VAII Global Connect｜CAFA Visual Art Innovation Institute Expert interview Series
CAFA Visual Art Innovation Institute Expert Ken Rinaldo
Ken Rinaldo
Ken Rinaldo is internationally recognized for interactive art installations developing hybrid ecologies with animals, algorithms, plants, and bacterial cultures. His art/science practice serves as a platform for hacking complex social, biological, and machine symbionts. Inventing and constructing techno interfaces allows illuminating and amplifying the underlying beauty, and intertwined symbiosis existent in natural living systems.
CAFA VAII：Please talk about your work updates and achievements since the covid-19pandemic in 2020. Is there any change in your life and work, and what is it?
Ken Rinaldo：Days before the pandemic hit, I closed an exhibition of the Borderless Bacteria / Colonialist Cash installation at the Art Berlin Laboratory. This artwork was about the ubiquity of microbes in our environment and the nature of borders. The work arrived at this strange prophetic moment finding its way into The New Scientist Magazine and indeed microbes are the original colonizers of us.
Part of this work’s visual allure is the delicate fungal and bacterial colonies intertwining with the colorful international currencies. They exploit the rich material qualities with micro texts, sections of invisibility, holograms, complex material weaves that can be the perfect hiding place for bacteria, fungus, and viruses. The work was a greener production, as working with the curators, I provided clear and concise protocols and detailed instructions and designs on how to recreate the installation, while saving the planet my carbon pollution by flying to Berlin.
Hollobiome Portrait Scatter Surge
Microbe Collection Unit Scatter Surge
While my art practice is generally based on large-scale interactive robotics, bio-art, and moving image, I was prepared to show my digital and virtual works much more during the pandemic. As a neo-conceptual artist, I work at the intersections of material process and concept. Recently, I have focused more on video installations, work outdoors, and moving image arts practice, which travels digitally. The pandemic also influenced how my works were presented and which platforms the works were created on, and optimized for.
I am excited to share many new interactive robotic sound installations and a videos of robotic installation works created this year, which premiered at many international festival: links to works below. During the isolation in the studio I did a series of collages called Immaculate Organicism, which brought an invitation for a one-person exhibition for the summer, with new works about human/machine mediations.
3D mock-up Visualization of the CRISPR Seed Ressurection work to open at a museum in Evora Portugal on May 15
Perhaps my most significant life changes was to retire from teaching at The Ohio State University and earn a position as an Emeritus Professor. I began teaching 22 years earlier at OSU and established a top-ranked Art & Technology Program with Professor Amy Youngs.
It was also inspiring to begin working this year with a talented group of Graduate students at CAFA, as a visiting professor. Working with Professor Xiaowen Chen, Professor Fei June and the graduate students has been a rich learning, and sharing experience. We faculty are excited to see the students progress on their art/science research in the coming weeks. I was impressed with the technical and conceptual elegance of so many of the ideas and designs presented.
CAFA VAII：What are the changes in the area of visual art and design that have come into your awareness?
Ken Rinaldo：I have always been attracted to art and design that creates itself through interaction with human, animal, bacterial orenvironmental elements. This seems to be the lens that I see through. I view all through the space of living systems and think and ask, how does the system work? What are the matter, energy, and information flows through the system?How is it intertwined with other living and "non-living" systems in the environment? I put non-living in quotes in the previous sentence, as the nature of life is not the matter it is made of, but the organization of that matter.
Aliveness is a function of that organization and not the matter itself. This is especially exciting for artists working with artificial life as it implies we may reproduce aliveness outside the substrate of wet biological matter. It means we will see more human-machine/ interface developments that move beyond the purely signal variety. Nature has much wisdom to offer the technological world. While we are beginning to understand nature’s signals, there are more profound organizational and process principles that I like to think about in creating art and design and imagining a greener planet. Machines have a materiality problem.
If all machines were recyclable, like leaves, plants, worms, and fungi, we could throw our old radios into our veggie gardens for an evolved and enhanced model and fertilize our squash and spinachin the process. This is the world I want to live in, where scientific structures, business processes, and commerce are not toxic to the natural living systems we are and that surrounding us.
In some ways, this time seems to be a golden age of Art & Technology. The sudden and dramatic market interest,such as Christie’s Auction House’s recent $435 000 sales of an AI work by Edmond de Belamy from La Famille de Belamy, the French art collective, is a clear sign. NFT (non-fungible Tokens) art has become big business, though with a high environmental cost, and it is not yet fully respected by established contemporary museum critics. Many NFT works tend toward spectacle. However, the monetary interest is there, and as with any medium, some breakthrough artists discover poetic ways of using the medium. When a greener alternative to blockchain appears, I may mean more interest in NFT’s.
I think we are going to see exciting futures in wearable computing and green wearables of all types. Conflating these forms will lead to great strides in fashion, communications, entertainment and health, and future human, machine, and further bacterial/fungal symbiogenesis.
CAFA VAII：Please talk about your artistic creation and relevant work during the pandemic.
Ken Rinaldo：I did a piece called The Opera For Dying Insects, which was shown in Russia during a keynote address, Italy, Portugal, Austria (Ars Electronica), and Montreal (ISEA). I am excited about the potential of streaming concerts of the Opera for Dying Insects in the future. This was a work about the insect apocalypse and the extinction of insects.
