Join us for an evening exploring the oceans with talks and screenings by artists Kasia Molga and Amy Cutler and a live visual performance by Kristina Pulejkova.
Tue, 19 February 2019, 19:00 – 21:00
Miranda Bar, Ace Hotel
100 Shoreditch High Street
London
E1 6JQ
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Kasia Molga will present her film ‘Coral Love Story: Chapter #1 | Getting Acquainted’, which is about a wearable artwork, constantly scanning the data from the marine stations of the Great Barrier Reef. The artwork has been featured in the local media such as BBC News and specialised news on tech and media arts such as AdaFruits blog. This project is also a first official project launching Electronudes – a new design and creative tech studio set up by Kasia and her regular collaborators Erik Overmeire and Ricardo O’Nascimento.
Amy Cutler will present works inspired by the media archives of alien or deviant underwater spaces, including her jellyfish short, ‘The White Princess’, a response to the mesmeric “dances” of Painlevé’s marine documentaries, particularly Amours de la pieuvre (1965), and Cousteau’s scuba-documentary Le Monde du Silence (1956). ‘Glaucus’ is a musical setting of Gosse’s The Aquarium: Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea(1854), where the scientific writing of the field-observer is tinged with wonder / revulsion at encounters with small, aberrant sea creatures in the “fairy-land” underwater or by the sea’s edge. The film ‘Leave Me on a Rainy Afternoon’ is a love letter to the dazed atmospherics of cloud systems, 1970s geography trips, the observation/notation of rainclouds, and their links to emotion and pathetic fallacy. It includes dark sky footage from early meteorological archives, the U.S. national oceanic and aeronautical organisations, public domain pedagogical material, radio broadcasts, 16 and 35mm offcuts from expeditions, music and animations.
Kristina Pulejkova will present a live visual performance around the topic of the eel migration, focusing on their journey across the ocean. The performance is inspired by her research on the eel’s mysterious life cycle that she undertook as part of the FLAMIN Fellowship programme, supported by the Arts Council England and the Fenton Arts Trust. Kristina worked with choreographer Georgia Tegou to develop a dance piece that imagines the eels’ act of love.
It is thought that all European eels spawn in the Sargasso Sea, in the western Atlantic. No matter where they live, once sexually mature, they turn a silvery colour and make their final arduous journey to this one location, driven there by instinct. Yet, there is no scientific evidence of where exactly the eels are spawning nor what the act looks like. Scientists have so far only speculated on the occurrence of this mysterious event.
Kristina is a London-based multimedia artist who works at the intersection of art, science and technology. Working mainly with moving image and installation, she aims to build a subjective narrative based on data and principles from the scientific disciplines of astronomy, physics, biology and ecology. Her main subjects of interest are time, ecosystems and mechanisms, looking for connections between man and machine, the organic and the mechanical.
Kasia is a Design Fusionist working on intersection of art, design, technology and science. She explores emerging trends in technologies and how they can influences human perception or and relation to natural environment and convey the notion of “collaboration with nature”. Her versatile experience of working across design disciplines gave her unique ability to comprehend, communicate and connect complex concepts and ideas. She translates them into tangible, multisensory and visual experiences, immersive environments, installations and hybrid visual/physical interfaces, design fictions or speculative futures narratives. Kasia has exhibited worldwide, most notably: Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, V&A Museum, FILE, Ars Electronica, TRANSNATURAL (NL), Meta.Morf (NO), ISEA (Istanbul, Turkey), Translife Media Arts Triennial (Beijing, China), MIS (Sao Paulo, BR), Dutch Design Week (NL); and is a recipient of many international awards, grants, nominations and accolades, among many others: Wellcome Trust Award, Ars Electronica 2012 Honorary, Creative Industries NL, European N.I.C.E Award, RESHAPE 2017 Honourable Mention, LES RESPIRATIONS 2016 Special Prize for Human Sensor. Her work was featured in on and off-line magazines and TV Programmes, such as Huffington Post, The Guardian, Wired, Dutch Technology Review and BBC.
Dr. Amy Cutler is a cultural geographer, film-maker, and live performer who works with ideas of geography and nonhuman others. Her writing often draws on unsettling ideas of nature by ‘hacking’ or resetting original source narratives and pedagogical voices, from radio to nineteenth century science textbooks, including her recent Oh What Monsters tour of insect femme fatales, with French pianist and composer Delphine Dora. She also curates the international touring concert NATURE’S NICKELODEONS, supported by Live Cinema UK, which uses live cinema projection, re-scoring and performance to investigate the ways in which public concepts of nature are produced by social screening practices; this has premiered as a special event at Sheffield Doc/Fest (2018) and at International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (2018). Her recent work includes a collaboration with data artist Anna Ridler and musician Leafcutter John, in which a neural network trained on romance novels reinterprets the ‘birds and the bees’ of original Disney nature documentary footage; the resulting film, ‘All Her Beautiful Green Remains In Tears’, has been installed at BBC Broadcasting House (2018) and at Somerset House Studios (2018). Cutler currently lectures on animals in the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths University.
Image Credit: https://unsplash.com/@connorcreates_