Test_Lab: Smart Hybrid Forms
Test_Lab: Smart Hybrid Forms at V2_Lab for Unstable Media, puts us in the triangle of art, technology and vegetal life. Recent artistic experiments bring back a longstanding question concerning the power of the vegetal: how can we use plants’ sensitivity to light, touch, frequencies, chemicals and electrical signaling to learn more about the environment?
By exploring plants’ sensory abilities under different conditions, natural and manipulated, these artists merge organic and inorganic systems to create new forms of intelligence. Wired together, these hybrid forms can obtain environmental data, survive in postnatural environments, communicate at a distance, and involve themselves in acts of play.
Acknowledging the disparity between the human and plant sensory ecologies, this edition of Test_Lab invites you to surrender to the vegetal pace and vegetal ways of communication. Attune yourself to other natural and manipulated forms of sentience – or, as Natasha Myers puts it: “Vegetalize your sensorium.”
Artists – Špela Petrič, Maria Castellanos, Katrin Petroschkat, Andy Gracie, Saša Spačal and an introductory conversation with Alice Smits, artistic director of Zone2Source.
Curator – Katažyna Jankovska
Design – Ringailė Demšytė
Photo – Davids Danoss
Video – Anaïs Saebu
V2_Lab for Unstable Media, Rotterdam, 2022
Test_Lab is a public events series organized by V2_ that provides an informal setting for the presentation, demonstration, testing and discussion of artistic research and development.
This edition of Test_Lab is a part of Smart Hybrid Forms, a collaboration of V2_Lab for the Unstable Media with Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Zone2Source, Waag and Gerrit Rietveld Academy and co-funded by the Dutch research council NWO.
