Machines Are Not Alone at CAC

This summer, CAC will present a group exhibition Machines Are Not Alone. Exposing machines as systems, networks, milieus, natures of many orders and cultures of different kinds, this exhibition will investigate and discuss the symbiosis and reciprocity between natural and cultural machines. The exhibition will launch at Chronus Art Center in Shanghai in the summer of 2018, and then continue to the Zagreb Contemporary Art Museum in Croatia and Queens Art Museum in New York. Each traveling iteration will situate itself in the local milieu and create interconnections with its immediate surroundings.

Field Remediations: Carbon is an art project in the exhibition, launched in resonance with the show under the support from Pro Helvetia Shanghai, Swiss Arts Council. It is a set of activities, field-visits, experiments, mediations, documentations, and publications on the topic of carbon and new technologies of machinic carbon remediation, capture, sequestration and storage. The goal is to align the science-fiction of carbon capture with the science-fact of its current research and implementations. Field Remediations: Carbon will collect objects and materials in the context of Shanghai that let us explore human and technological interactions with the carbon cycle, sampling the spectrum of the material practices, opportunities and challenges associated with development of negative emissions technologies. It will further produce media, documents and a manual “Closing the Carbon Cycle”.

Field Remediations: Carbon is a project by Swiss-based artists-researchers Karolina Sobecka and Jamie Allen. Sobecka and Allen investigate and involve themselves in emerging planetary technologies and what they teach us about who we are as individuals, cultures and societies. They are based at the Critical Media Lab and the Institute for Aesthetic Practice and Theory, HGK FHNW Basel.

Established in 2013, Chronus Art Center (CAC) is China’s first nonprofit art organization dedicated to the presentation, research / creation and scholarship of media art. CAC with its exhibitions, residency-oriented fellowships, lectures and workshop programs and through its archiving and publishing initiatives, creates a multifaceted and vibrant platform for the discourse, production, and dissemination of media art in a global context. CAC is positioned to advance artistic innovation and cultural awareness by critically engaging with media technologies that are transforming and reshaping contemporary experiences.

(Banner image: Site visit to Climeworks, Swiss startup for the capture of CO2 from the air. 2018. Courtesy of Karolina Sobecka.)