ARTISTS
DIGITAL WATER
No Water. No Cloud.
Our daily lives are based on interactions that increasingly take place online. But what if the digital space is not as independent of earthy matters as we believe?
Christina Gruber’s project Digital Water is based on the fact that both the digital and analog worlds are water-based. The digital cloud, essentially a vast network of servers, needs water to guarantee fast streaming. Bodies of water are involved in energy production and cooling its data servers.
In a cool and shaded reading spot by the pool, Christina introduces her “International Cloud Atlas Vol. 3,” which maps these invisible bodies of digital water. Her research tracks down cloud infrastructures on earth. She finds them—astonishingly—not in Silicon Valley, but in a small village in Upper Austria.
Christina Gruber is a Vienna-based freshwater ecologist, visual artist and sturgeon caretaker. Water is of special interest to her as it is the connector between stories of different places and layers, from clouds to data centers. In recent years she has visited and researched rivers from the Mississippi to the Danube, and currently teaches at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the University of Art and Design Linz.
Amniotic
Antidote
Zosia Hołubowska [they] is a queer sound artist, musician, and music curator, who has been living and working in Vienna since 2016. They explore archives of folk Eastern European music, as well as traditions of magic, herbalism, and demonology. Hołubowska experiments with archaic ways of singing to create queer [æsthetic] soundscapes, installations, performances, and audio essays. They also design sound for performances and video art. Zosia curates and coordinates the queer synth laboratory Sounds Queer?, which facilitates workshops on electronic and synthesized music for women, queer and non-binary people.
Her performance within the scope of BODIES OF WATER continues the conceptual performance Amniotic Antidote, which can be regarded as an amalgam of scientific and emotional experimentation of fluids.
Sediments
Ж Ignashev is a composer and sound/audiovisual artist. His works, often referring to surreal or scientific narratives, include acousmatic and live-electronic pieces, audiovisual art, installations, and soundtracks that aim to create tangible sonic experiences by fusing musicality with psycho-/otoacoustics, extended techniques, microintervals, spectral transformations, and spatial sound projections.
On this occasion, a DJ, he forms a sonic and musical ground for the flow of performances with the program.
Floating
Guitar
MS Mutt is experimental electric guitarist Johanna Forster’s solo project. Harmonic riffs and noise merge with modulated field recordings in her improvised collages. Her live sets feature experiments with the sounds of found objects, contact microphones and various analog devices.
Since 2008, she has been active in various formations and fields of experimental, noise, post-rock and improvised music, and has recently appeared on stage with the electric guitar sextet “In the hills, the cities” and the band “Half Darling”.
Micro Loop
Macro Cycle
The performance Micro Loop Macro Cycle investigates environmental cycles through the study of various states of water. It invites us to consider our profound relationship with water through technology, by joining the natural with an artificial environment. Aloïs’ focal point in this performance is how a tiny event, such as the formation of a drop of water, the noise of pressure and the crackling of melting ice, can be amplified and made cognizant. These sounds enter into aural feedback loops. The changes of aggregate are determined by the outside, as close and far movements affect the melting process. We thereby understand that the indivisible whole is crucial for even the smallest of (musical) environments.