Shared Habitats Exhibition
04.05.2019 – 22.07.2019
MO Museum, Vilnius, Lithuania
Artists and scientists associated with the Media Environments at the Bauhaus University Weimar are presenting their works in the exhibition at the MO museum of modern art, in Vilnius, Lithuania. The Shared Habitats exhibition offers several stopovers for participants to immerse themselves in the realm of other creatures.
“Shared Habitats” explores the influence of technology on socio-cultural processes via the artifacts, DIWO experiments, and the conference. The exhibition invites to encounters between humans and other beings. It focuses on the situatedness of organisms in their environment and explores interactions from humans in their habitat, humans with non-human species and living beings with machines. To develop new ways of understanding exhibition proposes continuous, evolving feedback processes between the respective agents. It looks for the expansion of seeing, thinking and acting.
One hundred years ago, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy described the so-called primitive man: he was a hunter, a craftsman, a builder and a physician in one person. According to Moholy-Nagy, these skills were lost in the modern age, so it was important for him to re-position human in everyday life with the help of artistic practices. “He no longer dares venture into other fields of experience. He becomes a man of one calling; he has no longer first-hand experience elsewhere,” – says Lazlo Moholy-Nagy in his book “The New Vision.” For Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, the focus was on decoding the temporal and biological validity of the artistic experience. Thus, Moholy-Nagy also demands the organically growing human. On the other hand, after 100 years human can no longer be seen as a moral authority and designer of a worth living civilization. Therefore it is necessary to demand again the opportunity “for unconditional and unmediated artistic experience”.
“Shared Habitats” refers to the idea of Jakob von Uexküll, who laid the foundation for the understanding of a constructed internal “world” of a being, where the identification of external stimuli creates internal memory and action between the individual and its environment. The exhibition takes up Uexkull’s respect for the completeness of the individual world and develops an aesthetic of exchange. We develop visions and new spheres of possible futures. At the same time the exhibition looks forward to communicate ideas of Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and to present Bauhaus University as a place where innovation in art, technology and science takes place.
