{"id":11123,"date":"2021-07-30T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-07-30T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artthescience.com\/magazine\/?p=11123"},"modified":"2021-07-26T19:04:14","modified_gmt":"2021-07-26T23:04:14","slug":"creators-thomas-feuerstein","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artthescience.com\/magazine\/2021\/07\/30\/creators-thomas-feuerstein\/","title":{"rendered":"CREATORS – Thomas Feuerstein"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Name:<\/strong> Thomas Feuerstein<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which came first in your life, the science or the art?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Art and science ultimately ask the same questions: What is life? What determines our life socially, biologically, technically, and economically? However, the methods of art and science differ significantly in their implementation. Art is allowed to bring threads of different disciplines together in a transdisciplinary way and to explore stories speculatively, beyond the present, into a possible future. I am interested in making social, digital, and biological processes speak on various levels in my work. Artwork operates not only metaphorically on the symbolic level of signs, images, and significations, but also on a material and molecular level. This connects art to life and reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, I have been cultivating green algae for over twenty years. These organisms bind carbon dioxide and produce ingredients that form the basis for food, energy, or material resources. For me, these small plant cells act as a narrative knot that connects to the big problems of the present – climate, food, scarcity of resources. From these cultures, I have harvested pigments for paintings, sugars for fruit fly cultures, an alcoholic drink, and ingredients for a new molecule. A team of microbiologists is developing a bioplastic from this for a new project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I call the sculptures in which I grow the algae MANNA MACHINES. They operate under real conditions during the exhibition, but also function as a symbolic and aesthetic apparatus, absorbing strands of reality in order to concentrate them artistically and socially.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Stacked<\/a>
MANNA SCULPTURES<\/em> <\/a>(2013-2016) by Thomas Feuerstein, algae (Chlorella vulgaris), glass, pump, plastic tubes. From exhibition PSYCHOPROSA, Chronus Art Center, Shanghai, 2016. Photo by Atelier Thomas Feuerstein. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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