2014
As part of the BIO·FICTION Festival in 2014, Biofaction organised artist in residence programmes with the Department of Nanobiotechnology of the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna. Klaus Spiess, Lucie Strecker and Herwig Weiser were part of the residencies.
BIO·FICTION was fortunate enough to utilize the Narrenturm (Fool’s Tower), The historic building and its specimen collection served as an eerie and fantastical backdrop to Klaus Spiess and Lucie Strecker’s evocative performance piece “Hare’s Blood+”. The piece contrasts the use of dead animal matter in artwork, with its value of liveness for commercial and genetic purposes. The artists consider concepts of ‚living money’ when the artwork is consigned to its “collectors” in a performative auction.
Set in an exhibit room of the Natural History Museum, Herwig Weiser introduced and temporarily installed and demonstrated his current work in progress “Lucid Phantom Messenger”. The piece consists both of a live protocell-like experiment and its cinematographic restitution; it brings together ingredients of a cristal garden with luminescent so-called nanodots from the forefront of scientific research, which mix and change in a live life-like hypnotic process.