knowbotiq

Amazonian Flesh

How to hang in trees during strike?

knowbotiq in collaboration with Pablo Alarcon and Ira Wilhelm (cocoons of idleness), Nina Bandi (research, scripts), Nicolas Buzzi (sound synthesis), Anna Bromley, Joerg Franzbecker, Leila Peacock, Sally Schoenfeldt, Ian Wooldrige (voices: bots), Fabian Saavedra-Laa/Anneke Dinkhase (Interkultur Ruhr)

The Psychotropic Refinery, 2022 ©knowbotiq

Exhibition

GOLD Mining the Unconscious

GOLD—Mining the Unconscious 11.2.2022 till 10.4.2022 Barbara Diethelm, Heinrich Eichmann, knowbotiq Helmhaus Zürich Soft vernissage: Friday 11th February, 11h to 18h dialog between knowbotiq and curator Daniel Morgenthaler: 17h

Around 50% of the gold mined worldwide is processed in discrete refineries in Switzerland. The work complex "The Psychotropic Refinary", manifests itself in this new exhibition as an immersive video projection and a psychoactive spatial setting with aetheric essences and mud, residue from a Swiss Gold refinery. knowbotiq fabulate about the incorporation of gold into all of our raw metabolism. The video Swiss Psychotropic Gold uses digital found footage in a critical fabulation to bring together the worlds in which precariously mined gold is secretly transformed into derivative stock market products, components of high-tech technologies, or libidinous wellness products. The work delves into gold and mercury amalgams—mercury is used to wash gold out of the earth—and emerges into a fictional psychotropic refinery for healing the collective subconscious of gold.

Swiss Psychotropic Gold, the molecular refinery, 2021 ©knowbotiq — Swiss Psychotropic Gold, The Molecular Refinery, 2021 ©knowbotiq

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indigo farming

Genesis Machines

Helmhaus Zürich, Kunst für die Stadt, 2.12.2022–22.1.2023

knowbotiq investigates with Genesis Machines, indigo farming a new form of agriculture provided by the US company Indigo. The company appropriates and capitalizes the Gaia thinking of the biologist Lynn Margulis. Instead of using pesticides, chemicals or genetic engineering they use micro biomes to improve the quality and skills of plants. Microbiomes form symbiosis and, in Indigo words, kind of “reprogram” them. Furthermore, such plants should thus be enabled to sequester more carbon and support methods to stop the climate change. The concept of Indigo includes geo-satellites and drones to surveil the agricultural fields and tries to install deep socialities between the company and the farmers. In a “pompous” setting knowbotiq assembles customary laboratory utensils and critically fabulates the creationism of such life science companies as a monstrous figuration. Genesis Machines over affirms the almost religious belief in the abstraction and fungibility of life.

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