Laboratory Reconstruction- Artist Guided Project

Full HD digital video, color, sound, 00:03:30, 2021

This project is a video work for the workshop Labor 2025, a collaboration between the Fraunhofer Institute for Electronic Nanosystems and Klub Solitaer e.V. in Germany, and as part of the Ars Electronica Center’s exhibition CCI Lab. The workshop attempts to reflect that scientific and artistic research each have very different ways in their practices: While scientific protocols are based on the idea of repeatability in a laboratory, the relevance of the artist is in the creation of unrepeatable pieces that are then sold to elite clientele. The purpose of this project is hence to rebut these myths, by finding the shared goals and interests of scientific and artistic practices, protocols and rituals. The materials and experiences collected over the process of the workshop are presented to generate a new territory where all fields can reflect together through a joint aesthetic experience the nuances of their work, eventually finding new and unexpected links to other, diametrically opposed, practices.

The project takes a visual-spatial-logical perspective on the strictly protected environment of technological inventions and production in the field of science. As certain spaces become an inaccessible and distant presence, the ability to peer into and restore a space through multiple visual materials is a complex problem caught between the public domain and the closed scientific laboratory.

Artist HUANG Jieyuan and ZHOU Yinglin tried to simulate the space through multiple images obtained in the workshop, combined with many fragments of information that existed in the corners of the Internet, and gained the power to freely visit the virtual space. In this space, the tour conducted by the laboratory staff can become a tour conducted by the artist, and the laboratory space and the production of science and technology are embodied in another narrative way.

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