Opening Reception

May 31, 2019 at 20:00 (please register by emailing register@artlaboratory-berlin.org).

Exhibition Opening Times

Friday to Sunday, 14:00–18:00

About

Shanghai-based artist Vivian Xu's Silkworm Project explores the possibilities of using silkworms to design a series of hybrid biomass machines capable of producing self-organized flat and spatial silk structures. In her work Xu is interested in how far the behavior of insects can serve as a foundation for technological design. She develops cybernetic machines based on both biological and computer-controlled logic.

The Silkworm Project is the first of an ongoing series titled The Insect Trilogy, in which she examines the behavior of silkworms, ants and bees in order to take this into account in the design of machines. Combining the 5000 year-old tradition of sericulture with new technologies, Vivian Xu's work investigates the role of human and nonhuman, biological and technological, and the permeable borders between them. Her silk machines are based on a closed feedback loop that creates an autonomous production system that is both organic and artificial, biological and computational.

The exhibition will present multiple prototypes and documentation of previous experiments as well as a new machine interacting with live silkworms. The most recent prototype of the Silkworm Project, Machine III – Magnetic Spinning Machine, has been financially supported by Art Laboratory Berlin. Art Laboratory Berlin is proud to exhibit the projects by Shanghai-based media artist and researcher Vivian Xu for the first time in Europe.

About Vivian Xu

Vivian Xu is a media artist and researcher from Beijing, currently based in Shanghai. In 2013, she received her MFA in Design and Technology at Parsons the New School for Design. She is an independent artist. Her work explores the boundaries between bio and electronic media in creating new forms of machine logic, life and sensory systems, and often take the form of object, installation and/or wearable. She has shown, lectured, and performed at various institutions in China, the US, Germany, and Australia, including the National Art Museum of China (Beijing), the Central Academy of Fine Art (Beijing), the China Academy of Art (Hangzhou), the Chronus Art Center (Shanghai), the Rockbund Museum (Shanghai), the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra (Shanghai), the New York Science Museum (New York), Gallery Ho (New York), Art Laboratory Berlin (Berlin), and SymbioticA at University of Western Australia (Perth). Vivian co-founded Dogma Lab, a trans-disciplinary design lab in Shanghai that is dedicated to creating experimental research at the intersection of design, technology, art and science. As an artist-in-residence at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (May-Aug. 2019), Vivian develops an artist book of her bio machine art series The Silkworm Project. This work will be presented at Art Laboratory Berlin.

About the Series

Art Laboratory Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) collaborate together through a four-month research stay in Berlin by Vivian Xu. Between May and August 2019, Vivian Xu will pursue her artistic research at MPIWG and ALB. The exhibition and a workshop on sericulture by Vivian Xu will provide the public with insights into this fascinating long-term project.