Bioart + Design Africa
VIAD
Imminent and Eminent Ecologies
Theresa Schubert
Dr Theresa Schubert is a Berlin-based artist, researcher, and curator exploring unconventional visions of nature, technology, and the self. She holds a PhD in Media Art from Bauhaus University Weimar. Her practice combines audiovisual and hybrid media into conceptual and immersive installations or performances, often including organic matter, living organisms, algorithms, and artificial intelligence as meaningful co-creators. She also works with immersive video environments and 3D laser scanning to challenge modes of perception and question the human-machine relationship in hyper-tech societies, where the nature-culture divide seems to dissolve in the digital realm.
Her work has been recognised with the Award of Excellence at the Japan Media Arts Festival 2022 (Art Division), a Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention (AI & Life Art 2021), a STARTS Prize 2021 Honorary Mention, and the NTAA (New Technological Art Award) 2016. She was longlisted for the Lumen Interactive Art Award 2022 and the Aesthetica Art Award 2023, and has been nominated for the GASAG Kunstpreis by Berlinische Galerie in 2016 and 2018. She has also been awarded a S+T+ARTS Residency (2019 and 2022) funded by the European Commission and was artist-in-residence at the Group of Applied and Molecular Microbiology at TU Berlin from 2018 to 2020.
Artist Statement on The Glacier Trilogy – Part 1 (Re-imagining Glaciers through AI)
The Glacier Trilogy is an immersive artwork investigating glaciers as the starting point of fluvial systems and the future of water in climate crisis. Produced by combining advanced computational technologies with sculpture materials and human creativity, The Glacier Trilogy imagines glaciers through AI, creating a synthetic archive of glaciers to stimulate an emotional engagement of its audience.
The work complex is based on Schubert’s research of fluvial systems in the Piemont area in north-west Italy. Schubert makes works that discuss the human impact on the environment, but also how we can use technology for better and more respectful relationships with nature, which is necessary as humanity is confronted with climate crisis. Glaciers hold an extreme importance not only as storages of water but also as a memory of the earth’s past and as indicators of climate change. Glacier ice archives millennia-old (an)organic information, such as (micro)organisms, pollen, and atmospheric dust, allowing scientists to acquire knowledge about ancient ecosystems and to predict future climate scenarios.
This work is a video projection made by using a combination of machine learning models that shows the formation and abstraction of synthetic glaciers. Starting from abstract imagery, slowly mountain landscapes with glaciers start to emerge. They are based on an earlier training process with historical images of the Italian Glaciological Committee in Turin and the Sella Foundation in Biella in combination with text input from the Italian geologist Arduito Desio. Together with the visuals, Shubert created a dense sound composition consisting of field recordings, synthetic sounds and voice recordings done with an opera singer. In the arrangement, she layered voices, sometimes as echoes of each other, sometimes in a canon creating a doleful atmosphere. What emerges are synthetic landscapes that don’t exist, a kind of machine dream from the future that tries to imagine what glaciers looked like in former times.
Extra
For more information on the artist, visit https://www.theresaschubert.com/
Read Dineo Diphofa’s blog article on Theresa’s Schubert’s Milieu (2023) here.