Programme
Artists, researchers, students and professors perform in the hybrid reality grove which merges physical grove with the 4500 sq.m. SODAS2123 complex, considered as a hive or swarm full of actants including Alt Lab, symposium Ūmėdė, Letmekoo, etc. Experience the grove from multiple perspectives of creatures working and living in and around it (from artists to microorganisms) by following a wandering camera(wo)man, tree climber, flying drone, running or crawling pet (dog, cat, bird, rat) or even branch or herb movement.
WEDNESDAY, Sept 9th, 5.20-5.50 pm EEST (GMT+3)
Format: GLOBAL LIVE artist talk + pre-recorded video
Experiencing lives
Mindaugas Gapševičius (DE/LT), Brigita Kasperaitė (DE/LT), Rūta Spelskytė (LT), Auksė Gaižauskaitė (LT)
Moderation: Valentinas Klimašauskas
The artist talk raises the question of collaboration between different species. It will start with a presentation of three projects: two toolkits for experimenting with living organisms and a conversation about microorganisms and their hosts. The artist talk is hosted by the Alt lab, a non-disciplinary research laboratory dedicated to artistic-scientific research and implementation of interdisciplinary projects.
Mindaugas Gapševičius
Microorganisms and their Hosts
Video, ~4min
In collaboration with Valentinas Klimašauskas and Auksė Gaižauskaitė
The video Microorganisms and their Hosts proposes to reconsider the ecology of a human while questioning the impact of the microbiome, researching self-healing strategies, and experiencing the artwork in parallel to the changing environmental conditions. How can one experience their microbiome? Is there any dependence between what we eat, how we behave, and what we think?
The video guides through scientific research, artistic considerations, and the consumption of fermented foods. It also introduces different perspectives on the symbiotic relationship between humans and their microbiomes.
Mindaugas Gapševičius (b. 1974) is an artist, based in Berlin and Vilnius. He obtained his MA at Vilnius Academy of Arts in 1999, and his MPhil at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2016. Since 2016, he has been conducting PhD research at Bauhaus University, Weimar, where he holds an artistic associate chair. His works question the creativity of machines, and do not presume humans are the only creative force.
Brigita Kasperaitė
The Birth of Venus
Toolkit, video, ~4min
While in the past electroconvulsive therapy was used in very questionable ways, we can admit one thing, the reality is questionable in itself. And while the artist Brigita Kasperaitė explores the natural and synthetic ways of electrical discharges and how they might affect the surroundings, she is also interested in knowing and experiencing that electricity is everywhere – as well as our bodies. To this ground, the artist wishes to explore electricity deeper and suggest investigating electroconvulsive therapy in different ways. While electricity might be a source to cause pain (military industry, lightning) it is also a source to cause pleasure (sex industry), and by investigating these two binary oppositions, the aim is to explore what might happen in between, as the nature of the world was never build only for the two of these sides.
The toolkit provides tools to explore electricity, from the basis of electroconvulsive therapy and how to change or influence the user.
Brigita Kasperaitė is a multidisciplinary artist who works and lives in Berlin (DE) and Kaunas (LT).
Rūta Spelskytė
Rethinking alive as material
Toolkit, video, ~4min
The toolkit is designed to rethink alive as material. To think of the ways we can use nature, create tools out of it, imagine or train plant and animal features, construct their development in the future, and on the other hand – how to take a moment to stop and just appreciate it.
The toolkit includes:
Dactylopius coccus also called cochineal bugs or E21 were used as a red pigment by the Aztecs as early as the 10th century and they are still used today.
Pyrocystis lunula is bioluminescent marine algae that emits blue light when disturbed.
Kombucha SCOBY (symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast) can be used to brew drink and also as leathery paper material when dried.
Fungus Chlorociboria aeruginascens causes a special discoloration in wood by producing the blue-green pigment xylindein. It was used by the artists in the 15th century and there are attempts by the veneer industry to make the coloring process a mass production. Chlorociboria aeruginascens also is said to be bioluminescent.
Desmodium gyrans is the dancing plant. By singing or playing music at its early stages of growing you can develop a wider range of leaf movements for the plant compared to those grown in silence.
Rūta Spelskytė has a Ph.D. in art with a special interest in misunderstandings and failures of human dialogue and interrelations between science and extro-science fiction worlds unaccessed by our instruments and the pattern of thought. She works with rare specimens, emission of light and pigments, imagining future alchemy, plants, animals, the relativity of time and sense of speed.
