Abstract

The Laboratory Garden is a research project and events series in development that focuses on the emerging artistic practice of incorporating plants, or more generally organic systems, into contemporary artworks using current technology and media. The project investigates this practice against the background of a larger conceptual framework in which these artworks play not only a solitary role, but are part of a proposed living heterotopian laboratory; a garden realm creating relationships between the artwork, its surroundings and its viewers. Major focus points are art and artists working with living systems as a paradigm of unfinished interaction in the context of electronic arts, where experimental practice between human and nature is marked by its character of real-time slowness and its fragile and temporal products. The emphasis on the garden as a laboratory primarily focuses on the aspects of interaction between living and organic systems, as well as technical and technological ones, that enable a shift into augmented incidents and environments.

• Thomas Munz (DE) is an independent curator and editor living in Berlin. In his curatorial and editorial work he is focusing on contemporary art at the crossroads of technology, science and nature, and on the cultural and political implications of digital and electronic media on present-day society.

Full text (PDF) p.  464-465