Opera for Dying Insects by Ken Rinaldo 2020. Photo by Ken Rinaldo. Acquired Immunity at Ars Electronica exhibits The Opera for Dying Insects video work curated by Marta de Menezes
Opera for Dying Insects by Ken Rinaldo 2020. Photo of interior of pill bug vitrine. Photo Ken Rinaldo
Code snippet of Max MSP and Jitter patch used to sense position and velocity of the pill bugs in the glass vitrine.
I produced a traveling video of the Scatter Surge bio robotic installation and showed it in Russia, Austria, Portugal, and Montreal.
I was invited to give a keynote address at the B3 Biennale Of Moving Image in Frankfurt, Germany, and present The Continuous War Train.
I learned about street sign-making this last year. I created a series of humorous and political street SIGNS and street installations concerning the environment, human-computer interaction, and cultural issues like data tracking.
GLOBAL WARMING AHEAD. By ken Rinaldo
GLOBAL WARMING AHEAD. by Ken Rinaldo
Cultivamos Cultura in Portugal commissioned a new work called Crispr Seed Resurrection for the Alter (action) exhibition.This artwork and project uses the evolved nature of seeds as a structural guide, to creating new bio-hybrid seeds, and containers. I hope it will help the seeds survive longer, so they may bloom in a distant future.
The work is based on the newfound understanding of how bacteria have taught us lessons on editing the DNA of viruses. CRISPR CAS 9 and CAS12 will allow the editing of the DNA of the seeds. Notably, I have been corresponding with, and collaborating with Dr. Lam Yun Wah Lam a specialist in cell biology and chemistry at City University in Hong Kong, who has become the science advisor to this project.
While this CRISPR artwork is about extending seed viability, seems hopeful as it can function as a technical augmentation to the seeds, sadly, it acknowledges this method may become necessary as a means to healing the earth in the future. A kind of insurance policy, given our burning of fossil fuels and global warming.
This conceptual artwork and research pursuit asks, can we engineer seeds to be more immune to higher rates of C02 in the atmosphere and to grow in future moist soils? Can we extend their ability to remain viable as seeds longer? Can we engineer seed pods that will keep these seeds safe and allow them to open at specified times in the future based on their material properties and structure?
CAFA VAII：What do you think of the future trend of visual art and design?
Ken Rinaldo：I am excited about several distinct movements in the art and design world at the moment. I am most encouraged by the continued growth of the Art/science/design/technology matrix.
Art, technology and design, can have a wonderful unified space to explore, create and express. So, digital arts, robotics and bio-art are now coming together with data spaces and machine learning.
Interface issues are most exciting to me, given they often have a determinative influence on how a work manifests and expresses itself. I think digital/bio-art and design will continue to flourish and become even more relevant. I believe intelligent biological research concerning material and process sciences and greener methods will replace many of the more challenging forms that are so energy-intensive and often toxic to the planet.
I believe environmental and bio-art and design will have an important role to play in the future of art and science.Immersive digital and green space hybrids will become experiences we seek. We can see in the history of art that there are movements that exemplify the times and for me green thinking bolstered by data is an important future.
As artists and designers we excel at thinking of the impossible and imagine what may seem like a science fiction at the time. We create myths and often dreams of the possible.
Still, the challenge for many is to think of grand designs based on the future. Can we use knowledge and science and move things forward at scale? We need artists and designers working with science to re-invision the future. The re-greening of the Loess plateau in China, where a dessert was transformed into green valleys and productive farmland, is a great example of vision and action and a healing forest as gift.
Small fan microbe mobile collection unit, and the gravity stones at the McDonough Museum of Art
SCATTER SURGE， ken Rinaldo
CAFA VAII：Can you talk about your following artwork plans?
Ken Rinaldo：I am working on a one-person exhibition to open in July at the Antonio Prates Gallery Portugal. It will be focused on human-machine interactions and their evolving relationships. I have been vaccinated and I intend to travel to install the show in Lisbon.
I will premiere new works such as Anthropogenic Slot Machine about gambling nature away. It will be in the form of a gambling slot machine. It can play as a stand-alone sculpture, and will be playable on a web browser for easy viewing. The exhibition will have additional works such as the 3-Story Robot 3D animation and video sculptures. I will also do a series of AI machine learning prints, and interactive works with conflations between printmaking and Arduino robotics.
I am thrilled to open up a new gallery in Columbus, Ohio, with Amy Youngs. We have just heard today we won a $50,000 grant to help establish the space and programming.
It will be called Emerge: The Network for Prototyping the Future. We will work on art, design and science for the environment. Emerge will look forward to collaboration with CAFA.
Lastly, I am working on a chapter of New Media for an encyclopedia, another book chapter on bio-art, and Co-Editing an upcoming Antennae Journal on Microbial Ecologies with Editor in Chief Giovanni Aloi.
I have not yet learned how to retire. : )
Interview Curator/CHANG Zhigang
Chief Editor/DONG Huiping
Interview Assistant/WANG Yongmeng, FAN Gongqing
Editor/SHI Miaomiao
English Editor/DONG Jing, HU Bao
Visual Design/ WEI Xiangmin
Image/CAFA VAII RobotArt Lab Ken Rinaldo
