They Are Watching Us
When a bird sounds an alarm, when a mosquito tracks our heat, or when a forest registers our passage, nature's surveillance completely bypasses our social constructs. We typically view surveillance as a one-way street, from human to non-human. Yet, this creates a profound blind spot by ignoring how intensely we are monitored in return.
Who is really watching whom?
Join us as we close our third residency period for an evening of tasting, touching, and embodying the living habitats around us!
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Visitor Information
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Program Timeline:
18:30 - 19:00: Doors open
19:00 - 20:00: Are you a feeder? - Thijs de Zeeuw, Jolanda Verspagen and The Gramounce (Talk)
20:00 - 21:30: Seaweed Becomings - Salicornia Studio (Tasting/Spatial Installation)
20:00 - 21:30: Embodying the Willow Ecosystem - Andela Zora Brnas (Performance)
20:00 - 21:30: Noise to Vibrato - sikau/pubalova (Exhibition/Performance)
20:00 - 21:30: A Slime Mold Workshop - Ringailė Demšytė (Workshop)
20:00 - 22:30: Multispecies Karaoke - Niek Hilkmann and Mathijs van Oosterhoudt (Interactive Installation)
Programme
Are you a feeder?
by Thijs de Zeeuw in collaboration with Jolanda Verspagen and The Gramounce
Taking place in the Barn, this talk brings together participants from The Gramounce’s Alt Food and Art Master for their first-year residency at Mediamatic. Organized by landscape architect Thijs de Zeeuw and joined by aquatic biologist Jolanda Verspagen, the event dives into how eating defines us as animals. We eat to survive, to transform, to meet, to share, and even to consume one another. Food often serves as a tool of control and affection in our relationships with other species; we feed ducks in parks, design feeders for garden birds, pamper our pets, and leave waste that helps rats thrive. Through feeding, we select who we care for and who we ignore, yet we almost never feed the fish. This afternoon, we gather to search for the love of fish and uncover the feeder within ourselves. Do you experience affection or discomfort when you feed another creature?
Guests are invited to bring something they would like to share with the fish as we explore these questions over talks and bites, joining together to make odd kin.
Thijs de Zeeuw photo archives -
Seaweed Becomings
by Salicornia Studio in collaboration with TestTafel
Federico Rizzo came to Mediamatic to study the diet of the species living beneath the waterline in the Oosterdok area. The residency culminates in a special tasting centered around Seaweed Becomings, a sculptural installation and performative dining experience created in collaboration with TestTafel. At its center sits a hand-cast table and seating crafted from lime mortar, sand dredged from the adjacent canal, local algae, and urban sediment, bringing a material record of the Amsterdam waterways directly into the cultural space.
This tasting experience is entirely vegan. A full collaborative dinner with TestTafel will also take place on the same day starting at 17:00 (more information coming soon).
Exhibition-setup-Multispecies-Dinner-by-Federico-Rizzo_2024 - photo-by-Anastasija-Mass
Embodying the Willow Ecosystem
Embodying the Willow Ecosystem is a performance and workshop led by artist Andela as part of her ongoing research at Mediamatic.
Grounded in the philosophy of the willow ecosystem, Andela has built a space at our tumulus dedicated to interspecies care, reclaiming a portion of our grounds and extending it outward toward the road. Her project, Multispecies Basket, aims to rekindle curiosity for human-ecosystemic imaginaries and foster caring, interspecies relations while critically challenging and "composting" dominant anthropocentric hierarchies. Guided by the wisdom of local Dutch willow trees, the project explores how species, habitats, crafts, design, seasons, and stories are deeply entangled.
Join us to weave a massive collective structure, connecting with the surrounding ecosystem and embodying interspecies care through the art of living craft.
Crafting Interspecies Care - Photo -
A Slime Mold Workshop
by Ringailė Demšytė
What happens when you let a living organism design type? How can non-human organisms become part of the creative process? Join this hands-on workshop in our Border Lab as Ringailė introduces you to the world of Physarum polycephalum also known as slime mould and its use within experimental design, bioart, and visual research.
Meaning emerges at the edge - Ringailė Demšytė -
Multispecies Karaoke
by Niek Hilkmann and Mathijs van Oosterhoudt
Sing, howl, or quack along with the multispecies karaoke. The Multispecies Karaoke will make you feel like a different creature. The system uses images and sounds to help you imitate other animals, such as wolves, frogs, and starlings. How good are you at being non-human?
This karaoke is a piece of interactive software, which visualizes animal calls and songs as lyrics and spectograms, and tracks your imitation of them. Up to two users can sing in a microphone at the same time, and work together to get the best score. We've been adding features and new animals to the project for a little over a year now. The prototype of the work has been shown at places such as Creative Coding Utrecht, Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam and the Vroege Vogels Festival.
Multispecies Karaoke - screenshot -
Noise to Vibrato
Following a month on view at Mediamatic, noise to vibrato by sikau/půbalová, Amos Peled, and Denis Połec closes with an interactive finissage. Visitors are invited into our Haptic Lab to directly engage with a living, soft-bodied installation that wrinklingly ages and sounds from within. You can kneel beside, sit with, or hold its tactile membranes, tending to the autonomous body while listening through touch. By resting bone-conducting speakers against your chin, internal peristaltic movements and metabolic sounds transmit directly as physical vibrations through the bones of your face. Experience an inversion of noise-canceling technology, where normally ignored bodily noises become a live, shared signal for one final day.
Profile photo of sikau/pubalova - Photo Credits: Vojtech Veskrna, Kunsthalle Praha
With: sikau/pubalovaQuestions? Feel free to reach out to: program@mediamatic.nl
This event is made possible thanks to the support of:
