The group exhibition SEAFair ’11 - Energy, Biopolitics, Strategies of Resistance and Cultural Subversion conveys the story of artists presented through various approaches regarding our reflection upon power relations (biopolitical conflicts in the real and virtual worlds increasingly involve governments, NGOs and corporations), energy control, the choice of fuel materials; alternative energy sources; nuclear energy, the control of the biological, the inheritance and programmability of life, entropy; causes and consequences of global environmental change; the sustaining of the environment; macro and micro ecology; current topics in applications of microbiology in biotechnology; the dimensions of live matter; the relation to the relation to life, genetically modified foods, death, and appearance.
“Camera Lucida” by Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand
Within a transparent chamber filled with water, sound waves are transformed into light emissions by employing a phenomenon known as sonoluminescence. After adapting to the absolute darkness surrounding the installation, one begins to perceive the fleeting configurations of glowing sound fields. Although it has been established that the source of light arises inside of the imploding gas bubbles, the sequence of events remains predominantly unknown. After much research, numerous theories have been proposed, ranging from collision-induced radiation and quantum tunneling to plasma core ionization and even bubble fusion. No research, however, has been conducted on the implications of sonoluminescence as a perceptual tool. It is our intention to uncover this delicate bio-chemi-physical interface, where the visible is the condition of the invisible (of the audible) and “where the inverse is also true, where invisibility [the disappearance of the observer in total darkness] is the condition of a new kind of visibility” (Roger Caillois).
„Nuage Vert“ by HeHe [Heiko Hansen & Helen Evans]
In the past decade, new buzz words have entered into media discourse and everyday language: ecological visualisations, carbon offsets, eco footprints, food miles etc. These abstractions signify our attempts to quantify individual responsibility and to find ways of facing up to the very real challenges of climate change, and the exploitation of finite natural resources.
Nuage Vert is based on the idea that public forms can embody an ecological project, materialising environmental issues so that they become a subject within our collective daily lives. Its material, collective and aesthetic dimension distinguishes it from other approaches.
A city scale light installation onto the ultimate icon of industrial pollution, alerts the public, generates discussion and can persuade people to change patterns of consumption.
Nuage Vert is ambiguous, as it doesn’t offer a simple moralistic message, but rather tries to confront the city dweller with an evocative and aesthetic spectacle, which is open to interpretation and challenges ordinary perception. Turning a factory emission cloud green, inevitably, leads to questions being asked. It shifts the discourse about climate change and carbon emissions from abstract immaterial models based on the individual, to the tangible reality of urban life. The project was situated in the cultural context and specific locality of Ruoholahti, a former industrial harbour redeveloped as modern residential district of Helsinki, Finland, where there is ever-increasing energy consumption.
„Farm Fountain“ by Ken Rinaldo & Amy M. Youngs
Farm Fountain is a system for growing edible and ornamental fish and plants in a constructed, indoor ecosystem. Based on the concept of aquaphonics, this hanging garden fountain uses a simple pond pump along with gravity, to flow the nutrients from fish waste through the plant roots. The plants and bacteria in the system serve to cleanse and purify the water for the fish.
This project is an experiment in local, sustainable agriculture and recycling. It utilizes 2-liter plastic soda bottles as planters and continuously recycles the water in the system to create a symbiotic relationship between edible plants, fish and humans. The work creates an indoor healthy environment that also provides oxygen and light to the humans working and moving through the space. The sound of water trickling through the plant containers creates a peaceful, relaxing waterfall. The fish that are part of this project, Koi and Tilapia, also provide a focus for relaxed viewing.
The plants we are currently growing include lettuces, cilantro, mint, basil, tomatoes, chives, parsley, mizuna, watercress and tatsoi. The Tilapia fish in this work are also edible and are a variety that has been farmed for thousands of years in the Nile delta. Farm Fountain is a collaborative project by artists Ken Rinaldo and Amy Youngs. We hope you will be inspired to create one yourself. Please visit our illustrated “How-To” pages to see how we made our home version and join our free online forum to share your ideas.
