We are delighted that Resurrecting the Sublime received an Honorary Mention in the Artificial Intelligence & Life Art category at the Prix Ars Electronica 2019. This year, the Prix received a total of 3,256 entries from 82 countries. We will show documentation of the project in the CyberArts exhibition at OK OÖ Kulturquartier, as part of the Ars Electronica Festival.
Photograph: © Vitra Design Museum, Bettina Matthiesen.
Curated by Viviane Stappmans, Better Nature opened on the 19th July at Vitra Design Museum Gallery at the Vitra Campus, Weil am Rhein. This first solo show includes six projects made between 2009 and 2019.
'British artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg (born in London in 1982) investigates the relationship between nature and the man-made, exploring how this interconnection changes through advances in design and technology. The resulting artworks tell evocative stories that are at once provocative and ironic. From 20 July to 24 November 2019, the Vitra Design Museum Gallery presents a solo exhibition tracing Ginsberg’s journey as an artist and critical designer. Trained in architecture and interaction design, she has been especially interested in the emerging technoscience of "synthetic biology" – the design of living matter. Within this context, Ginsberg has been intrigued by the premise that underpins all approaches to design: the desire to make things »better«. But what exactly does better mean? Better for whom? And who decides? These questions, which are crucial in times of radical technological and scientific advances, are the basis of "Better Nature".'
Photograph: © Vitra Design Museum, Bettina Matthiesen.
Photograph: © Vitra Design Museum, Bettina Matthiesen.
Photograph: © Vitra Design Museum, Bettina Matthiesen.
The Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial opened simulataneously at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in NYC and at Cube design museum, Kerkrade, Netherlands, on the 10th May. The organising museums commissioned a new work, The Substitute, and a new edition of Resurrecting the Sublime where visitors can smell the extinct Orbexilum stipulatum, last seen (and smelled) in 1881, in Kentucky, US.
Digital reconstruction of the extinct Hibiscadelphus wilderianus Rock on the southern slopes of Mount Haleakala, Maui, Hawaii, around the time of its last sighting in 1912. © Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg.
Resurrecting the Sublime, a major new collaborative project, launches today in the exhibition La Fabrique du Vivant, curated by Marie-Ange Brayer, at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. The project is a collaboration between Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Sissel Tolaas, and an interdisciplinary team of researchers and engineers from the biotechnology company Ginkgo Bioworks, led by Creative Director Dr. Christina Agapakis, with the support of IFF Inc. You can read more about the project here.
At the Centre Pompidou, a 1m x1m suspended smell hood diffuses the smell of the extinct Hibiscadelphus wilderianus Rock, which was lost around 1912 as its habitat on ancient lava fields on the southern slopes of Mount Haleakala, Maui, Hawaii, was destroyed by colonial cattle ranching. Using DNA extracted from a pressed flower specimen from Harvard University’s Herbarium, Ginkgo’s scientists predicted and then resynthesized gene sequences that encode for fragrance-producing enzymes. From this information, Tolaas reconstructed the flowers’ smells. While we know which smell molecules the flower may have produced, the amounts are also lost. Thus, fragments of the smell mix in the hood: there is no “exact” smell. The lost landscape is reduced to its geology (a large lava boulder, as found on the slopes of Mount Haleakala), and the flower’s smell: the human connects the two, and in contrast to a natural history museum, the human becomes the specimen on view.
The work will appear in a number of exhbitions this year, in different iterations and with different flowers. For more information, visit resurrectingthesublime.com.
Daisy contributed a chapter on "Critical Imaginaries to this essential new book about imagining about the future, edited by Jan Boelen, Ils Huygens, and Heini Lehtinen. Buy it here!
"The ability to use imagination to envision future needs is crucial in art, design and architecture. Future thinking and making require the capacity to create narratives for near and far futures and to compose proposals to meet the imagined needs of the future. Future-oriented creative practices also require future literacy—understanding the temporal continuum in which future-oriented work is created and being aware of the underlying incentives, motivations and structures of works, commissioned or self-initiated. Similarly, viewing or consuming speculative creative works requires some level of understanding of the context of the works.
Studio Time: Future Thinking in Art and Design approaches these questions with essays from international design and art thinkers, a number of shorter essays and a selection of art, design and architecture projects. The book consists of three parts that each focus on future fictions in art and design from different perspectives: future fictions and imagination in creative practices, future literacy and future ethics. Each part consists of two essays, two reflective contributions from artists and designers and selected projects from practitioners around the world.
The book is a closing chapter of Studio Future, which is one of the research studios developed by Belgium-based Z33 House for Contemporary Art. Since 2012, Studio Future has focused on a variety of aspects of future-oriented art and design practices through different research and exhibition projects, accompanied by online and offline publications."
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Photograph: © Vitra Design Museum, Bettina Matthiesen.
Photograph: © Vitra Design Museum, Bettina Matthiesen.
Photograph: © Vitra Design Museum, Bettina Matthiesen.
Photograph: © Vitra Design Museum, Bettina Matthiesen.
Digital reconstruction of the extinct Hibiscadelphus wilderianus Rock on the southern slopes of Mount Haleakala, Maui, Hawaii, around the time of its last sighting in 1912. © Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg.