Voices @ ZKM

Your voices at the »art Karlsruhe«! How do you imagine the ZKM of tomorrow? What do you need from a cultural institution and when is it relevant for you? What would you do with 15,000 square meters of exhibition space? The visitors of the fair have made plenty of inspiring statements, which can be listened to here.

My name is Saša Spačal, I am from Slovenia. I call myself a postmedia artist. That means that I work with media that I think are necessary for a certain project, for a certain topic. And that's why I think we need to do media projects, because actually most things nowadays are media, media art. You deal critically with different media and in this way you give society certain indications of how you can work with these media in the future.

Hi, my name is Dan Wilcox. I'm an artist, engineer, musician, performer. I work in software development and research for the ZKM Hertz Lab. Why am I a media artist? I think, mainly because software, electronics, big data, AI, those are the tools of our time. Those are the things that are shaping the way we are moving forward, building communities and expressing ourselves. And I think as artists it's imperative that we learn to use these tools and utilize them also for our own expression. But also so that other people within our community can better understand how these things are shaping our times.

I see art and society as being intrinsically linked. They're part of the same thing. Art, by its definition, I think is not a set of objects in the world that we call »art«. It's a way of doing things. And that applies to politics, to horticulture, to cooking, to all aspects of life. This is a very holistic idea of art and therefore it's part of society. And what makes society? Society is glued together by culture, the culture we make together. / Alistair Hudson

My name is Christof Hierholzer. I'm an employee at the ZKM, since 1999. I'm in the museum technology team and I came to the ZKM already in 1997. The ZKM collection is my hobbyhorse. I work a lot with the objects, as I also take care of them in our warehouse. They have to be stored, they have to be transported.

Hello, I'm Ivan Henriques, I'm from Brazil. I work with new media because technology is part of our everyday life. We can't deny technology, but in order for us to produce technology we also have to destroy nature. So how can we rethink the way we do things and find new ways of production to achieve a sustainable future?

Institutions like ZKM are now really some of the last public spaces where you can meet ideas and meet people who have different viewpoints. And so for me, it's vitally important that that space is maintained and is a healthy one that is generally thought of in as an ecology about making things connect, building relationships between people, between ideas, but also allowing for difference in the world we live in at the moment.

My name is Helen Pynor. I am a media artist but I work quite specifically with biological systems – often living cells, living tissues, living organs and in some cases my own body material. For example, I’ve worked with my own bone material and I worked with my own exhaled breath material. For me, working with media art is an extension of working in contemporary art.

Hi, I'm Yasha Jain. I work at the Hertz Lab at ZKM as a software developer. My main job is to provide technical assistance to artists who come here. And also we do our own in-house production at the Hertz Lab. I think we live in a very technology based society and media Art gives you space for creativity and experimentation and creating something or prototyping something really quickly, and that's something that only technology can provide and which is something we are living through right now.

Hello, I'm Anna Zinßer, user experience designer from Karlsruhe. Before the pandemic, before the lockdown, there was a lot of interaction at ZKM, also with communities from the population and in the context of »Open Codes« or »Critical Zones«. And I would definitely like to see more of that, because I actually found it totally enriching to see what else Karlsruhe is made of. And I thought it was great that the ZKM also offered itself as a platform to bring together different communities from Karlsruhe.

I'm very much a believer in the idea of what might be called the »interlocal«, which in a way replaces this idea of the »international« with this idea that, where you have a homogenous operating system for the world that applied in every location. But actually the reality of the world is, that society exists as a network of interconnected specific places, local places, talking to other local places in the same country or on the other side of the world.

My name is Constanza Piña Pardo, I am an artist, Chilean, dancer, electronic and visual artist. For me, as a Latin American artist, it is very important to mix the traditional technologies, the craft techniques, especially those related to the female work, with the contemporary media technologies, to re-evaluate works that are part of other cultures and insert them in the contemporary technologies on the same level.

Hello, my name is Jens Lutz. I am the head of the Publications Department at ZKM. In the future, we should continue to focus more on the critical discourses regarding media use. But it's also important that we recognize which social groups are being left behind by the opportunities offered by digital media and that we help these people.

I've heard a lot in my career so far from people who say art and politics don't mix. But for me, art is politics. Art is part of the way the world works. It's wrapped up in all its complexities, and a lot of politics is driven by culture. Culture is the foundation of how we think, how we act, and therefore you cannot separate the two.