S+T+ARTS AIR. Artistic innovation for European Resilience

STARTS is about thinking out of the box and building bridges between Science, Technology and Arts.

Back in April 2023 a very special project was kicked off by an international consortium, led by the MSC. Part of a long tradition of similar projects within the “S+T+ARTS” ecosystem, “Artistic Innovation for European Resilience” (AIR) is a new iteration of the European Union’s approach to art-driven innovation: artists and scientists working together on high-tech artistic experiments, learning from each other and transferring complex topics and methods to the general public through the means of art.

The first half of the project was dedicated to the selection of ten artists through an open call. This culminated in ten artistic residencies at four regional hubs (Stuttgart, Barcelona, Rome and Koper) starting their activities in December 2023.

Photo: HLRS - High Performance Computing Center University Stuttgart

On January 18th/19th 2024 Hièn Hoàng, one of the artists closely collaborating with the MSC (as well as our core partner HLRS), visited our facilities for the first time for a kick-off collaborative working session with the HLRS visualization department. Based in Hamburg, Hièn Hoàng creates art exploring how humans perceive and interact with their environment. In her AIR project “Garden of Entanglement”, she strives to create an immersive visual and auditory landscape that lets participants experience the inner life of trees to gain a better understanding of how human movement affects trees in urban settings. The residency will be concluded in October 2024 at the AIR Festival in Barcelona.

In the past, conversations with scientists have helped me to understand the biology of trees, but working as a fellow at HLRS is something special because it offers the chance to collaborate directly with experts in visualization and high-performance computing in realizing a project together,” Hoàng said during her first visit. “I am looking forward to seeing how this develops and how it might help to develop my future artistic practice.”

The second artistic residency at the MSC/HLRS is by Uncharted Limbo Collective and their project “Monolith”. The London and Athens based artists and creative coders Eleana Polychronaki, George Adamopoulos, Philip Pappas and Chris Waters have already begun working on their residency and will visit us in early February for an on-site working session.

S+T+ARTS AIR offers us a unique opportunity to develop a project we’ve been discussing for a while — an urge to address the important questions of agency and emergent sentience of digital entities,” commented Eleana Polychronaki. “As artists with significant experience in coding and art-directing real-time visuals for dance performances and interactive installations, we found ourselves wondering how we can break the norm of the typical ‘accompanying visuals’ and ‘one-way reactivity’ seen in most New Media performances. We hope that by collaborating with the HLRS team and taking advantage of their expertise in innovative visualization and access to supercomputing power we will be able to contribute to the immense field of research that explores human-machine interaction and the ever-evolving dynamics of that relationship.”

Photo: HLRS - High Performance Computing Center University Stuttgart

The other artists working on AIR residencies include:

Antoine Bertin
Filippo Gregorett
Filippo Nassetti
Jonathan Reus
Maria Arnal Dimas
Michail Rybakov
Natan Sinigaglia
Richard Vijgen

Stay tuned for more news about this residency, as well as other residencies and activities within the AIR project.

Art and science have never been closer than now in the digital age.​

Contact Us

Media Solution Center Baden-Württemberg e.V.
At the High-Performance Computing Center HLRS Stuttgart
Nobelstrasse 19, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany