Talk data to me.

Cyborgs have sex to the sound of nature.

Am Ende der Welt ein sänitärer Pool.

The microbiome drifts between 1 and 0.

These are the four statements, artist and writer Valerie Prinz created for a special series of posters for AIL, which are currently out and about, inviting Vienna to come explore AIL universe online and offline.

With the new space (hello Postsparkasse!), new name (from Innovation to Interdisciplinary Lab) and the over all feeling of a fresh start (hopefully!) our aim with this poster campaign is to make our complex but vivid program visible, invite new and old audiences in and after what feels like two years of hibernation, followed by an overcompensating amount of events, input and trara to poke yet again your curiosity.

Following our open call Valerie Prinz created / extracted a collection of sentences putting the variety of subjects at AIL to the forefront, and in AIL manner thereby including some twists, charme and humour.

So we asked Valerie to give us insights into her concept and to introduce herself.

Special thanks to the Institute of Sprachkunst – especially Gerhild Steinbuch – for opening up to this cooperation.

AIL’s tentacles are reaching out: into different subjects, into the Angewandte and for a moment into the space of the city of Vienna too!

And: AIL is now extended by Café Exchange, which is even more awaiting you with open arms.

[0]

AIL stretches out its tentacles in all directions: interdisciplinarity, interconnections, absurdities, theories, discursiveness, future (sound), noise, nonsense, research, love, sex & robots. We count posthumanism, postmodernism, postfeminism, post_____,… Postsparkasse.

Within each sentence, the content and program of the AIL, which combine research, art and theory, are situated in relation to each other.

Does it make sense? Possibly. Does it need to be thought through? Definitely. What's in it for us? tbh. – potentials.

[1]

I’ve always found it difficult to locate my own artistic work anywhere within the arts. Always had the feeling for it to be a neither-nor what could have been read as a but-also.

Concepts: Big fan! Research: Love, love, love.

Science is grotesquely beautiful and creating connections between art and theory is exactly what defines the AIL and, ultimately, my own work. We are multi-limbed octopuses. Hybrids and creatures of social reality, of fiction.*

While working on the concept what came as no surprise was that our data is deeply biased and filthy. It’s filled with a western-centered world view and framed by a humming machinery’s sound of automated capitalism. Still it’s being used to feed our greedy AI’s and stomachs. Hence the word dirty and data could almost be used synonymously (fun when you’re a bit nerdy and into sexting).

But what stroke me most was to draw connections between the seemingly different topics presented in the arts as well as in research and to quickly understand that they’re actually not that different. If you zoom in, you’ll see that most content is based on the presence of an almost dystopian atmosphere and that, indeed, everything is connected.

[0,5]

‘And sometimes it is necessary to allow a quote severed from its original body to flourish in its new one. A grafting of another’s ideas. Trans-planting from one space to another.’**

[2]

Valerie Prinz is an artist and writer. She studied media science as well as gestaltung and is currently at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Institute for Language Arts. Her works position themselves within a socio-political context and are primarily research-based, shaping her artistic practice through the interweaving of text and media, + pop-culture phenomena.

She writes for magazines and artistic projects and is part of the collective rau – Kollektiv für vorpolitische Praxis.

Most recently: Wiener Festwochen (AT), Kunstraum53 (GER), Antwerp Art Week (BE), Das Wetter. Her works have been exhibited & published.

*vgl. Harraway, Donna: „A Manifesto for Cyborgs. Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,“ in: Simians, Cyborgs and Women. The Reinvention of Nature, New York; Routledge, 1991, S. 149.

**Fusco, Evan: „WE EACH GO THROUGH SO MANY BODIES IN EACH OTHER“, in: Other Forms (Hg.): Counter-Signals #4. Identity is the Crisis, Chicago 2021, S. 160.