Enter the Hyper-Scientific – EPFL-CDH Artist in Residence Program

Rosa Menkman is a Dutch artist and researcher. Her work focuses on noise artifacts that result from accidents in both analogue and digital media. These artifacts can offer precious insights into the otherwise obscure alchemy of standardisation and resolution setting. As a compendium to this research, she published the Glitch Moment/um (inc, 2011), a little book on the exploitation and popularization of glitch artifacts.

Sarah Oppenheimer is an architectural manipulator. Oppenheimer creates circulatory pathways that establish unexpected kinesthetic and visual relays between bodies and buildings. Gestural manipulation of interwoven instruments alters the contours of surrounding architecture. Rhythms and timescales of living systems flow from body to building and back again. The viewer is transformed into an agent of spatial change.

Gary Zhexi Zhang is an artist, writer and occasional technologist. 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 fictions and interviews with leading climate modellers. 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.

Alan Bogana is a Swiss visual artist based in Geneva. 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.

Dorota Gawęda (PL) and Eglė Kulbokaitė (LT) are an artist duo living and working in Basel. Their multimedia practice draws from extensive historical and theoretical research processes, a high sensitivity to materials, and intellectual openness.

Joel Kuennen (US) is an art critic, curator, editor, and artist. 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.

Riccardo Giacconi (IT) is an artist and documentarian based in Boston. His practice investigates narrative forms through an 'evidential paradigm', drawing from micro-factual details and clues.

Melissa Dubbin & Aaron S. Davidson have been chosen as the next artists-in-residence at EPFL Pavilions. Dubbin and Davidson are interdisciplinary artists based in Brooklyn, New York and Northern California. Their work has been described as addressing processes of transmission and reception, interference and transference, often seeking to materialise immaterial or ephemeral states of matter (sound, light, air, time).
Developed in the framework of a remote version of the artist-in-residence programme, the installation Delay Lines, (feedback) is a new variation of the work begun in the context of IF THE SNAKE, the Okayama Art Summit 2019, produced for the exhibition: Nature of Robotics. Dubbin & Davidson’s knowledge in the field of soft robotics is enriched by data developed in collaboration with EPFL’s Biorobotics Laboratory, led by Auke Ijspeert. The visualisation explores the relationships between a soft robotic manta ray and a simulated virtual environment. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the artists and scientists had to devise and complete the collaboration remotely.

Nora Al-Badri was chosen to be the first artist to join this new residency program. She officially began in July 2019 and was hosted by the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+). Her work will culminate in November 2020 with an exhibition, Babylonian Vision — الرؤية البابلية, a public lecture and a two-day workshop at EPFL Pavilions.

Nora Al-Badri is a multidisciplinary media artist with a German-Iraqi background. She lives and works in Berlin. She graduated in Political Sciences at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main. Since 2009, she collaborates with Jan Nikolai Nelles in some of her works.

Nora Al-Badri’s work has featured in The New York Times, BBC, The Times, Artnet, Wired, Le Monde Afrique, Financial Times and Arte TV, amongst others.