Splendor in the Gras & Stick Bugged Speed Run

Veranstaltung

Mögliche Zukünfte des Rhinluchs – spekulative Entwürfe zur Koexistenz
Prof Undine Giseke + Studierende
BOL Küche
&
Splendor in the Grass
Hana Yoo
Foyer
&
Stick Bugged Speed Run
Anan Yoon Lee
Artist Talk (deutsch & english)
Foyer

11:00–13:00
register here

Mögliche Zukünfte des Rhinluchs – spekulative Entwürfe zur Koexistenz von Prof Undine Giseke

Nichts ist mit allem verbunden, alles ist mit etwas verbunden. Donna J. Harawy 2018

Je nach ihrem Zustand sind Moore Klimakiller oder Hoffnungsträger: Moore sind ideale CO2-Speicher, werden sie jedoch trockengelegt, so werden sie zu einer Belastung für das Klima. Dies war Ausgangsunkt für unsere Beschäftigung mit einer Moorregion gleich hinter den Toren Berlins: dem Rhinluch.

Das Rhinluch verfügt über eine lange Geschichte. Geomorphologisch ist es geprägt durch die letzte Eiszeit und das vor mehr als 12000 Jahren entstandene Eberswalder Urstromtal. Seitdem hat es vielfältige Veränderungen erfahren. Wie kann seine Zukunft als Teil der europäischen Metropolregion Berlin-Brandenburg und zugleich als eine Landschaft im Anthropozän aussehen? Dieser Aufgabe haben sich Studierende im Entwurfsstudio Verwandtschaftsräume der Masterstudiengänge Landschaftsarchitektur + Urban Design an der TU Berlin im Sommersemester 2021 gestellt.

Ziel des Entwurfsstudios war es, an tradierten Lesarten des Rhinluchs zu rütteln. Der Aufforderung von Donna Haraways eines “Making Kin” folgend haben wir uns auf die Suche nach möglichen Formen der Koexistenz von menschlichen und nicht-menschlichen Akteuren im Rhinluch gemacht. Für uns ging es dabei um eine spekulative Auseinandersetzung mit der Gegenwart, Vergangenheit und Zukunft des Rhinluchs als Lebensraum für alle Lebewesen.

Wir haben versucht, Verwandtschaft breiter zu denken als rein biologisch und reproduktiv und uns gefragt, was es bedeutet, wenn wir ein neues Verständnis des Miteinanders anhand der Akteure im Rhinluch entwickeln. Wir haben vielfältige Fragen erörtert – etwa zu einer biologisch-kulturell-politisch-technologischen Genesung des Rhinluchs oder wie eine artenübergreifende Gerechtigkeit aussehen könnte – und haben diese in Teams aus Landschaftsarchitekt*innen und Urban Designer*innen in konkrete Konzepte für den Raum zu übersetzen versucht.
Undine Giseke und Jonas Möller sowie die Teilnehmer*innen des Studios: Tobias Baeumer Nathan Bram, Ying Gao, Leo Grösch, Christoph Gudewer, Xiaoxuan Huang, Juliana Francesca Keßen, Yuanzhihong Liu, Anne Mann, Alejandro Orduz-Trujillo, Nora Rieger, Julia von Rinck

"Splendor in the Grass"
by Hana Yoo
The project started with inspiration from an experiment conducted on cattle at a dairy farm in Moscow, showing them a virtual image of peaceful grassland on a cow-customized VR headset. The article that describes this experiment implies the VR experiment reduces the anxiety of cows and has shown a possible increase in milk production. The utilization of technical apparatus in the welfare of both humans and animals have different purposes, e.g. cows for milk and meat production - humans for improving their quality of life. However, the subject-object relationship in the scientific experiment has strong similarities in the dynamic between the political system and the people. The assumption that presenting utopian images will reduce anxiety connects to the sovereign control of mental health and female reproductive labor being the ultimate catalysis for capitalism. With various purposes, the endeavor to change perspective and overcome the boundary of visual perception has been technologically achieved, for instance in VR. However, it simultaneously reveals numerous limitations that oversimplify the individual’s experience and relationship to their environment, along with not taking into account the psychological implications in their entirety. How could one embrace the complexity while detouring from the idea of ‘self’? Inspired by children’s stories and human-animal metamorphosis in mythologies, the film and installation take an extremely exaggerated anthropomorphic view of non-humans, which paradoxically reveal the position of humans to widen perceptions, whilst confronting limitations.

"Stick Bugged Speed Run"
by Anan Yoon Lee
This work is about speculative creatures, which are animated and automated by the machine learning algorithm. The Installation displays a real-time simulation of the AI agents athletics. The 6-legged agents are learning themselves to walk forward as fast as possible. According to the rule of Reinforcement learning, it will get rewarded when it moves faster and longer without failing down. The agents keep learning, heading to the invisible goal, but respawning at starting point endlessly before they reach the end of the level.While the agents are learning, the second monitor shows the discrete footages of the uncanny insect, the so-called ‘walking stick’, the master of mimicry and the data-mother of the agent runners. Her biological name is Phasmatodea, meaning ‘Ghost’, referring to their resemblance to vegetation while in fact being animals. She is an illusion between animal, plant, object and blurs the boundary between animate and inanimate. The videos prove this iconic insect which became a key inspiration for both scientists and artists to create animate beings, sometimes as a military robot, or as a diegetic character for the video game. In South Korea, the Stick bug is indicator species for detecting the ecological effects of a changing climate. They were overpopulated epidemically and decimated due to the warming winter. The footages reveal the moment the stick insects get exterminated. They cease to play dead to become real dead. A mixture of fear and empathy is projected on this species. More speculative and less biologically, we are all together stick-bugged. While the agents are running, they ruminate on their mother insect. The found footage and real-time machine learning simulations are mixed in multi-channel installation as if it shows the shared memory of stick insect agents. The algorithm decides itself the subject of the camera - the agents to follow with, and chooses the found footages also in random order, as Random Access Memory. The AI-driven movement and the captured motion of living stick buck crash on these racing tracks - the entanglement of the lifelike-dead object and deadlike-living animals. The gym becomes the place of movement, the constitution of life, liveness and liveliness, the unstable boundaries of the organic and the synthetic, and the remembered histories and projected futures of anatomical and technical configurations of post-organism, as well as post-animation.They never stop playing/learning/thinking until their world (Program) ends without knowing what comes at the end of the level. The Speedrun is never completed.