2012 – TRANSMEDIALE BERLIN – presentation

Open, O Sesami. Open, O Green. Open, O Fields. A chance meeting in the name of Green Rush.
This chance meeting on the occasion of composting the city/ composting the net launch at transmediale2013 brings together partners and projects of green rush. In 2009, Nomadisch Grün launched prinzessinnengärten at Moritzplatz in Berlin Kreuzberg, cultivated a wasteland into a vibrant, self-sustainable urban farming/gathering site. In 2012, a ‘Let it grow’ campaign calls for public support to stop the land from being sold by the Property Fund.

Alotof, A Laboratory On The Open Fields, is an okno (Brussels) initiative to develop framework and structures, seeking open labs/fields possibilities for the practices of media art and ecology. Yo-yo (Prague and Hranice u Mal_e) supports experiments at the intersection of art, ecology and media, across the rural and urban contexts.
Ricx (Riga Centre for New Media Culture) organizes Techno-Ecologies (since 2011) , part of baltic-nordic initiative Renewable Network, takes into account the environment, social relations, and human subjectivity. Planning for Riga Culture Capital 2014, Fields further maps the expanded fields of artistic practices that merge politics, technology, ecology, gender, semiology.

Transmediale2013
Global café stage
11:00 – 13:00, january 31, 2013

Composting the city (2012) investigates urban farms and cycles of composting system. In search of biotechnological food production, Hu.M.C.C (2012) creates a brand new productline, Maya YogHurt.
Inviting catch up chats among the acquaintances and the strangers; the artists and the organizers; the builders and the schemers; the techno-minded and the dirty earthy hands, this meeting serves as a depot for information drop-off, pick-up, take-away and tag along, walking us into a rhizomic rooted forest-scape.

With:
prinzessinnengarten.net: Svenja Nette
okno.be: Annemie Maes Gívan Belá
yo-yo-yo.org: Lenka Dolanova Michal Kindernay
rixc.lv: Rasa Smite Raitis Smits
FIELDS: Armin Medosch with RIXC
Composting the city | Composting the net Shu Lea Cheang
mayayoghurt.net: Maja Smrekar

Bios:
Prinzessinnengarten
The Prinzessinnengarten, started in the summer of 2009 at Moritzplatz in Berlin’s Kreuzberg, is a social and ecological urban garden. Once a wasteland, the group Nomadisch Grün along with friends and neighbors cleared away rubbish and built transportable organic vegetable plots using shipping containers. Through a collective, self- organized, and self-financed effort, this exceptionally green space with a bar and a restaurant has a variety of cultivated plants as well as a variety of social encounters, relationships, and cooperations.

Prinzessinnengarten Berlin


Annemie Maes (Belgium)
media artist and activist, holds master degrees in fine arts and cultural studies. Her artistic research and cultural activism projects are cited as ‘politics of change’ with a focus on ecology and women empowerment. She is co-founder of Okno, an artist-run organisation working with media art and ecology. Her recent research focuses on connected OpenGreens, a transdisciplinary project at the intersection of art, biology and green technology, including urban agriculture and city bee-monitoring.
http://okno.be
Gívan Belá (Belgium)
is a provocative and subversive figure who has launched a multitude of unverified stories, creating his own myth. His numerous collaborative virtual organizations include Stellingname (1984- 1989), Young Farmers Claim Future (1990-2000), dBONANZAh! (1998-2002), mXHz. org (since 2002) and Society of Algorithm (since 2004), investigating various forms of creativity, from real and non-physical beings (including machines). Recently a shift to eco-technological perspective in his approach.
http://mxhz.org/
Lenka Dolanova and Michal Kindernay (Czech)
started yo-yo in 2009 as a collective of artists, curators and organizers. In 2012, Yo-yo urban (Prague) and Yo-yo rural (Hranice u Mal_e), two interconnected branches support the experiments at the intersection of art, ecology and media, across the rural and urban contexts. With an aim to explore the alternative spaces for art, the KRA (Kravín Rural Arts) residency project provides a space for creation, meetings and discussion, dedicated above all to media arts and ecology.
http://yo-yo-yo.org/
Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits (Latvia)
are Riga based artists, curators and cultural inventors, working with emerging media since the mid-1990s. They are key founders of E-Lab (1996) and RIXC (2000). They organize the Art+Communication festivals (since 1996) with the publication of publish Acoustic Space journal series. Together with RIXC, the festival introduces themes such as internet radio (1998), locative media (2003), waves (2009), transbiotics (2010), techno-ecologies (2011), and art of resilience (2012).
http://renewable.rixc.lv/
Armin Medosch (Austria)
contributes to the practice and discourse on art, science, technology and social change as a curator, convenor of conferences, critic and theorist. He has recently been awarded the degree of Ph.D. in Arts and Computational Technology at Goldsmiths, University of London for his work on the 1960s art movement New Tendencies. Medosch’s current FIELDS curation is being developed with RIXC, following their past projects together, such as Waves 2006, the Spectropia conference and reader, 2008, and the Networks and Sustainability conference track at Textures 2010.
http://thenextlayer.org/
Shu Lea Cheang (USA)
Artist. conceptualist. filmmaker. networker. She constructs networked installation and multi- player performance in collective mode. She drafts sci-fi narratives in her film scenario and artwork
imagination. Currently located in post-net BioNet zone – UKI (2009-2012) reformats defunct replicants into viral variants; La Graine et Le Compost (2012) studies urban farming and composting system; Baby Work (2012) entrusts the public to work as clone babies amid piles of broken keys.
http://mauvaiscontact.info/
Maja Smrekar (Slovenia)
develops projects in the field of bioart in collaboration with Kapelica Gallery and Aksioma Institute. In 2010 she organised International Festival HAIP10/New Nature at the Multimedia Centre Cyberpipe in Ljubljana where she has been active as an artistic director for two years. She was awarded at the CYNETART festival 2012 by the European Centre for Arts Hellerau – Dresden the first prize for her project Hu.M.C.C. She is currently finishing a New Media MA degree at Fine Art Academy in Ljubljana. http://majasmrekar.org/work