Exhibition Series "Science meets Art"

In March 2021, the Laboratory 2025 was realized as a pilot project of the FUNKEN Academy. In the Funken Academy of Klub Solitaer e. V., high-tech institutes and research facilities come together with artists to experiment at the intersection of art and technology. Artists, in collaboration with three Chemnitz research institutes - the Saxon Textile Research Institute, Fraunhofer IWU, and Fraunhofer ENAS - designed workshops in which students and post-graduates worked on the prototyping of ideas in the fields of AR, smart materials, and textile design and then presented their results in an exhibition at the Ars Electronica Center Linz.

Laboratory 2025 was supported and implemented by the Chemnitz 2025 Cultural Capital Office as a pilot project within the EU-funded project InduCCI in cooperation with Kreatives Sachsen.

The exhibition titled "LABOR 2025 - an artistic workshop with Fraunhofer ENAS" is based on the five-day workshop that took place virtually in March 2021 under the direction of media artist Fabricio Lamoncha, with scientists from Fraunhofer ENAS and the Center for Microtechnologies at TU Chemnitz, as well as the artists. Participants were guided via video stream through the cleanroom of the Center for Microtechnologies at TU Chemnitz and through Fraunhofer laboratories in the areas of printed functionalities, packaging and reliability. Based on the impressions gathered, the artists created videos and digital exhibits that reflect how they perceived the work environments and processes at our research institute and on particularly impactful impressions.

We thank all workshop participants: Kevin Blackistone (US), Indiara Di Benedetto (IT), Noor Stenfert Kroese (NL), Barbara Jazbec (SI), Tiio Suorsa (FI), Kristina Tica (RS), Jieyuan Huang (CN), Yinglin Zhou (CN), Ricardo O. Nascimento (BR), Natalie Wagner (DE), Julia Dolipski (DE), Franziska Hagenauer (DE), Fabian Thueroff (DE), Matthias Pitscher (DE), and Fabricio Lamoncha (ES).

The following works are on display:

For "Photogrammetry", Julia Dolipski processed the video footage of the tours through software that creates 3D animations of spaces from image material. The employees depicted during the tour create a disturbance for the software. She overlayed the resulting abstract spatial structure onto the original footage in a video animation.

In contrast to that automated interpretation, Jieyuan Wong and Yinglin Zhou approach the ENAS premises with human imagination. Based on information gathered during the tour and publicly available information from the internet, they transformed their conception of the spaces into a virtual architectural model of the institute, which reflects their understanding more than the actual location.

Indiara DiBenedetto, Noor Stenfert Kroese and Barbara Jazbec significantly reduced the video footage from the tours of the four visited laboratories for "Nanomentary", so that only four dots are visible on the monitor to the naked eye. When viewed through the accompanying microscope, the video material is once again distorted, making the screen technology particularly visible to the viewers. The work also references the microtechnology contained in devices like the monitor, which is created under conditions similar to those in the laboratories at Fraunhofer ENAS.

Kevin Blackistone uses artistic imagination to animate a monitor on which an imaginary process is technically monitored. Additionally, he inputs informational material from Fraunhofer ENAS into a text generator. Using its artificial intelligence, it creates publications that, despite their artificiality, exhibit a scientific aesthetic.

In the video work "Substrates", Tiia Suorsa focuses less on the technical aspects and more on the manual and poetic moments of the guided tour through the laboratories. She extracts moments of handwork from the videos and highlights individual phrases from the tour that resonated with her, weaving them into a collage.