Lecture: Of (Deep)Time Machines and Spectral Landscapes
20 April 2021 | 19.00 CET @ Zoom
Erich Berger: Of (Deep)Time Machines and Spectral Landscapes – Tales of the Rare Earth
The lecture is the first public event of a remote art residency to run until the end of 2021, in which Erich Berger continues a long term research project dealing with the relationship between radioactivity and the landscape. The lecture will be held in English.
Deep time is understood as the concept behind geological time: the history of the earth from its beginnings as a molten ball of matter until the present. Deep futures do not yet exist, they are a thought vehicle to speculate within the probability space of a future earth. The realization that anthropogenic impact is leading to transformations of the earth system which follow through into deep futures is not only discussed within the sciences. The Anthropocene and with it a strong interest directed towards deep time and matters of geology surface increasingly within artistic practices. At its core artists look at the origins and consequences of human impact and speculate about deep futures. Berger’s own interest, manifested in his artistic work, is to investigate the dichotomy between human time perception and the time in biological, environmental, and geological processes which we as humans are part of. This dichotomy arises from the present as we as individuals are challenged to change our way of life and to contribute to endeavours and measures to secure a future for humans beyond our lifetime.*
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Erich Berger is an artist, curator and cultural worker based in Helsinki Finland. His focus is on the intersection of art, science and technology with a critical take on how they transform society and the world at large. Throughout his practice he has explored the materiality of information, and information and technology as artistic material. Berger’s current interest in issues of deep time and hybrid ecology led him to work with geological processes, radiogenic phenomena and their socio-political implications in the here and now. He moves between visual arts and science in an area which he also investigates and develops as director of the Bioart Society in Helsinki which was awarded the Finnish State Prize for multidisciplinary art in 2017. His installations, performances and interfaces are exhibited widely and Berger received awards from renowned institutions such as Prix Ars Electronica (AT), ZKM (DE), Vida Telefonica (ES), Files Prix (BR) and Arts at CERN (CH). Find out more about his work at https://randomseed.org*
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Production: Zavod Projekt Atol with the support of the Ministry of Culture and the Department of Culture of the City of Ljubljana. The lecture is organized in the framework of AiR that is part of the project GREEN Revisited financed by EU Creative Europe programme.
