6 - For The Love of Experimentation

Art has long held up a lens to science and technology. It has even been a driving force behind scientific innovation. Science fiction writers and artists relish the potential that new scientific discoveries represent.

Named after the collection of short stories by author and biochemist Isaac Asimov, Robot Dreams was a contemporary art exhibition that took place at the Kunsthaus in Graz at the end of 2010. Part of the steirischer herbst festival, and supported by the AVL Cultural Foundation, artists were invited to create works that explored subjects such as cybernetics and artificial intelligence. And they were posed the question “where does contemporary technology stand?”

Artists such as Thomas Baumann, John Bock, Kirsty Boyle, John Kessler, Richard Kriesche, Nikolaus Passath and others explored these topics and more. A vast spectrum of perspectives challenged and excited visitors to the exhibition, which was organized in collaboration with the Tinguely Museum in Basel.

The history of ceramics is as old as the history of technology. Today ceramics are found everywhere in science from automobile components to computers and superconductors. The progress of ceramics in art has mirrored its progress in science, and as new applications for ceramic materials have been found in the world of technology, new ways of working with them have been explored by artists.

Supported by the AVL Cultural Foundation, the Kneaded Knowledge exhibition was an exploration of ceramic art. Encapsulating thousands of years of the history of ceramics, the exhibition ran from September 2016 to February 2017 at the Kunsthaus Graz. The event was curated by the renowned Peter Pakesch with support from famous ceramicist Edmund de Waal and globally revered artist Ai Weiwei. It featured works by Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Alison Britton, Hans Coper, Lucio Fontana, Lydia Benglis, and of course Ai Weiwei and Edmund de Waal.

Through the medium of ceramic art, visitors can see how artists through the ages have physically worked with the material. It explores the art, the function, and the creativity of the people who made the works, and the cultures for which the works were made. And in reflecting this, it connects us with our own past and heritage through the physical medium of ceramics.

AVLIFE was a 1995 event attended by almost 10,000 guests, both in person and via live streaming. The project was an art performance that sought to use technical know-how as a basis for artistic experimentation. Split across four acts that took their themes from technology, media and biology, act one amalgamated the cumulative emotions of the audience to create a ‘meta-person’ which then evaluated a car from this new collective human emotional perspective.

AVLIFE combined works by a variety of artists, including Richard Kriesche and Josef Klammer, to offer a new way of seeing the relationship between humans, technology and art. It used emotion and research data as inspiration for the creation of music, visual art and performance.

Scientists search for patterns – causes and their effects, questions and their answers. The AVL Cultural Foundation asked cultural theorist Peter Oswald to examine the ‘causes’ that are found in the sounds of locations and times: cities, the countryside, the political climate of regions. And in his essay, Sound, Silence, Cities, he attempts to link them to the ‘effects’ of cultural phenomena. In particular musical composition.

How do places and politics influence the cultural impact of music creation? How does nature inspire composers to create orchestral works? How do the noises of the jungle – birdsong, white water rapids, insects and frogs – influence musicians to create significant artistic works? What influence do these environments have on their work and how does their work reflect back upon the locations and cultures that inspired them.

From the hustle and bustle of Vienna to the jungles of Costa Rica and the city streets of New York, Oswald takes us on a whistle-stop tour of the world. Examining the cause and effect of our surroundings on our culture, he asks if this is a new type of language – a dialogue between the arts and the world they find themselves a part of.

Both a film festival and a forum for discussion, Diagonale presents the best new work from the Austrian film scene for critical review in its home market. As the popularity and media attention of Diagonale has grown since its launch in 1998, filmmakers who submit their work now find themselves increasingly in the public eye, and the subject of public discourse.

The AVL Cultural Foundation has been a long-standing partner for the opening of the festival at the Helmut List Halle. The Graz cultural event, has hosted more than 1,300 films since its launch and attracts more than 25,000 visitors each year. Diagonale prefers to embrace a diverse range of filmmaking rather than being confined to a particular genre, and young filmmakers in particular are eager to get involved and have their films seen by the public.

A continuing partnership between the GISAlab (Girls in Science and Art) laboratory, and the AVL Cultural Foundation, this collection of science art projects seeks to encourage girls between the ages of 8 and 15 to get excited about science and technology. Working with artists and scientists in a series of fun workshops, the children are asked to explore ideas and concepts such as: what does my heartbeat look like? How do I transform sound into light? Can you use topics such as drivability and acceleration to give robots an artistic soul?

One such project was the art and science workshop, Crazy Robots. Under the watchful eye of robotic artist Nikolaus Passath, the young engineers were invited by GISAlab to build robots, and then command them to create a huge artwork with paint and brushes. The girls built the machines with modular parts, and then learned how to program them with a variety of functions and motion sequences, to create different shapes on the floor of the AVL Academy.

Exploring the interplay between art and technology in a fun and creative way, workshops like these give youngsters a unique insight into the world of science and engineering. Sometimes they get to take a masterpiece home to show their parents.

A continuing partnership between the GISAlab (Girls in Science and Art) laboratory, and the AVL Cultural Foundation, this collection of science art projects seeks to encourage girls between the ages of 8 and 15 to get excited about science and technology. Working with artists and scientists in a series of fun workshops, the children are asked to explore ideas and concepts such as: what does my heartbeat look like? How do I transform sound into light? Can you use topics such as drivability and acceleration to give robots an artistic soul?

