2022, Volkart Schmidt, Yvonne, Shaw, Christine, Turpin, Etienne

2021-03-18, Volkart Schmidt, Yvonne, Spillmann, Peter

Going to the Limits of Your Longing, Research as Another Name for Care, the spring 2021 Master symposium at Art Institute HGK FHNW, in Basel, will be devoted to ideas and forms of artistic research that center art as a practice in service of the social. With this symposium we will revisit certain moments in our recent history and present of researching, producing, and exhibiting art in the name of such beliefs, namely social justice. To that end, this gathering will be dedicated to the memory of Marion von Osten, the artist, curator, researcher, writer, and teacher whose curatorial, theoretical, and altogether empathic approaches to the medium of exhibition-making revolved around artistic research devoted to the collective. In von Osten’s memory, and under her exemplary influence, we will examine the moments when exhibitions became filled with archives, with documents of testimonies and documentaries of testifying moving images. Institutions suddenly saw the need to create collective collections—like the Former West curatorial research project, for example. It was the beginning of a transformation that, since then, has undergone many turns and many faces, but that remains at the core of understanding art as a practice that serves the social and all the forms of justice (and its opposite) that enumerate it.

2020-10-08, Volkart Schmidt, Yvonne, Smite, Rasa, Smits, Raitis, Maeder, Marcus, Rissanen, Kaisa

2020's RIXC festival is a collaboration with the “Ecodata–Ecomedia–Ecoaesthetics” research group, Institute of Aesthetic Practice and Theory, Academy of Art and Design Basel FHNW Switzerland. Proposing a new techno-ecological theory, project initiator Yvonne Volkart investigates technoscientific methods based on registering, collecting and interpreting data in the arts. How do the data affect us? Do they trigger care, solidarity, and empathy? Celebrating the project’s closing phase in Riga, Marcus Maeder and Rasa Smite also show their artistic research results in the ECODATA exhibition of the RIXC Festival. Together with Yvonne Volkart and forest scientist Kaisa Rissanen they present and discuss the collaboration between art and science.

2020, Volkart Schmidt, Yvonne

2021-09-16, Volkart Schmidt, Yvonne, Smite, Rasa, Rissanen, Kaisa, Gessler, Arthur

What are volatile particles, how can we measure and feel them? And why do we experience a fragrant forest as a consequence of climate heating? In the 3D installation „Atmospheric Forest“, which is exhibited at „Critical Zones“, the artists Rasa Smite/Raitis Smits focused on the phenomenon of volatile emissions from trees and their visualization. In the course of Rasa Smites collaboration with the Swiss Federal Institute of Forest Snow and Landscape Research WSL she learned that under the threat of climate change, certain trees do not only transform CO2 into oxygen, but also emit various gases into the atmosphere: forests breathe. Taking this artistic work as a point of departure, this issue of the Terrestrial University will handle in-depth the scientific and artistic research of fragrant forests, using the Pfynwald Pine forest of Swiss Alps as a case study. This 10’000 year old forest in the Valais, southwest Switzerland, is unique: As one of the first long term and large outdoor laboratories worldwide, it has been under close surveillance for more than 20 years. The researchers and partners talk about tools, methods and scale of fragrant forests affecting the climate change alongside with the question how art translates the invisible and alarming interactions between the forest and atmospheric ecosystems into a sensible environment affecting people for system change.

2021-01-18, Volkart Schmidt, Yvonne

Volkart will draw on the research of Ecodata–Ecomedia–Ecoaesthetics, which involves artists among others working with environmental media, to show that the transversal potential of an artistic project lies in the creation of an aesthetic event which provides unexpected relations with our more-than-human co-beings and thus affects us to care for them.

2020-05-07, Volkart Schmidt, Yvonne

What kind of techniques might provide us with an open sensorium towards the environment? What are the methods? What the technologies? What kind of processes, relations and aesthetics emerge out of them, and how can we tackle a more-than-human approach? With this method workshop we bring together local and international researchers exploring techno-aesthetic and -scientific approaches towards natureculture. We are particularly interested in the sensorial and technical dimensions of scientific and aesthetic research and their impact for an ecological awareness. Furthermore, we want to critically discuss our adopted methods and question the role of technology for human’s perception of the world. Invited speakers: Yves Citton, Paris; Anna Krzywoszynska, Sheffield; Christoph Kueffer, Rapperswil/Zürich; Jacopo Rasmi, Nancy; Andreas Rigling, Birmensdorf; Alexandra Toland, Weimar/ Berlin and the Team Ecodata–Ecomedia–Ecoaesthetics (Yvonne Volkart, lead; Marcus Maeder, Rasa Smite, Aline Veillat). Moderation: Felipe Castelblanco and Karolina Sobecka

2021-09-11, Volkart Schmidt, Yvonne, Smite, Rasa

Was kann Kunst leisten, was Wissenschaft nicht leistet – und umgekehrt? Inter/Nationale Referent*innen aus den Disziplinen Kunst, Film, Kunstwissenschaft, Philosophie und Wissensgeschichte diskutieren miteinander ihre Forschungsansätze und Werke. Basis des transdisziplinaren Dialogs ist die aktuelle Gruppenausstellung «It is not the End of the World» an der Fundaziun Nairs, die sich mit den vielfältigen Fragestellungen und Bildwelten des Anthropozäns befasst. Ausgehend vom Ort Nairs, der wiederholt als Kraftort wahrgenommen wird, diskutieren lokale, nationale, und internationale Referent*innen aus den Disziplinen Kunst, Film, Kunstwissenschaft, Philosophie und Wissensgeschichte miteinander ihre Forschungsansätze und Werke. Was kann Kunst leisten, was Wissenschaft nicht leistet – und umgekehrt. Was kann Nairs dazu beitragen, was leistet der Nukleus dieses Begegnungs- und Rückzugsortes selbst innerhalb der Diskurse so dicht an der Natur gelegen. Teilnehmende sind u.a. Yvonne Volkart (HGK Basel FHNW), Rasa Smite (MIT Boston), Peter Schneemann und Toni Hildebrandt (Universität Bern), Wolfgang Hagen (ETHZ) .

2021, Volkart Schmidt, Yvonne, Damm, Ursula, Gapsevicius, Mindaugas

2020-05, Volkart Schmidt, Yvonne