gewerk in the garden 5: Nature as Designer

We generally think of art as a finished work created by human hands, which is presented to the world as a fixed entity. However, there are also works of art in which nature is the driving creative force, and which can continue to change even after their completion. Sometimes, it is the creative process itself that constitutes the work, rather than its final result. Process art seeks to focus attention on these creative natural processes.

As an art movement that emerged at around the same time as art – in the form of the better-known Land Art and Performance Art – was increasingly breaking free from traditional media such as canvas or paper, Process Art finds its malleable form in the ephemeral, the changeable and also in that which grows of its own accord. This makes it ideally suited to working with biological materials. Bio Art, which developed from Process Art within contemporary art, utilises biological processes and systems in conjunction with technology as means of artistic expression. Exploratory work with living materials and biotechnological methods transforms an artist into a scientist whose focus is on examining ethical and social issues, thereby opening up new intellectual and practical approaches to alternative forms of perception and visions of the future. The spectrum of biological media and processes that can be transformed into art is wide-ranging, extending from programmed cell simulations through tissue engineering to intelligent fungal cultures. Process Art and Bio Art enable scientific research and objective analysis to be carried out, which can then be translated into aesthetically appealing, spatially designed works.

At ‘gewerk in the garden 5: Nature as Designer. Biological Processes as Artistic Material’, the artist Theresa Schubert will present two of her projects that bring together science, technology, art and space: Always Dead and Alive and Sound for Fungi. The curator Sarah Maske will contextualise these projects within the framework of process art and immersive spatial installations.

Theresa Schubert is an artist and researcher. With a PhD in media art from the Bauhaus University Weimar, she focuses her artistic work on technological-biological installations that challenge anthropocentrism – a human-centred worldview. She translates her own scientific research into spatial art installations, which often incorporate a technological or media component. Her award-winning works are exhibited internationally (e.g. at Futurium Berlin, the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz and the Electro Fringe Festival in Australia), and she regularly initiates exhibitions and research projects herself.

Sarah Maske is a freelance curator, project manager and sustainability manager. During her many years of academic and institutional research at the University of Potsdam (Brandenburg Centre for Media Studies) and at the ZKM | Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, she explored process-based, ecological art as a source of inspiration for future models in which the boundaries between humans, nature and technology dissolve. Most recently, she worked as a curator for the Daimler Art Collection. Her long-term project ‘Sandsturm’ in Istanbul and Berlin examines global ecological processes. An exhibition on the theme of process art, which she commented on in an essay, was The Process of Becoming at the Galerie im Körnerpark in Berlin.

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