Opening night Sensing Otherness | Bio Art & Design Award 2024

How can we get to know more-than-human worlds better? Which senses do we need and how do we train them? Or do we need additional sensors and perhaps even new (body) languages to truly connect and experience kinship?

For a long time, humans assumed that language made them unique and superior. But paradoxically, thanks in part to technology, we are discovering more and more complex communication systems between non-human animals, plants and the earth. It is high time we learn to listen to these as well, instead of just listening to each other, when that is already proving so difficult.

Sensing Otherness | Navigating the more-than-human world zooms in on how artists and designers, working closely with scientists, explore these complex conversations between a wide variety of living species and ecosystems. Remarkably, ancient mythological knowledge and advanced sensors and artificial intelligences seem to reinforce each other. We are now especially acoustically witnessing life happening in the remotest corners of the earth and the deepest depths of the oceans and we want to give this life recognition and meaning. At the same time, it makes us increasingly aware of the far-reaching, often poisonous and destructive influences, we human animals have on soil, air and water.

How this brings us closer to the more-than-human world, and how we bring it closer to us, is explored by the two BAD Award-winning teams from 2024 each in their own way. And this goes as well for the eight other artists and collectives coming together in Sensing Otherness. So come to MU this winter, train your senses and navigate beyond the limits of your human perception.

Participating artists are

affect lab | Waiting for Cows
Carla Alcalà Badias & Laura Villanueva (BAD AWARD 24) | Microbial Prophetesses
Disnovation.org | The Solar Share & Eating the Sun
Emilia Tapprest & Samar Khan (BAD AWARD 24) | Ecotonal Beings
Herwig Ilegems | Head to Head
Jan van IJken | Planktonium
Marit Shalem | Milk
Saša Spačal |Terra Xenobiotica
Xandra van der Eijk | Mother of Pearl
Zuika Owada | The Eyes Tell You The Truth

BAD Award exhibition 2024
Sensing Otherness | Navigating the more-than-human world
Friday 13 December 2024
Doors open: 7.30 PM
Start: 8 PM

Film première Waiting for Cows by affect lab 8.30 PM
Film première Milk by Marit Shalem (SpOp) 9 PM

About the BAD Award
The yearly Bio Art & Design (BAD) Award aims to stimulate emerging designers and artists to delve into the world of bio art and design, and produce new multidisciplinary work. This can encompass numerous fields - from sustainability, food and health, to biotechnology, horticulture, and agriculture, from new materials to ethics and from molecules to the universe and every bio entity in-between, natural and synthetic.

In 2024, the BAD Award is made possible by a collaborative consortium of Noord-Brabant based cultural partners: BioArt Laboratories, Dutch Design Foundation, MU Hybrid Art House and Next Nature Museum.