We finally have an artist for the 2024 residency!

Yes! We have already selected an artist (from a total of 27 artists applying) for the upcoming edition of our artistic residency AR(t)IBMCP in 2024!

The jury, composed of Mónica Bello (Art Historian, Science, Curator, and Head of Arts at CERN), Blanca Pujals (architect, spatial researcher, filmmaker, and critical writer), and Pau Alsina (Professor at Universitat Oberta de Cataluña, codirector of HacTeBcn, and coeditor of Artnodes Journal), recognized experts in the field of Art-Science interaction, along with the Director of IBMCP, Pablo Vera, and myself, Javier Forment, as coordinator of AR(t)IBMCP, have decided to select the project ‘Plant Autonomy: entangled presence, perception, and intelligent behaviour’ by Liang Xiao, who is expected to join us from early March to late July.

Liao Xiang obtained her MA in Art & Science at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (University of the Arts, London, UK). She’s currently a PhD Art candidate at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Australia. Her work is grounded in plant intelligence, entwined with technology, scientific research, and development, harmonized with art to fashion hybrid biomorphs that merge selected crops and robots. You can learn about her work at https://art.ibmcp.upv.es/liangxiaoportfolio and https://vimeo.com/xiaoliang.

Her project for AR(t)IBMCP proposes the creation of an installation that will include sculpture, digital collage, digital video, performance, interactive installation, art book, and experimental music. It will be designed through interaction with the different research groups at IBMCP, aiming to translate their plant biotechnology research into an artistic practice that questions the relationship between crops, biotechnology, machines, and human beings.

This proposal focuses on five interconnected objectives:

(1) Investigating existing plant data theories and experiments at IBMCP to summarize relevant technologies and methods for target crops and considering how to leverage these for project advancement;

(2) Extracting human data from the laboratory to study the impact of human behavior on experimental subjects;

(3) Transforming crop growth data into a bodily experience to explore how plants influence human behavior.

(4) Synthesizing the findings from steps two and three to create a groundbreaking collaborative project driven by technology and art (speculative design + human-plant interactive installation).

(5) Evaluating interactive behaviors from step four, creating physical installations, and
inviting audience participation for sensory analysis.

This project aims to raise awareness of the interconnectedness between crops, biotechnology, and human development. It envisions plants becoming experimenters/researchers based on plant intelligence, either through a combination of plants and machines or by enhancing plant autonomy.

Currently, it’s only an imaginary project, and it will be re-investigated during the residency with the help of the scientists and learning from each other.

We’re looking forward to starting with it!