The installation in Vita Kuben was created by Nils Faber, Anton Dobrevski, Amélie Kim, Joris Putteneers, Sharon van Rijthoven, Angelo Vermeulen, Arise Wan and Jasper Wennekendonk.
The hostile and unpredictable environment of deep space requires a new conceptual approach for interstellar flight, one that differs radically from any current design in aerospace. Using biology as inspiration, E|A|S suggests creating starships that physically grow and evolve during their journey. Resources extracted through asteroid mining are used to 3D print new components of the ship in an almost endless process of adaptation. The DSTART team is currently developing concept studies and computer simulations to test these ideas.
The proposed art installation is a combination of a large-scale animated video, a composition of flat screens with moving and still images, and a living plant sculpture. The animations and still images are visual studies of the E|A|S project.
Curator spring 2019: Carl-Erik Engqvist
Carl-Erik Engqvist, curator in Vita kuben spring 2019.
Carl-Erik Engqvist is a contemporary artist and the Artistic Director of Humlab, an interdisciplinary digital humanities laboratory placed in Umeå, Sweden.
Since 2006, he has been working with concepts and perspectives related to artificial intelligence, robotics, nano-, and biotechnology, games and virtual worlds. Investigating the meeting point between spirituality and high technology, both contemporary and speculative, is of of great importance for his work. He is also driven by a strong interest in games and game development, both digital as well as analogue. Engqvist believes that the multi-medial nature of games has a strong potential, both as contemporary artistic projects and as pedagogical tools.
The different technologies and the variety of challenges connected to them have regularly given him the opportunity and motivation to collaborate with various professionals both within and outside of the art world. The human factor is a fundamental reason why he, as an artist, is working within Humlab, where he has been based since his M.F.A. graduation from the Umeå Academy of Fine Arts in 2009.
Currently he is focusing on discerning the artistic use and risks with artificial intelligence.