As you might be aware, the 0x Salon recently had a call for applications to our Research Residency program based in Berlin at Trust. Meet our five incoming Residents!
After a very successful first round in 2021/2022, the 0x Salon recently re-initiated its Research Residency Programme for a second cycle. In late March, we announced five vacancies, to be based in Berlin at Trust where we continue to spend our days enmeshed in the ever-expanding playground of Salon activities.
This time around, for a residency cohort again numbering five, we were (again) amazed at the quality of candidacies and grateful — if intimidated! — in having to parse them out for shortlist. After giving it much consideration, we narrowed down our selection to fifteen interviewees. We had a wonderful time speaking with and learning from a set of incredible practitioners, coming from rich and diverse backgrounds and expertise, all of which made the decision process very, very arduous. Eventually, we arrived at our final selection of five Research Residents, more on them below! As a way to make our lives a little easier along the way, we couldn’t help but initiate some alternative forms of engagement, more news on those soon.
Suffice it to say, we’re thrilled with the new arrivals and are incredibly excited for their upcoming contributions to the 0x Salon. We’re very much looking forward to you becoming personally acquainted with them all in due course: you can expect to find them conspiring and roaming around the Trust workspace and everywhere else the 0x Salon can be found. In the interim, we’re excited to introduce them and their projects to you, hoping that they’ll pique your curiosity as much as they did ours!
Biography: Gediminas Žygus’ (LT) practice involves interdisciplinary projects, including music albums, installations, performances and film. Gediminas works within the intersection of politics and art and explores themes, such as collective worldmaking, scientific and communicative failures. Their broad and encompassing practice morphs and evolves with every interaction, location and collaboration. Their work has been featured at institutions such as Barbican Centre (UK), Berghain (DE), La Biennale di Venezia (IT), Centre Pompidou (FR), Haus der Kunst (DE), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (DE), Palais De Tokyo (FR), The Kitchen (USA) and others.
Residency statement: During my tenure at the 0xSalon residency, my intent is to utilise design as a lens and interrogate its shaping the contours of reality, human cognition, and power dynamics, with an emphasis on AI creativity and the processes of self-definition. This research will manifest in work on several ongoing projects - an album, performative lecture and installation. Within the scope of the residency, I will also facilitate a discussion on thinking machine creativity through the work of Pauline Oliveros.
Biography: Understanding itself as an independent intelligence division with the benefit of semi-anonymity, ASID is a site for philosophical and artistic R&D. Following the principle of DAO and giving testament to the pro-gnosis that instituted structures (including both collectives and the ‘individual’ person) will rapidly obsolesce, ASID bonds only through mutable protocols with variably nested virtual shells. ASID facilitates an investment of its assets into perverse marriages between esoteric and exoteric, disintegration and spontaneous order. ASID is thus engaged with paradox as a logical translation of what is mechanically instantiated by circuitry and exemplified in such cultural syndromes as anti-egoic individualism, neotradition, esoteric pop-culture and algomysticism. At present, this is expressed in probing the coincidence of visionary writing, cryptography, alchemy, game development and computational poetics.
Residency Statement: The offering ASID presents to the daimon of 0x Salon is a series of recurrent events, falling into the threshold between competitive and ceremonial. In the guise of gamic, this format crossfades video, alternate reality and live action role playing variants thereof. In that of the ritualistic, it sees itself simultaneously in the tradition of 20th century secret societies and the archaic mystery religion they resurrect. To this end, ASID is interested in hosting an LCD scrying workshop, HTML sacred text adventure and A/V eucharist, incarnating the dynamics immanent to an alphanumeric artefact that has revealed itself to be in isomorphy with astronomic calendrics and indexed by cartomancy.
