Shared Habitats: from scientific laboratory to karaoke for flies

MO Museum, in collaboration with Weimar Bauhaus University, is opening a new exhibition – Shared Habitats. The exhibition aims to reveal how scientific advancement changes our culture and vice versa – what impact cultural change has on science.

The exhibition features artworks that required scientific experiments. Visitors are invited to experiment in a self-repair lab, sing karaoke to flies, watch how tattooing mushrooms grow and change the tattoo or try to avoid a slaughterhouse while playing a virtual reality (VR) game.

Invitation to dive into scientific experiments

“We raise questions about our relationship with other life forms and the environment around us since the beginning of April, when we opened our main exhibition Animal – Human – Robot. However, this theme is so diverse that we are taking a further and deeper look at it in the new exhibition. We invite visitors to experience, discover and evaluate how we live together with other forms of life and what impact technology has on this relation”, says Milda Ivanauskienė, Director at MO Museum.

At the exhibition, all visitors are invited to dive into scientific experiments. Viewers will be able to actively participate in analyse exhibits, such as play a VR game intended to find an escape from a pig slaughterhouse, sing karaoke to flies and watch how they respond to this sound. In addition, MO Museum will host a self-repair laboratory, where everybody interested will be able to conduct their own scientific experiments. By actively engaging in experiments or exploring artworks created during experiments, viewers will be able to analyse how we are shaping our environment, how the environment is shaping us, and learn what role art has in all these processes.

How does scientific progress change our culture?

The artists from Bauhaus University, whose works are presented at the exhibition, focus on the relationship between organisms and their own environment. Artists explore the interrelations between people, other organisms, and machines. How do different types of beings communicate? How do people experience it? How to present this experience through art – artists participating in the exhibition raise these and some other questions, while visitors can also come up with some of their own.

“The interaction between biodiversity and computer technology is crucial in this exhibition. Scientific knowledge is transferred to a cultural context, and artistic practice aims to develop the perception of the boundaries of life. This results in interesting artworks born during experimenting, and the exhibition’s visitor can become a part or an active participant of it”, notes Ugnė Paberžytė, one of the exhibition curators.

The topic of science and art will continue on 5 May (Sunday) at the international conference Minds and Milieus organised at MO Museum. Participants will analyse the issue of science-based creativity and will be looking for answers to questions like what kind of art is important during the times of technological and ecological disasters. The conference will be attended by cybernetics expert Andrew Pickering, curator of the exhibition Shared Habitats Ursula Damm, Audronė Žukauskaitė, Yvonne Volkart, and others. The conference will be moderated by philosopher Kristupas Sabolius.

Curators of the exhibition Shared Habitats: Ursula Damm and Ugnė Paberžytė, coordinators – Mindaugas Gapševičius and Iveta Jaugaitė, scientific consultant – Julian Collet.

The exhibition Shared Habitats at MO Museum will be opened on 4 May, at 6 p.m.; Minds and Milieus Conference – on 5 May, at 2 p.m. The exhibition Shared Habitats will run at MO until 22 July.