Androids, robots, animals and growling plants. In the VU Art Science gallery, imagination becomes reality and reality is represented.
Look for the entrance on the street side of the New University Building, then the De Boelelaan, but the VU Art Science Gallery it’s worth it. A place where art and science meet, where scientists inspire artists and vice versa. “Artists are always looking for margins, uncertainties,” says curator Wende Wallert. “This inspires scientists. On the other hand, science is a way for artists to see how the world really works, how things work. “
Some of the results of these mutual stimuli are now visible in the Welcome to the Symbiocene exhibition, featuring works by Jelle Korevaar, Tabita Rezaire, Wanda Tuerlinckx and Christiaan Zwanikken.
The sound of plants
Korevaar has placed a deer skull and peacock feathers on a decommissioned robot vacuum cleaner to represent “symbiotic life forms”. Elsewhere in space, a parrot skeleton is attached to an installation that makes the skeleton fly on solar energy, and there’s an armadillo-like shell that closes when you get close.
In one film, Rezaire shows the similarities between the World Wide Web and the Wood Wide Web, the huge network of tree roots and fungi, on which VU scientists conduct groundbreaking research.
Van Tuerlinckx has a series of portraits of androids reminiscent of the portraits of the deceased from the 19th century. The works inspire questions such as what do you get when you feed an artificially intelligent robot the memories of real people. What is intelligence? What is identity?
In the darkroom of the gallery, plants are subjected to hypergravity and different types of light in zoetrope-like machines to see how they react to it. The speakers emit a strange otherworldly sound that, according to Wallert, is produced by plants.
The works on display are as fascinating as they are surprising and sometimes perhaps even slightly disturbing. “This is a place of dialogue between artists and scientists,” says Wallert. “New alliances are forged”.
Birthday gallery for peace and debate
VU Art Science, freely accessible to all, claims to contribute to “solutions to the current problems of our society”, but the gallery is also an excellent place for contemplation and meditation, a place to relax in the midst of the frenetic pace. from the Zuidas and the VU campus.
In the classrooms and in the café of the same building, debates are held on the exposed, the so-called Dialogues on the science of art. On the website (hyperlink) artists and scientists shed light on it in podcasts. By participating in art routes through the Zuida, the gallery was able to attract people from outside the VU. From the street side, the gallery is easily visible to passersby, some of whom gaze in amazement at Korevaar’s modified robot vacuum cleaner.
On Friday 11 November VU Art Science will celebrate its first birthday. The new exhibition opens on Wednesday 30 November Someone, a collaboration with the University Medical Center Amsterdam. This exhibition explores the disturbed relationship between body and mind in the digital age.