Clot Magazine

Joe Davies is one of the seminal figures in Biomedia. His work has shocked and polarised the artistic community while at the same time laying the foundations for a new artistic discipline. The artist is a research affiliate in the Department of Biology at MIT and his research and art include work in the fields of molecular biology, bioinformatics, and sculpture. With his practice, he was one of the first to blur the lines between art and modern biology, In the late 1980s, Davis collaborated with molecular biologist Dana Boyd to insert for the first time a non-biological DNA message into a coding sequence. The recipient was the bacterial strain E. coli, one of the basic tools in molecular biology labs. The work, named Microvenus, encoded a binary representation of the Germanic rune for the female goddess of earth and life. The piece was a response to the Pioneer plaques designed by astronomers Frank Drake and Carl Sagan that were sent aboard Pioneer spacecraft with the intention of being intercepted by ext

Harm van den Dorpel is a Berlin-based dutch conceptual artist regarded a key figure in post-internet art movement. Alongside with other contemporaries, they developed a new way of exploring technology, digital footprints and social networks. He was at Unsound Krakow 2016 bringing the visual element to Lexachast, a project by Bill Kouligas and Amnesia Scanner which started as a website with generative visuals from Harm. These were programmed to live stream pictures uploaded in real time on Flickr and DeviantArt, algorithmically filtered to show Not Safe For Work images. The project expanded into a live premiere for Unsound, combining uneasy imagery with the dystopian music. With a background in Computer Science and Artificial intelligence Harm´s work investigates how algorithms can analyse digital archives and guide the artist in aesthetic decision making, leading to a symbiosis of man-machine art creation. He uses algorithms and data to explore how things online relate and mutate in what is called “unst

Marcel Weber better know as MFO is a renowned German lighting and visual artist. Marcel has been creating and directing audiovisual performances, installations, and video works since 2001. His work has a very distinctive aesthetic concerned with memory and perception, it highlights the architectural elements of performance spaces with powerful experimental visual narratives juxtaposing the work of some of the world’s most renowned electronic musicians. Marcel work lays between the analog and the digital. Employing old media like projectors, film, and lenses, against digital compositions and generative software. Some of the artists he has collaborated with include Kara-Lis Coverdale, Tim Hecker (Ephemera), Ben Frost (Aurora Tour), and Kode9 (Her ghost, homage to Chris Maker's la Jeté). Last year saw light his collaboration with Rolly Porter for the latest new show Third Law, inspired by solitary iced landscapes and which culminated in a blinding strobe crescendo. During Unsound he managed to find som

The American experimental electronic duo Matmos are M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel. Both artists are the main core of the outfit but they are frequently joined by other musicians and an array of domestic gadgets. Currently based in Baltimore - Daniel is an associate professor in the Department of English at Johns Hopkins University-, they formed in San Francisco in the 90s, where Schmidt worked as a teacher in the New Genres Department at the San Francisco Art Institute and Daniel was taking his doctoral studies on the literary cult of melancholy at Berkley (University of California) Over the last 2 decades Matmos have gained a reputation as the new masters of musique concrete through their conceptual approach and the use of unusual sound sources. Their productions are challenging but also infused with a playful touch of domestic humor and a disregard for genre conventions. They first entered the more mainstream musical consciousness in 2001 through their collaboration for Bjork’s album Vespertine and th

CLOT Magazine got the chance to talk to musician Robert Lippok and video artist and live performer Lillevan during 2016 edition of Unsound Festival: Dislocation (Kraków, Poland) where they were presenting Gletschermusik together with musician Askat Jetigen from Kirzystan. Robert Lippok is an avant-garde German musician and visual artist and composer which has been an influential player in Berlin’s thriving experimental music scene from a very early age, with bands like To Rococo Rot for which he is best known, while his solo work has been featured in the renowned label Raster-Noton. Lillevan an animation, video, and media artist, was a founding member of the visual and music group Rechenzentrum (1997-2008) and has performed and collaborated with many artists like Christian Fenesz and Vladislav delay Gletschermusik is a dislocated audio-visual performance that blends art, science, and folklore. It uses the sounds and images of Central Asia’s melting glaciers as a source of inspiration to promote a dialogue

Media historian and artist Kristen Gallerneaux is the Curator of Communications and Information Technology at The Henry Ford Museum (Dallas, USA), where she takes care of things like computers, and also things like radios, televisions, things that have tubes and transistors. The museum is one of the largest historic collections in North America. Kristen’s universe, who was raised in a generations-long Spiritualist family, is surrounded by visionary architecture, local micro-histories of sinister small towns, ‘thing theory’, vernacular technoculture, aesthetic failure, contact magic, monster magazines, learning to weave, sound studies, and visual legends and legend trips, in her words. Through her writings, she has covered an extensive range of topics like the audible history of paranormal culture and the visual history of telepathy research. CLOT Magazine got the chance to speak to Kristen during 2016 edition of Unsound Festival: Dislocation (Kraków, Poland) where she gave the talk ‘Sonic Spectres’. There

(This podcast was produced by CLOT Magazine editorial team and Stephen Mclaughlin) What happens if we alter the traditional methods of sensing by adding an extra sense? What changes if we extend our perception and abilities by enhancing our senses? In her A Cyborg Manifesto, written in the early eighties, Dora Haraway defined cyborg as ‘A cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Neil Harbisson, cyborg artist, co-founder of The Cyborg Foundation and Cyborg Nest, ‘became technology’ and therefore cyborg more than a decade ago when he implanted an antenna in his skull that allows him to hear colours. Born with achromatopsia, a rare condition of colour blindness that makes him see the world in a grey scale, the antenna, which Harbisson calls ‘eyeborg’ represents the perfect cybernetic union between human and technology. He even wears it while showering. For Harbisson, the son of a Catalan mother and an Irish father, his identity as a

For our innagural podcast we would like to introduce you to the work of Johannes Klabbers. Johannes is an Australian artist, writer and also developer of the intriguing discipline of posthumanist therapy. During Unsound Krakow 2016, he acted as resident posthumanist therapist and he also presented his work as the performance "How Can a Posthumanist Be?". For it, he used an improvisation method developed by John Cage in 1958 for his piece Indeterminacy. In his latest book "I am Here" (2016), Johannes Klabbers gives insights to help understand the process of death and dying and help people cope with suffering. It is about listening and talking to people who are dying, and about life and death. We had the pleasure to talk to him during the Festival about how quantum physics influenced his theory and what a posthumanist therapist actually is and does This podcast was produced by CLOT Magazine editorial team and Stephen Mclaughlin for Unsound Festival in Collaboration with OFF Radio Krakow. Piotr Figiel ki