| Beschreibung |
Our contemporary condition increasingly shows that human activities have a destructive effect on ecosystems — such as encompassing environmental degradation, transformations in social relations, and effects on cognitive and mental ecologies — call for renewed artistic and research-based inquiry into humanity’s conditions of existence. In response, artists and researchers from the Media Environments and Acoustic Ecologies. Chairs at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar propose a framework that shifts attention away from computational systems understood in isolation, toward the broader field of relational interactions in which biological, technological, and perceptual processes coemerge. The works contributed to this year’s Ars Electronica exhibition build upon ongoing research initiatives, including Non-Machines, PostCompost, Listening to Change and Wetlands. These projects approach life not as a discrete, bounded, or fully computable entity, but as a dynamic constellation of relational processes. Within this constellation, humans, non-human organisms, materials, and technological systems participate in continuous exchanges that generate emergent forms of agency, perception, and organization. Rather than positioning technology as external to life, these works investigate how technological and biological processes mutually inform and transform one another. Situated at the intersection of contemporary art, biology, cybernetics, and transdisciplinary practice, the proposed contribution advances a shift beyond mechanistic and anthropocentric paradigms. It foregrounds hybrid systems in which agency is distributed, contingent, and co-constituted through interaction. The works function both as artistic propositions and epistemic instruments, enabling visitors to
encounter and reflect upon processes that challenge conventional distinctions between organism and environment, subject and object, and living and non-living systems. Through artistic experimentation, ecological engagement, and theoretical reflection, the contribution articulates an alternative conceptual framework in which life, art, and technology are understood as inseparable and mutually constitutive processes. In doing so, it invites audiences to reconsider their position within complex ecological and technological entanglements, and to reflect on the forms of responsibility, care, and imagination required to inhabit these conditions. |