One such project was the art and science workshop, Crazy Robots. Under the watchful eye of robotic artist Nikolaus Passath, the young engineers were invited by GISAlab to build robots, and then command them to create a huge artwork with paint and brushes. The girls built the machines with modular parts, and then learned how to program them with a variety of functions and motion sequences, to create different shapes on the floor of the AVL Academy.

Exploring the interplay between art and technology in a fun and creative way, workshops like these give youngsters a unique insight into the world of science and engineering. Sometimes they get to take a masterpiece home to show their parents.

Technology (hightech) and technological revolutions have long had an influence on social norms (lowtech). This relationship between the two poses new questions about mankind’s search for meaning, and in doing so it asks us to reassess the very nature of art, and of technology, and their interaction, identity, and influence upon themselves and society.

This topic was the foundation for a series of events, titled hightech/lowtech, which were held at the Forum Stadtpark in Graz, Austria in 2000. Organized by AVL in collaboration with the steirische herbste international festival for contemporary art, the program aimed to answer questions about the relationship between technology and aesthetic engineering, the accessibility of technology for artistic productions, and the understanding of technology in art.

As well as an art exhibition, the hightech/lowtech program of events involved workshops, art seminars, presentations, lectures, forums, films, videos and concerts.

Much like a player piano, a Welte-Mignon piano was able to record a piece of music precisely as it was played, and then replay it in exactly the same manner. With his fascination of technology (he was one of the first residents of Vienna to own a bicycle) it didn’t take much to convince the composer Gustav Mahler to record a performance on one of the devices.

Having a machine that can replay a piece of music exactly as a composer performed it means that, even more than a hundred years after his death, Mahler can accompany other performers in the rendition of his works as if he were there in the flesh. This idea formed the basis of the 2014 styriarte-SOAP performance, which combined theatre, video, song and a variety of different performance arts to bring Mahler’s work and life to willing audiences.

Like Mahler and the AVL Cultural Foundation itself, styriarte-SOAP performances are concerned with the combination of art and science. Fusing acting, storytelling, music, singing and other art forms with technologies such as digital video projection gives the art extra dimensions that bring it to life. Creating immersive experiences for audiences in this way brings them closer to the artists and their art, and with this performance in particular they were able to sit in the same room as Gustav Mahler – virtually.

Every year since 2011, employees from AVL Regensberg in Germany have teamed up with students from the Institute for Art Education at the University of Regensberg to create something exciting, innovative and new. Under the watchful eye of their tutor, Josef Mittlmeier, the students collaborate with the AVL engineers to bring together ideas from economics, technology, art and to create artworks inspired by the work, culture and values of AVL. And at the same time they gain valuable insight into AVL, its history, and the work of its people.

The annual project series results in a wide variety of new art with themes spanning technology, economics and much more. Every year the works are displayed in an exhibition at a prestigious location. In the past these venues have included the Budapest Technical Museum and the Leerer Beutel Gallery in Regensberg.

Complex systems are all around us. In nature, in society, in almost every aspect of the universe there is complexity. Both scientists and artists have set themselves the task of making sense of complex systems, of finding patterns where at first there may appear to be none.

Whether it is human societal interaction, fluid dynamics, or musical composition, scientists and artists seek order in the chaos. Just as a sculptor finds form within the complexity of the rock, scientists search for understanding and predictability through mathematical equations and experimentation.

In this project, supported by the AVL Cultural Foundation, cultural theorist Peter Oswald roams the world of complexity as he speaks with philosopher of science Professor Dr. Klaus Mainzer and contemporary composer Rebecca Saunders. And in doing so he explores how complexity has influenced the works of musicians such as Olga Neuwirth, Beat Furrer and Gustav Mahler, architects such as Wolf Prix and Zaha Hadid, and the physicist Henri Poincaré.

Sound artist Bill Fontana has been experimenting with technology and noise as a form of sculpture since the 1960s. Some of his works have crossed continents as he’s worked with radio waves, some have found permanent homes, such as the Sonic Mapping sculpture in the entrance hall of the MAXII Museum in Rome. All of them explore our relationship with sound, and the world around us. In particular his works play with the idea of making hidden sounds – the sounds that we overlook every day – both audible and visible. He even extends his experiments to sounds that cannot be heard by the human ear. A bell that does not ring. The sound of the sand in the desert.

He has travelled the world, working with sounds of the desert in Abu Dhabi for his 2014 sound experiment Desert Soundings, and visiting the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva for his 2013 Acoustic Time Travel work. And he has been exhibited in museums around the planet, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Cologne’s Museum Ludwig, London’s Tate Modern and Tate Britain museums, and the 48th Venice Biennale.

In 2015, as part of impuls –the International Ensemble and Composers Academy of Contemporary Music – the AVL Cultural Foundation invited Fontana to Graz to speak about his work. His lecture, Acoustical Visions and the Phenomenology of Sound, gave insight into his understanding of sound, his artistic sound experiments and a behind the scenes look into his latest projects. During his visit he took time to meet with AVL’s acoustic engineers, and learn what role sounds plays in the development of the motor vehicle, and the driver’s relationship with it.