We are excited to announce that our Objects-in-Residence trajectory will be exhibited at the Ars Electronica Festival for Art, Technology and Society. The exhibition features an outcome of the year-long artist-in-residency program Technologies Otherwise.
Ars Electronica 2024 will take place in Linz, Austria, from September 4 to 8 and will be dedicated to the title “HOPE – who will turn the tide”. Like never before, the Linz Festival for Art, Technology and Society will focus on artists, researchers, developers, activists, and entrepreneurs from all over the world. The main location will once again be POSTCITY, which is due to be demolished and will become a hotspot for the international media art scene for the seventh time.
Visit Ars Electronica to know more about the Festival
In 2024, Baltan is practicing a hopeful approach towards technology. Many technologies started with hope—for example, the early phase of the web or the beginning of the blockchain movement. Nonetheless, because of the continuous colonization of technology by corporate capital, both have led to an amplification of centralized power and profit-driven innovation. This colonization created a great sense of disillusionment. How can we cope with it?
Let us restart and do technology otherwise: open it up, unscrew it, dissect its materials and rethink the narratives behind it. Let us reclaim our imaginative power and develop new stories that could inspire this process. And with these stories in mind, let us think about how developing more diverse technologies could challenge our current one. Different technologies by different voices, for different human and non-human users, with different materials and production models, for different temporalities and localities.
The exhibition at Ars Electronica will focus on presenting the Objects-in-Residence trajectory of Baltan Laboratories’ 2024 program. An object is the intersection of economic, material, political and social interactions. Starting from specific technological objects (the smartphone, the battery and third-party cookies), we invited three artists/designers to spend one year with those objects, take them apart, materialize/visualize how they work, analyze how they are produced and assembled, what materials are chosen and where they come from.
Alignment Problem
What can we do in the face of the ever-worsening climate crisis? This project titled Alignment Problem presents two apps that attempt to have an effect. The first app limits your screentime on your phone based on the carbon emissions associated with its usage. It links your digital wellness to ecological limits, but it is a fig leaf: a few grams of carbon saved is nothing substantial. The second app takes a different tack: it collects pledges of money toward buying a company responsible for 1% of global emissions and running it into the ground.
Thomas Thwaites is an award-winning design researcher and author of two acclaimed books, The Toaster Project and Goatman. His work is in the permanent collections of museums including the V&A and the Boijmans and is exhibited worldwide. He has an MA from the Royal College of Art, and a BSc. from University College London.
Decline All | An investigation into third-party cookies
This work examines the upcoming 2025 phasing-out of third-party cookies, touching on themes of transmateriality, surveillance capitalism, and remembrance culture. Three distinct plates are featured made from electronics, glass, plastic, and copper, representing the internet’s core components, with lights and a Raspberry Pi. The back showcases text on web-based tracking, illustrating the past, present, and future of digital tracking technology.
Marie Dvorzak (she/her) is a designer and programmer with a focus on creative coding, critical design research and the visual & technical development of complex web applications. She recently completed the Information Design Masters Program at the Design Academy Eindhoven and is now working as a freelance creative in Vienna.
Sediments of Power
Sediments of Power is a research-based work that examines lithium batteries in electric vehicles to address the ambivalences of the twin transition, its material dependencies, and the effects on our fast, portable lifestyles. The project is presented as an installation that oscillates between analysis of global supply chains, on-site work in spectral lithium mines in southern Europe, and the proposal to rethink acceleration and scale in our relationship with digital technologies.
Azahara Cerezo has exhibited solo work at Bòlit Contemporary Art Centre (Girona) and Centro de Arte La Regenta (Las Palmas) and taken part in group shows at the Instituto Cervantes of New York, National Arts Festival (Makhanda, South Africa), Bienalsur (Cúcuta, Colombia), Nieuwe Vide (Haarlem, Netherlands) and MACBA (Barcelona), among others.
The residency is part of a year program for 2024 Technologies Otherwise, supported by Creative Industries Fund NL and Stichting Cultuur Eindhoven.