“Taste the Waste” by Valentin Thurn
On the way from the farm to the dining-room table, more than half of the food lands in the dump. Most of it before it ever reaches consumers. For instance, every other head of lettuce or potato. Discover what awaits you when you venture a look into dumpsters: behind your local supermarket and, if you can summon up enough courage, in the trash cans outside your own door. We’re not talking about chicken bones and potato peels here. The topic at hand is the perfectly edible food, some of which is still in its original packaging and frequently enough not even the “best before“ date has expired. Around 100 kilograms per household every year. Even more, about twice as much, is “rejected” on fields, in factories mand at retailers.
Why are ever greater quantities being destroyed? We seek explanations: from supermarket sales staff and managers, bakers, wholesale market inspectors, welfare recipients, ministers, farmers and EU bureaucrats. It’s a system that we all take part in. Supermarkets constantly have the complete selection of merchandise on offer, the bread on the shelves has to be fresh until late in the evening, strawberries are in demand at any time of the year. And everything has to look just right: one withered leaf of lettuce, a crack in a potato or a dent in an apple and the goods are sorted out; containers of yogurt as early as two days before the “best before“ date has expired.
We visited a variety of people who want to stop this incredible waste by working together on a goal that offers a major opportunity: if we were to save merely half of the avoidable garbage, that would have the same effect on the world climate as if we took every other car off our roads.
“Film is the Art of Electric Energy and the Sexiest Current Comes from Split Atoms” by Hrvoje Pukšec
Justine sees pictures, Justine knows stuff. One of the pictures with which she sees the truth shows her elegant, a little bemused, on an empty golf course, and from her fingers stretched up to the sky little tongues of electricity flicker. Melancholia, the new film from Lars von Trier, brand-new Nazi and known provocateur, does not deal with energy any more or less than most world films. The visual opulence is the best part of the film, and the picture in which the skies and the human being are combined into a temporary unity via a discharge of electrical energy is the most recent depiction in a numerous sequence of films (Frankenstein, Weird Science and other films in which electricity is a source of life) in which human beings and energy are equated. Not a word of this present article or a hundredth part of any film at all can exist without energy.
In fact, energy is everything uttered and, for a surety, much more too. All the same, the relation between film and energy although inseparable and intense is seldom directly made clear. How much energy is used for just a single film is almost impossible to calculate mathematically. It turns out that economics is more precise in this case, because how much a film costs and what the precise prices of a given item are comprise a banally common computation in the movie industry.
No films without energy; but feature films about energy are fewer still. Promotional works about electrical or thermal energy and how to save, how to buy or simply how to use are not so uncommon, but how many dramas, comedies or thrillers do we really have about electricity? Film is the art of electricity, but electricity is not a common theme of films. How can it be given cinematic shape, and who would watch it if it could? The movement of ions from positive to negative does not have the charge of an Odyssey, but good film potentials are created on ideas about energy outs, untameable energy, abused energy.
“Winter Gardens” by Jasenko Rasol
The gardens I photograph appear on no-man’s-land, in zones that are described as being non-urbanised, on empty surfaces of the city and always in the proximity of large residential neighborhoods. In order for these gardens to come into being, the following are needed: a relatively large piece of land, an absence of title deeds and residents in neighboring buildings. Such a constellation will result in what I believe to be the wondrous sites of suburban gardens. I photograph the gardens in the wintertime, out of season and without any people.
It is when they are out of use that they become even more undefined and thus acquire new meanings. Due to their temporary nature, the gardens are sites of function conversion. Dominant are recycling processes, improvisation, formal messes and casual ecology. The gardens function as contemplative playhouses for adults or a haven for citizens suffering from rural nostalgia, or a possible salvation for the poverty-stricken.
I believe that these gardens reflect the need for a context reaching beyond the basic function of the street. These are symbolic points lacking in the urban body of the city due to the fact that they are outside the reach of primary architecture. The gardens are spaces of outbuilding/upgrading, just like squares and parks.
Still, the gardens are spaces without a future - they are sites of future shopping malls and other corporate or residential necessities. Today’s condition of formal neglect is probably more advanced than what is yet to be realized by transitional urbanization. The garden spaces are exactly the opposite of what they seem to be, and in comparison to what is to come, they represent an elite location in the neutered architecture of the city.
Zagreb, winter 2006
P.S. Four years later I returned to photograph the gardens. A fair amount of what was once documented is no longer there. As expected. The city is expanding and devouring the meadows left behind. It is as if the triple uncertainty of the previous text has also vanished - the remaining gardens witness the poverty-stricken as their only visitors now.
