Andreas Greiner (de, 1979)
Residency period: January-April 2020
My residency period was intended to last from January to March 2020 but I stayed until mid-April, due to the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic. During that time I experienced a great sense of hospitality and respect towards artistic practice and its sometimes uncontrollable dynamics.
My main achievement was to work on and finish my new monograph Life Forms, which I published together with architecture writer and curator Carson Chan. We commissioned essays by Gregory Cartelli, Ryan Roark, J.D. Schnepf, Ursula Ströbele, Mareike Vennen and Olivier Zeitoun. It also features a conversation between J. Craig Venter (the controversial biotechnologist who created the world’s first artificial life form) and myself, and documentation of my practice during the last three years.
La Becque in winter and early spring 2020 was the perfect time and place to focus and concentrate on the main questions in the book: how do humans today intervene in growth processes through synthetic biology? How does this affect the relationship between nature and culture? And what significance does art have in the age of the Anthropocene?
Andreas Greiner is a graduate of the Berlin University of the Arts and the Institute for Spatial Experiments under the direction of Olafur Eliasson. Resorting to a wide range of techniques including sculpture, installation, photography, video, algorithmic image creation and 3D printing, his approach focuses more specifically on mankind’s influence on its natural environment. Greiner is also a member of the artist collectives, A/A and Das Numen.
LIFE FORMS: Essays on the Display, Synthesis and Simulation of Life and Artworks of Andreas Greiner
Edited by Carson Chan, featuring essays by Gregory Cartelli, Ryan Roark, J.D. Schnepf, Ursula Ströbele, Mareike Vennen and Olivier Zeitoun, and a conversation between Andreas Greiner and J. Craig Venter.
Published by Snoeck Publishers, Köln, 2020
Designed by Sin-U Ko