Raitis Smits - Emerging Techno-Ecological Art Practices - the Poetics of Green Energy
Date:
Wed, 02/18/2015 - 5:15pm - 6:45pm
Location:
CCRMA Classroom
Event Type:
Guest Colloquium 
Since 2012 RIXC artists, together with scientists, have experimented with MFCs (microbial fuel cells) - a next generation bio-technology, making sonifications of bacterial activity in dark gallery spaces, hosting public DIY workshops on how to build bacteria cells, and installing bio-energy 'power-stations' outdoors in ponds. Bacteria, who live in dirty water, waste, soil, inside of our bodies, that is, everywhere where they can 'eat' organic matter and where there is nearly no oxygen, release free electrons. An artwork Biotricity makes visible and audible the invisible activity of nature which is happening at the bottom of a pond, and which otherwise we can neither see nor hear.
http://rixc.org
http://renewable.rixc.lv
Biography
Raitis Smits is artist, curator and innovator in science and emerging media technologies and founder of RIXC - a Riga based artist collective and center for new media culture (http://rixc.org), curator of Art+Communication festivals, and co-editor of Acoustic Space - a peer-reviewed journal.
He works together with Rasa Smite and their art is long-lasting , process-based, experimental, networked and visionary. Their work includes: 'internet radio' (1997), 'locative media' (2003), 'renewable energy' (2009), 'techno-ecologies' (2011) and 'human-plant communication' (2012).
Raitis Smits also lecture at universities, conferences and festivals in Latvia and Europe on contemporary media art theories and practices. Raitis Smits is an Assistant Professor at the Latvian Academy of Arts, and he will defend his PhD thesis on "New Media Art. The problematics of preservation and representation" in March 2015. Recently together with Rasa Smite he organized the 5th Media Art Histories: ReNew conference in Riga, 2013, and co-curated the large-scale international exhibition FIELDS in Riga in 2014.
FREE
Open to the Public