As part of EPFL-CDH’s AiR program Enter the Hyper-Scientific, launched in September 2021, the artists Rosa Menkman (*1983), Sarah Oppenheimer (*1972), and Gary Zhexi Zhang (*1993) are each developing a project at the intersection of art, science, media, and technology in dialogue with EPFL scientists and laboratories. The three-month residency allows them to access the technologies, infrastructures, materials, and science developed or made available at EPFL to foster intensive experimentation with new forms of expression. AiR residencies culminate in exhibitions in the EPFL Pavilions on the Lausanne campus.

In this conversation with Le Foyer, the residents of the current season provide insights into their ongoing transdisciplinary research and work processes. Taking their prompts as a starting point, we reflect on the promises, challenges, and potential pitfalls of the residency program together with AiR curator Giulia Bini.

In collaboration with EPFL-CDH AiR program “Enter the Hyper-Scientific,” kindly hosted by Archizoom, EPFL.

Archizoom
EPFL campus
Place Ada Lovelace
Bâtiment SG (SG 1212)
Station 15, 1015 Lausanne

Rosa Menkman is a Dutch artist and researcher. Her work focuses on noise artifacts resulting from analog and digital media accidents. As a compendium to this research, she published the Glitch Moment/um (INC, 2011), a little book on exploiting and popularizing glitch artifacts. In a second book titled Beyond Resolution, Menkman developed and highlighted the politics of resolution setting further  (i.R.D., 2020). In this book, she describes how the standardization of resolutions is a process that promotes efficiency, order, and functionality and involves compromises and the obfuscation of alternative possibilities. In 2019, Menkman won the Collide, Arts at CERN Barcelona award, which inspired her recent research into what makes things im/possible.

Sarah Oppenheimer earned a bachelor’s degree in semiotics and a master’s degree in Fine Arts in painting. Beyond two-dimensional or media limitations, her work is situated as installation art on the border between architecture and sculpture. She uses her architecture-based interventions to explore the perceptual mechanisms of people in built and digitally imprinted space. Her approach has developed over the past decade in the context of various solo exhibitions in galleries and institutional contexts, including Kunsthaus Baselland (2014) and Kunstmuseum Thun (2020). Most recently, Artforum dedicated an extensive article to her work.

Gary Zhexi Zhang is an artist, writer, and occasional technologist who lectures in Critical Studies at Goldsmiths MFA and taught previously at Parsons School of Design. His recent work explores connections between cosmology, technology, and economy. He recently edited a book about finance and time, Catastrophe Time! (Strange Attractor Press, 2023), comprising economic histories, science fiction, and interviews with leading climate modelers. The opera he co-wrote, Dead Cat Bounce, premiered at Somerset House in 2022. In September 2023, he presented The Tourist, a new film exploring the life of Ali Sultan Issa, a revolutionary who sought to build post-revolutionary Zanzibar in the image of China. Recent/upcoming publications include Against Reduction (chapter, MIT Press, 2021), Incomputable Earth (chapter, Bloomsbury, forthcoming), Platforms: Around, In Between and Through (Singapore Biennale, 2023); Future Art Ecosystems III (with Victoria Ivanova; Serpentine, 2022).

Giulia Bini PhD works at the intersection of visual art, media, science, and emerging technologies in curatorial practice, theory, and writing. She is head of the program and curator for Enter the Hyper-Scientific, the newly established artist-in-residence program of the College of Humanities (CDH) at EPFL, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne. Previously curator and producer at EPFL Pavilions (2018–21) and a member of the curatorial team of ZKM Center for Arts and Media| Karlsruhe (2014–17), she has curated and co-curated numerous collective exhibitions and solo presentations, among them Nature of Robotics. An Expanded Field (EP, 2021) and, as part of the project Beyond Matter, Spatial Affairs and S.A.Worlding (Ludwig Museum Budapest 2021). She authored “Media spazio display. ZKM Zentrum für Kunst und Medien Karlsruhe | HFG Hochschule für Gestaltung” (Mimesis Edizioni, Milano 2022) and is a lecturer at HEAD-Geneva Work.Master.