What Are the BAD 2018 Artists Working On?

ANA LIU

What does it mean to be human? At first glance a simple question, the idea of being human is an unstable construct, continuously recrafted. In her project ‘Data Veins & Flesh Voxels: a search for what is Human’, Liu investigates how technology influences us, with a focus on recognising the relationship between our body as matter and as data. In collaboration with researchers from the Department of Radiology at the AMC Amsterdam, Liu will make a series of artworks that show how recent technological innovations allow us to redesign ourselves profoundly - from networked prosthetics, artificial intelligence, to the genetic code of life itself. Can the body be simplified into a machine? Can the mind be reducible to signals? This body of work explores our pulsating subjectivities as influenced by evolving technologies that challenge our notion of being human.


YIYUN CHEN

What happens to you – both mentally and physically – when you live horizontal for a longer period of time? What will change in the way you live, your health and your perspective when you are bedridden, doomed to a life that mostly or even completely takes place horizontal?

In collaboration with the Department of Nutrition and Movement Sciences NUTRIM van de Maastricht University, the Chinese Yiyung Chen designs and builds an environment suitable for horizontal posture. She will subsequently live and work in this studio for a month, as an action to mimic the lifestyle of the bedridden. The project ‘Horizontal Living - Long live in bed’ hacks and re-designs the current space for living upright, explores the change of lifestyle, perspective and health status of living in bed and aims to echo to today’s indoor lifestyle and 24h culture. Various aspects of metabolic health will be investigated during the whole process to see the impact of living in a restricted area on health.


AMANDA BAUM & ROSE LEAHY

In collaboration with the NIOZ (Koninklijk Nederlands Instituut voor Onderzoek der Zee), the English duo Amanda Baum and Rose Leahy investigate the past, present and future of life on earth from a microbial perspective. Set in a future archaeological site, Microbiocene unearths scenarios based on information found in ancient microfossils. Amongst hybrid ruins, a microbial monolith reveals myths from the year c. 2100 AD. Drawing together semiotics, sculpture and marine biogeochemistry, Microbiocene materially explores past, present and future life on Earth from a microbial perspective. In response to dominant narratives of the Anthropocene, ‘Microbiocene: Ancient ooze to future myths’ suggests how alternative futures can be co-created by weaving worlds with our planetary makers: the microbes. The English duo Amanda Baum and Rose Leahy investigate the past, present and future of life on earth from a microbial perspective. In response to the stories of the Anthropocene, Baum and Leahy will use the prize to elaborate the ‘microbiocene’ to show how alternative futures are constructed by weaving worlds with microbes.