12 July 2014

14:00-17:00 (walk 14:00-16:00, discussion 16:00-17:00)

Museum für Naturkunde, Invalidenstraße 43, 10115 Berlin
 

An ideally-shaped machine […] effortlessly draws, out of a heap of greenish crystals, shiny and fluted dressing-room tidies. At one end, raw, telluric matter, at the other, the finished, human object; and between these two extremes, nothing; nothing but a transit, hardly watched over by an attendant in a cloth cap, half-god, half-robot. (Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 97)

Bringing technology into discourse with natural history, Martin Howse and Rosemary Lee will lead a guided walk through the Museum fur Naturkunde Berlin. Discussing themes such as mining, post-humanity, media geology, and ecology in relation to the collections of the museum, they invite new interpretations of the earth's materiality, the deep past, and humans' relation to it. Martin Howse's work has often brought together computing with geology, such as generating code from earth, composing poetry with magnetic memories for worms, or growing fungi "doped" with technological minerals. Rosemary Lee, in her residency at the Vilém Flusser Archive, has been deconstructing media apparatuses into their mineral composition, mining them for minerals, and recomposing them as rocks. Each artist, with their own perspective on these topics, will enter into dialogue with the exhibits and architecture of the museum, referencing literature, science, history, philosophy, and their own artistic practice. Visitors on the tour are invited into the discussion, welcome either to listen or to participate, resonating with the context and encouraging new assessments of how we build our relation to the earth and the past.

The number of participants in the event is limited to 20 people. To pre-register, please send an email to rsvp[at]transmediale.de in advance. There is no entry cost for the walk itself, however, the entry to the museum has to be covered by each participant.