EPFL announces four artists-in-residence

Selected artists and their projects

Alan Bogana: Light-Oriented Ontologies

Alan Bogana is a Swiss visual artist based in Geneva. Over the years, he has developed a multiform art practice involving installations, sculptures, time-based media, websites, virtual realities and holograms. His research focuses on the real and speculative behaviour of light as well as on the emergence of organic shapes and patterns by means of technological processes. He completed a Fine Arts Diploma with honours at the Geneva University of Art and Design HEAD in 2009 and a specialization in artistic research methodologies at the Zürich University of Art and Design in 2013.

Light-Oriented Ontologies aims to interrogate speculative narratives concerning the threshold between living and inanimate matter as well as animistic belief systems in relation to light. The project will focus on experimental applications of holography, photonic crystals, and UV lithography, as well as experimental forms of volumetric 3D printing with light. Bogana will have a deeper insight into the mechanisms of “volumetric printing” of various types of organic (and biological) entities with light. Envisioned EPFL collaborations: The EPFL Center for Imaging, the Laboratory of Applied Photonics Devices (LAPD) and the Optics Laboratory, among others.

Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė: Synthetic Landscapes

Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė are an artist duo living and working in Basel. Both graduated from the Royal College of Art in London in 2012. Their multimedia practice - which includes performances, videos, sculptural and installation works, as well as perfumes - draws from extensive historical and theoretical research processes, a high sensitivity to materials, and intellectual openness.

The duo will develop the project Synthetic Landscapes, which will look into the history of the Western landscape painting tradition. Through this research, Gawęda and Kulbokaitė will explore the formation of the concept of Nature in an effort to better understand the current ecological crisis. The project will seek to challenge the illusory promise of subjectivity as a whole, and separate from the environment in order to break normative patterns of behaviour, and negotiate new ways of relating to the world. Envisioned EPFL collaborations: The EPFL Center for Imaging, among others.

Riccardo Giacconi: Rational and Irrational Numbers

Riccardo Giacconi studied fine arts at the University of Venezia. He has been an artist-in-residence at the Centre international d'art et du paysage (Vassivière, France), lugar a dudas (Cali, Colombia), MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, La Box (Bourges, France) and Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen (Innsbruck, Austria). He is the co-founder of the collective listening festival ‘Helicotrema’ and the audio storytelling studio ‘Botafuego’. Giacconi’s work has been exhibited at various institutions, and he has presented his films at the New York Film Festival, Venice International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Visions du Réel and FID Marseille, where he won the Grand Prix of the International Competition in 2015.

Rational and Irrational Numbers is a project on the concept of animation. It aims to connect the archaic tradition of puppetry to the latest technological developments on robotics and artificial intelligence, while addressing puppets as an ancient prefiguration of the ‘uncanny valley’ theory, according to which the more an anthropomorphic automaton resembles a human being, the more monstrous its imperfections appear. The project focuses on the production of a film in collaboration with the Carlo Colla & Figli Puppet Company in Milan, and the EPFL Reconfigurable Robotics Lab (RRL). Envisioned EPFL collaborations: The Reconfigurable Robotics Lab (RRL) and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (LIA), among others.

Joel Kuennen: Spheroids

Joel Kuennen is an art critic, curator, editor, and artist. They received an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2010). Their art practice investigates human relationships to the earth as a means of understanding the social dynamics that can interrupt the extractive and exploitative ways in which we engage with this planet. Working through site-specific land art interventions and extensive materials research, they push back against a persistent present that blinds us to the consequences of our daily actions.

Spheroids interrogates exoplanet geologies and ecologies to question our burgeoning interplanetary imaginary, and its relationship to how we interact with the Earth. The objects will be spheroidal with magnetic cores coated in materials believed to comprise certain exoplanets. Biological textures and biofilms will be added to create a relationship that straddles the known and unknown. These geo-eco hybrid objects question imperialist and colonialist motivations through which we have come to include these intergalactic places in our cultural imaginary, as potential escapes from our own looming climate disaster. Envisioned EPFL collaborations: The Laboratory of Statistical Biophysics (LBS), Crystal Growth Facility, and the Distributed Electrical Systems Lab (DESL), among others.