FRIDAY
Ignas Pavliukevičius (LT)
Standing waves
FRIDAY, Sep 11th at 6.50PM EEST (GMT+3)
Format: ~15 min live interactive performance on the roof with streaming + pre-recorded video.
Every living being on our planet is surrounded by an electrical field – whether generated by the organism itself, exuded by electromagnetic fields of forests, animals, man-made devices, or stemming from extra-terrestrial sources, such as outer space. All of them interact with each other in the form of various signals, connecting everything living and dead. Humans also generate and project a field of energy – a very low-frequency electromagnetic field – even if its signal is very weak. The human electromagnetic field fluctuates depending on its unique state, and these changes can be captured. It allows us to capture in real-time the changing human energetic field and turn these changes into sound, thus allowing a nearby person to feel the changes of energy in their own body and each of its cells. For the AE Garden, Vilnius installation will become a 15 minutes performance on the rooftop of Sodas 2123, visible only from a bird’s eye perspective.
Sep 11 7-7.55pm EEST (GMT+3)
Format: GLOBAL LIVE
Format: live edited multi-screen streaming (with interaction possibilities on Mozilla Hubs and Youtube) + pre-recorded video
PhAMA/ FAMM department at Vilnius Academy of Arts (LT)
Multi-eyed creature navigating and traversing the grove
AE Garden VIlnius Mozilla Hub hosts directed multiangle and XR Live Experience of the Garden where around 15 live events and usual grove life are happening in numerous spaces inside and outside and dozen cameras are directed by humans, animals and plants. You can navigate through busy culture events or find your calm spot to enjoy the life of nature.
Students will create the 3D scan of the venue and grove around it and let the online viewer travel and traverse physical spaces as transparent habitats. An assemblage of 10-15 cameras will allow the connected viewer to experience the event, building, surrounding grove and grooves through various viewing angles (both human and non-human as well as both live-view and simulated or animated). This experience will let you fully immerse into the mediated reality in POV, drone-view, animal-view, bug-view, plant-view, etc.
Moreover students’ 3D gallery will feature a collection of their recent works which responded to the pandemic situation.
PhAMA (Photography, Animation and Media Art) is a community of 80 students in BA, 20 in MA and 5 in Doctor of Arts programmes plus around 15 professors. They are interested in practice and theory based research on media, art and related matters.
Vitalij Červiakov (LT)
Calvaria – participatory walk (partly represented in Mozilla Hub)
Heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, blood oxygen level – all those things we are measuring and recording with portable and simple designed devices and sharing that information for analysis and storing to contemporary or future big data wealthiest. How are different processes of our body and mind changing during walking? Is it possible to capture and to research it with EEG scanners help? Walking series “Calvaria” tries to consider how walking with some prepared and directed circumstances affects our feelings and emotions.
Vitalij Červiakov is an artist and a PhD student at Vilnius Art Academy. He is organising psychogeographic performative participatory walks at prepared locations with special created scripts and different experiences of action.
SATURDAY, Sep 12th at 6.00-7.00PM EEST (GMT+3)
Ūmėdė (live stream of the pre-symposium discussion)
artists & curators collective
In the discussion panel: artist & speculative designer Julijonas Urbonas, Pixelache Helsinki festival co-director, artist & organiser Andrew Gryf Paterson (FIN/SCO), artist Ignas Pavliukevičius, artist and composer Gailė Griciūtė, TBA
Moderator: dr. Vytautas Michelkevičius
Ūmėdė is x⬳disciplinary symposium for emerging art & related matters and takes its name from the Lithuanian name of the mushroom Russula.
The first iteration of the festival-like event in mid-November is questioning “What happened after the meteorite of the Anthropocene has hit contemporary art, and bioactivists together with AI and XR have exploded the discourse formerly known as media art?”
Ūmėdė in the pre-event during AE Garden will bring critical roots (background) to it, experimenting and reflecting how we can stay together in one space with humans and non-humans in post-pandemic times. By making it we are also thinking about what kind of formats are possible today for the x-disciplinary festival. Initiator of this festival Vytautas Michelkevičius was running a series of 9 Inter-format Symposiums in Nida Art Colony (2011-2019) with an aim to bridge the gap between academic and art events and find a relevant platform for knowledge production and sharing in art and science.