Image: “Ghost in the Climate”, 2019, 4K video, 10:10min
Biography: Anna Mikkola is a Finnish artist living between London, Berlin and Helsinki. Her practice examines, usually through moving image and audiovisual installations, how technologies shape subjectivities, people's relationships with the environment, collectivity, and future imaginaries. Her works often engage with porosity, for example, investigating how narratives and materials transform through distribution when they travel through networks, ecologies and infrastructures. Her recent projects have researched taxonomy and botany as scientific practices that organise nature in particular ways as well as navigated uncertainty and subjectivity within scientific practise particularly in the context of climate modelling. Anna’s work has been exhibited internationally, among others, at Somerset House, ICA, SPACE (all London), Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), Rewire festival (The Hague), HIAP (Helsinki), Trust (Berlin), L’Inconnue (NYC) and FUTURA (Prague). An upcoming performance will take place at Gray Area (SF).
Residency Statement: During the residency I will continue exploring questions relating to systems, consciousness and artificial life; and will specifically research algorithmic classification, taxonomy and optimisation in the context of astrobotany, taking as a case study a Lithuanian astrobotany lab which was the first in the world to grow plants from seeds on a space station in 1982. I will continue experimenting with my moving image-making process which combines found, original, archival and computer-generated footage as well as animations produced in video game engines. I will also do field recordings and seek within them subjectivities which cannot be algorithmically captured to further express a desire to escape optimisation. The theoretical and material research will inform an upcoming video work.
Biography: Klara is an opera maker, writer and researcher, based in London. She is the co-artistic director of Waste Paper Opera, a collective of artists, performers, musicians and writers who create and produce performances and films, curate performance series and run workshops around collaborative making. Recent works by Waste Paper Opera include: Free to Choose, an operatic financial sci-fi for the metaverse, created in collaboration with Bahar Noorizadeh and Rudá Babau (Open Systems 1_Open Worlds, Singapore Art Museum, May ’23), Dead Cat Bounce, created in collaboration with Gary Zhexi Zhang (sound installation at Medialab Matadero, May 23, premiere at Somerset House, July ’23). She has worked extensively with the Baroque ensemble Ensemble Molière and the historical gesture specialist Dionysios Kyropoulos. Klara’s writing recently appeared in Catastrophe Time! (Gary Zhexi Zhang, Strange Attractor/MIT Press, 2023), Hederafelix’s Mycelia, and Writers & Makers: Women & Technology in New Music, and contributed research to Other Internet’s Positive Sum Worlds: Remaking Public Goods. She occasionally investigates international B2B trade shows, and works at the Bookartbookshop in London. Klara studied history at Glasgow and Oxford. She was born into a Greek/Polish family and grew up in Düsseldorf.
Residency Statement: In the context of the research topic ‘Prophet Motives’, Klara will be exploring mystical cults (on - and offline), special economic zones and communal living setups as ‘exit strategies’ in the context of her interest in the affective dimensions of capitalism and the impacts climate change will have on these affective infrastructures. She aims to create an analytical toolkit to understand these exit strategies through a historical, anthropological, political and psychological lens. A new operatic performance project, based on Klara’s research on meteorology and mysticism in the seventeenth century, will create a practice-based framework for an exploration of these questions.
Biography: Christopher Dake-Outhet is an artist and researcher based in Berlin. His work is rooted in the exploration of novel technologies and networks that enable esoteric economies, ecologies, and infrastructure that facilitate acts of reclamation while promoting new formulations of exchange. Most recently, he worked with the collective terra0, researching and creating hybrid ecosystems that aim to pioneer a new class of legal actors in which an algorithmic entity acts as the institutional representation for an ecosystem. He holds degrees from Concordia University in Intermedia Cyberarts and Design & New Environments from the Iceland University of the Arts.
Residency Statement: During the residency, I am particularly drawn to exploring the discourse surrounding "Prophet Motives” — delving into the intricate relationship between humans and technology, unveiling the spiritual, libidinal, and mythopoetic foundations of this connection. In addition, I am interested in expanding research on topics such as zealotry, incentive creation, and the ethics of technology, particularly in the context of technological artifacts and their perceived neutrality. I propose working with privacy-focused protocols and esoteric datasets to channel alternative predictive models, harnessing their power to foster new possibilities for alterity — stochastic applications for existential migration.
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