and synthetic biology research.Through a series of case studies pursued in the design of smell and novel flavors, the talk will discuss the epistemic origins of taste and reflect on the cultural implications of designed chemistries and
biologies that present themselves as living, semi-living, and life-like artifacts.

Orkan Telhan is interdisciplinary artist, designer and researcher whose investigations focus on the design of interrogative objects, interfaces, and media, engaging with critical issues in social, cultural, and environmental responsibility....

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The plastiglomerate walks continued in Iceland after the ones that we had announced. We were very happy to receive this image of a finding that was made by Carla Lange on a walk in Thingeyri, in the Westfjords. She is a student at the University Centre of the Westfjords in Ísafjörður.

It was found on a sandy beach above the high tide line. How the various components became into this one entity is a mystery to her as well as to us.

If you find any plastiglomerates please let us know!

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Thank you everyone who accepted our invitation to take part in the first of the series of walks where we explore what hybrid matters is and can be - on location and remotely!

Reflections on the plastiglomerate walks in Iceland are now online!

And there are more walks to come!

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In the beginning of August we will go looking for a new geological entity that geologists have called plastiglomerates. You are very welcome to join us for these exploratory walks, where this particular hybrid matter is in focus. Reportedly this new kind of rock that consists of plastics, lava, corrals and more has been found on Iceland. Regardless whether we find any, there will be plenty of time during the walks to discuss and speculate on the matters that emerge when human and natural forces merge. What brings them into being? How can we understand them? Who and what are they a concern to? How could they be used?

The first walk will be held in Reykjavik on Tuesday 4th August 2015.

During Friday 7th and Saturday 8th other walks will be held in the Westfjords. The Friday walk starts at...

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We have received more then 110 excellent applications for Field_Notes out of which we have been choosing 30 participants. The participants form the five groups which will investigate HYBRID MATTERs from 14th to 20th of September at the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station. Read more about Field_Notes HYBRID MATTERs here ...

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We have received more then 70 applications from all over the Nordic countries for the HYBRID MATTERs production grant. The quality of the applications has been generally high and so it was really difficult for the HYBRID MATTERs team to come to a conclusion. Finally we settled on the exciting proposals TROUBLED ATMOSPHERE by Hanna Husberg and FOLDING by Lawrence Malstaf. We are looking forward to produce these new works in collaboration with them and keep you updated on the develoments.

Hanna Husberg (b.1981, Finland) is a Stockholm based artist. She graduated from ENSB-A, Paris in 2007, and is currently a Phd in Practice candidate at the academy of fine arts Vienna. Through a practice of video and installation projects she investigates how we perceive, and relate to our environment in...

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