We are pleased to announce Bassam Issa Al-Sabah, bela and Kloxii, Mac Andre Arboleda, and Nadia J. Armstrong as artists-in-residence for the Beta x transmediale Residency this fall. The residency takes place in Dublin, Berlin, and remotely during October and November 2023.
During their residency, Bassam Issa Al-Sabah will develop Uncensored Lilac – a new AI animated film. A story about revenge and desire, Uncensored Lilac questions the ways in which climate change affects and alters social and environmental relations. The film follows a group of goddesses, who may or may not be aliens, and their assembly of familiars, pets, servants, and technologies. Set in a dreamlike hallucinatory landscape that mutates between ornate embellishments and its original form, the landscape and the assembly have been invaded and altered by a toxic species, making them nurturing but venomous. Bassam Issa Al-Sabah is an interdisciplinary artist working with film, video, sculpture, and paintings, based in Belfast.
暴洪野火机构 – a fictional agency established by bela and Kloxii – creates the context for their collaborative performance. Focusing on the production and dissemination of musical scores that respond to the anxieties of climate collapse and mass disintegration, the duo explores how the news and social media cycles of crises affect our emotional and psychological responses to them. Drawing inspiration from East Asian rain rituals and the duo’s witnessing of flash floods and wildfires in their homelands of South Korea and California, they question the atmosphere of never-ending doom, deconstructing and reorganising its patterns and rhythms. bela is a musician and a performance artist based in Berlin known for electronic music performance merging pungmul – a Korean folk act rooted in agricultural traditions and linked to past social movements - and vocals inspired by extreme metal. Kloxii is a Berlin-based artist and music producer of experimental pop inspired by trip-hop and industrial beats.
ABOLISH THE SCREEN! is an artistic research project and manifesto that investigates the implications and politics surrounding the screen as a central medium for societal functions. Through a series of workshops, dialogues, and presentations, the project questions what the abolition of the screen might mean, and speculates on the new dependencies that could arise from its disappearance. Mac Andre Arboleda is an artist exploring the sickness of the internet, currently based in Berlin.
RENDER ME TENDER is an audiovisual experience that invites the public to consider the neo-primacy of the chat forum in our present understanding of communication. Rooted in cyborg feminist practices and eco-social concerns the project attempts to unbury the liveness and physical immediacy of the socio-political, and the oratory origins of the word “forum.” Through aesthetic signifiers, scripted conversations, and public interaction, automated AI characters will emerge on screens to engage spectators in rhetoric around the mutations of social interaction that the socio-technical history of the forum presents to us. Nadia J. Armstrong is a Dublin-based visual artist working with performance, 3D composition, AI, and expanded video based in Dublin.
The residents were selected by Aisling Murray, Sheena Barrett, Tomke Braun, and Nóra Ó Murchú.
The Beta x transmediale residency is a cooperation between transmediale, Berlin, and Beta festival, Dublin, and is funded by the Arts Council of Ireland International Residency Initiatives Scheme.
