Re-Routing Nature

The Exhibition Re-Routing Nature explores various correlations and entanglements between nature’s organic forms and technological progress. A twofold investigation is opened up by the title of the exhibition, which plays on the two verbs ‘to root’ and ‘to route’. The title suggests a ‘re-routing’ or ‘re-rooting’ of our understanding of how technology and organic life can begin to form close relationships and emerge as new kinds of cybernetic organisms, also referred to as cyborgs.

Re-Routing Nature presents a range of artworks by artists who work with the inseparable connections between nature and technology, and the new hybrid forms these create. Jakob Kudsk re-creates futuristic virtual simulations of existing real-world tree roots and examines how imagination, technology and ecology intertwine. Embracing the view on animism expressed by Adorno in his Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), where he formulates it as a cultural activity pitted against the capitalistic serial approach to image creation, Kudsk addresses technology as a prosthesis with which to experience the world and as a channel to animate it. Rune Bosse researches concepts such as nature and decay, using organic materials as a poetic language to investigate and articulate, through organic syntaxes, how we perceive and understand a topic like the passing of time. Through his practice, he gives new life to organic elements by re-assembling scattered timber, sticks and twigs into sculptures, whose forms recall branches from the crown of a tree deprived of its leaves. Viktor Timofeev explores the entanglement of the organic with the inorganic in his coloured pencil drawings, creating imaginary worlds which eschew binary relationships in favour of complex connections and relations between matter. Alfredo Aceto investigates how organic elements and amorphous forms grow and take over machines and other sorts of manmade landscapes. His drawings investigate the concept of ‘endemic’, looking at infiltrations of alien organic bodies into determinate inorganic contexts, as though nature would threaten the existence of human habitats. The artist duo Biitsi create sound installations and music performances based entirely on the agency and properties inherent in organic materials and nature’s systems.

The invited artists in Re-Routing Nature re-examine and re-imagine the composite layers of interconnectedness and interdependence between nature and technologies. Their research and practices go beyond the binary relationship that is too often addressed as characteristic of both. By embracing different media – from virtual reality films to installations, performances and drawings – the invited artists suggest ways of re-considering the entangled and interdependent connections between human, organic and inorganic bodies. Each of them embarks on an alternative route to understanding ecology and our relationship to it.

Kilde: SixtyEight Art Institute