“Chimera” by Niki Sperou
The Chimera is popularly referred to as the shape shifter. Implying some form of transgression, the fusion of human blood and flowers suggests the dissolution of boundaries. Organic form becomes a metaphor for broader concerns. Blood is a highly political medium which signifies on multiple levels; life force, contagion, commodity, gift. Within both science and culture, bodies are subjugated, territories are colonized and power struggles occur. This provocative work elucidates new ethical dilemmas each time it is reproduced. Notions of resistance and subversion are brought to the fore, regarding hierarchical structures between the arts and sciences, ideas of purity and pollution, moral virtues, the bio-politics of the body and its parts, issues of ownership, ethics clearance and consent from medical and scientific authorities. In the spirit of empathy and without request from the artist, volunteers offered to donate gifts of blood when the work was presented at the Royal Institute of Science in Australia in 2010.
These works are part of a larger series of muti-disciplinary works titled Chimera.
“One More Frustrated Artist” by Opa
The project One more frustrated artist is based on the new visual form, typical of the territory and the time in which we live. It is an expression – a visual sign of a phenomenon, of a local (but yet massive) psychological and social change. Using exactly this one, already accepted form, Opa tries to reach wider audience and to convey a personal feeling and attitude towards the cultural situation in Macedonia. The calendar, distributed as a gift, allows an intimate communication between the authors and the recipient on their common social responsibility.
“Oil in Macedonia? / Oil in Ohrid Lake?” by Ivanka Apostolova, Toni Dimitrov, Zorica Zafirovska
What would happen if the local authorities were to discover that Ohrid Lake is rich in oil? How would the world react to that news and how would it regard Macedonia in respect to all disputes and tensions peculiar to this country? Can the black gold make Macedonia a Balkan Dubai? How would the local environmentalists and activists react? In that case, would Macedonia become a new attractive destination with credibility for global businessmen? Would the improvement of the standard at home stop the need for immigration and asylum due to the need for basic survival? In that case, would the oil really improve the standard or is the standard dependent on other economic, strategic and energetic moves - smart moves, and what are they? What is guest worker’s loneliness and when will emigration take place under different conditions and motives, such as personal love life, international education available to everybody interested, active tourism, productive collaborations outside the closed circles, i.e motives beyond the raw escapism and beyond direct bare emigration. Would the benefit of domestic oil in Macedonia contribute to new manipulations? Of what type? …
“Controlled city zone” by Igor Stojanovski
This project aims at researching the process of controlling the urban public space and the mechanisms for control and discipline of its users by the state apparatus. Through hyperbolization of the permanent circumstances, an attempt is made to push the limits of the rational until the regulations themselves reveal to us as irrational.
With this project, a new situation is postulated in which nearly every use of the public space is controlled by the state apparatus. Taking the form of a feigned campaign, the administration of the City of Skopje introduces a fee for the use of the urban space and the accessories in it. The use of sidewalks, walkways, parks, public playgrounds, lawns, benches, bus stops, seats in public transport, lifts, public lighting will be charged. The city is divided into zones, each zone having a separate fee amount. The objects themselves are marked with stickers that describe the process of paying the fee for each use, which is almost identical to the method of payment for the use of the public parking lots. Instead of the plate number, the citizen records one of the most important personal data - the personal identification number.
“Total surveillance” by Toni Dimitrov
The new century introduces the era of scientific and technological development, the era in which rationality and scientific thought began to dominate. However, exactly from the moment when the greatest hopes were given to technology, science and the great theories, they seem to have failed to fulfil the expectations. Instead of being tools for achieving the ideals of humanity and attaining prosperity, they are becoming the most powerful tool of the system for establishing new forms of power and domination. Here, the theories of the technophiles and the technophobes collide; those who still believe that technology has something to contribute to humanity, as opposed to those who believe that it leads to depersonalization of individuals and establishes control.
The work refers to the anti-utopian dimensions that modern society obtains in today’s context. Total surveillance criticizes one of the most explicit “benefits” of modern society, which is a part of our everyday lives to that extent that we practically do not even notice it. Exposure to constant surveillance is also the subject of the famous anti-utopian works which accurately anticipate the consequences of improper use of technology, and the philosophical dimension of which completely corresponds to modern times. The whole constellation, in this world where the overdose of technology is considered normal and healthy, the idea of technophobia and the fear of technology sound completely foreign and unnatural.
