STREAM: Guest Lecture Series - Medientheorie: Reiner Maria Matysik

Zoom Meeting ID: 980 9326 4296
Please register with medientheorie@uni-ak.ac.at

The third Zoom guest lecture at the Department of Media Theory will be given during this summer term by the Berlin-based German artist Reiner Maria Matysik, a professor of three-dimensional design at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle, Germany.

The talk Create Hopeful Monsters will be hosted as a synchronous (real time) online lecture and is scheduled for May 26, 2020 at 2 pm. The guest lecture is organized and hosted by Professor Ingeborg Reichle within her summer term lecture series on “Speculative Biologies: New Directions in Art and Biotechnology”. This guest lecture series is an informative and stimulating opportunity to hear from distinguished artists and experts about what’s going on in the emerging fields of bioart, biodesign, and speculative biology and it also helps our students to build their network of contacts.
1. Let’s get physical (a kind of online performance)

First of all we have to take into account the quality of our encounter. In order to enhance the situation we will implicate intimate physical contact within digital communication.

Understanding and evaluating organic forms and grown entities not by using mimetic and imitative sculptural techniques, but through direct interaction based on the human as a biological organism.

2. COME, TAKE ME

About the quality of a direct encounter between individuals and artworks. About the difference between analogue and digital. An exemplary project of Matysik’s at the Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven enables visitors to experience the full potential of direct contact between individuals and works of art during the lockdown. Social isolation facilitates engagement with the work of art in close proximity and intimacy.

3. Antibiology

A brief overview about projects such as: a new living biological system grown from human tissue, unity of humans and apes through common offspring and others.

Reiner Maria Matysik is a Berlin-based artist and a professor of three-dimensional design at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle, Germany. He studied fine arts at the Braunschweig University of Art and at the Ateliers Arnhem. He works in manifold ways with concepts for future landscapes and organisms, such as post-evolutionary life forms. Through the specific adoption of object, installation, and video he has developed a dynamic scenario of future landscapes and organisms. In this way he creates an area of conflict between promise and failure in a potential future. Both the visual implementation and its linguistic form can be recognised here as the essential artistic strategies which he uses as his own interface between the worlds of scientific research and pseudo-scientific fiction. In 2004 he directed the artistic development project Institute of Biological Sculpture at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Braunschweig. He was a lecturer at the Institute of Visual Arts, Faculty of Architecture, Technical University Braunschweig, and from 2008 to 2009 visiting professor of sculpture at the Fachhochschule Kunst Arnstadt.

Reiner Maria Matysik has exhibited his artworks at institutions such as the Gerhard-Marcks-Haus, Bremen; Centre Pasquart, Biel, Switzerland; Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin; Projektraum deutscher Künstlerbund, laboratoria moskau; Museum Koenig, Bonn; Georg Kolbe Museum and Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden- Baden; Fondación Cesar Manrique, Lanzarote; Kunstverein Hannover; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland. He is the recipient of grants from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, Kunstfonds e.V., DAAD, KfW Bank, Stiftung NORD/LB Öffentliche, and the Senate of Berlin.

Since 2020 he is the co-founder of a recently set up biolab at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle. This biolab is managed by a microbiologist and a biotechnologist and is a place within the art school where art and design students work hands-on with molecular biology and biotechnology and engage with artistic and design research in the fields of molecular biology, biotechnology, and the life sciences.

http://reinermatysik.de/