Eye Gymnastics (LT)
The World is Here For You
SATURDAY, Sep 12th at 8PM EEST (GMT+3)
Format: ~30 min live performance in the grove with streaming + 15 min pre-recorded video
For the AE Garden Vilnius festival duo presents a two live vocals performance, subtle spoken melodies and soar beats in a dialog with Arturas Bumšteinas’ musical material. During the show, the performers connect eye exercises inspired texts with gradually evolving melodic inserts, spoken songs. In a midst of all suddenly accommodating autumn rush, repetitive, hypnotic recitation invites you to exercise your gaze and see through within.
Eye Gymnastics is a stage name of Viktorija Damerell and Gailė Griciūtė. The artists collaborate on creating performances of experimental music, vocal instructions and incantations. In their investigations, sensual timbres merge with mental voyages, hypnosis and echoes of pop.
Open Studios of LTMKS/Letmekoo.lt artists (works in the Letmekoo.lt space at Mozilla Hub)
Artists: Akvilė Anglickaitė, Tomas Daukša, Saulius Leonavičius, Tomas Martišauskis, Emilija Škarnulytė and others.
Artists of Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association open up their working studios and invite to explore contexts of heterotopias, technological mythologies, structured commonism, hybridised beings.
Virtual students’ exhibition “Hopes & Slopes” (online gallery linked from Mozilla Hub)
Artists: Eva Rodz, Viktorija Balkutė, Vilija Simutytė, Kotryna Šarkutė, Jokūbas Vaicekauskas, Ainė Petkūnaitė, Agata Tracevič, Žilvinas Baranauskas, Kasparas Pilinkus and others
Virtual gallery www.iltys.eu
Made during the most intensive quarantine period works by artists from the youngest generation rethink isolation, solitude, remoteness, trauma and translate them into visual and aural vibes. All these artists are studying Animation or Photography and Media Art (PhAMA) at Vilnius Academy of Arts.
If one stares at the wall for a long time, the wall starts to move. To crave, to wag its tail, to drop its leaves or to sough, to growl, to tick, to show filtered faces,
to flirt via Internet,
until it leaves one in solitude after bursting,
in front of a Facebook wall, where Zoom links ripple.
I get lost.
An exhibition by a group of young artists titled Hopes & Slopes is a place for a safe walk among what has fallen out a few months back. Dust and scattered memories; meanings lost in translations and primeval human found by the world tree somewhere nearby; advice on how to feel alive after falling out of this tree with a traumatic fracture (or after having lost one’s head), a gaze of a drone watching the drying laundry in a courtyard of a city district and non-existent cities roaring in texts… the artworks are just like various objects stored in tin boxes, which got there under various circumstances – they smile, they grin, they exhibit what they are longing for.
This is an exhibition about time measured in hopes. Its measuring units are slopes which were scattered after human heads covered with masks were dewed from exhaled air and anxiety. The artworks of Hopes & Slopes hover like fairy tales – you need to find yourself in the right place at the right time and then the portal to the other reality will open. But be cautious! While you are there, you may be bitten by the stories from photographs, or by strange creatures from sound recordings; some of them are climbing the walls, drifting in texts, stealing faces and pretending to be you, because of this inhuman solitude. Caution is the parent of safety, see where you meander – slopes!
Programme
https://arselectronica.sodas2123.lt/programme/
Artworks and 3D Mozilla Hub
https://ars.electronica.art/keplersgardens/en/groves/
TEAM
Curator-commissionaire:
Vytautas Michelkevičius
Curatorial team: Danutė Gambickaitė, Lina Rukevičiūtė, Mindaugas Gapševičius, Ignas Pavliukevičius, Gailė Griciūtė
Artists: Mindaugas Gapševičius, Ignas Pavliukevičius, Gailė Griciūtė, Brigita Kasperaitė, Rūta Spelskytė, Valentinas Klimašauskas, Auksė Gaižauskaitė, Vitalij Červiakov, ūmėdė, Andrew Gryf Paterson, Julijonas Urbonas and others
Team: Antanas Skučas, Arturas Bukauskas, Paulius Žižliauskas, Gailė Cijūnaitytė, Nidas Kaniušas, Eva Rodz, Žilvinas Baranauskas, Gabija Pernavaitė; and all students, artists and collaborators
Organised by:
Instituto Media, LTMKS / Letmekoo (Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association), Ūmėdė / MENE, VDA PhAMA (Department of Photography and Media Art at Vilnius Academy of Arts)
Supported by Lithuanian Culture for Council, Vilnius City Municipality, Robotics School Vilnius, Vilnius Academy of Ars