Image: Hard to Be a God, 2013. Film still.

Our serial public program and potluck is back! Flux Saturdays are organized by different artists and take many forms, including pop-up exhibitions, performances, screenings, artist presentations and more. We are requesting RSVPs to determine a head count for refreshments but will not turn away guests.

Performance with Amelia Marzec
3:00 – 4:00 pm

Please join us for a performance from Amelia Marzec’s Itinerant Signal Institute, where visitors will learn to create and distribute a special herbal remedy.

Itinerant Signal Institute (Rite of Spring) is a fictional institute and installation, grounded in techno-ecological art. The story of the Institute is told through sculpture, digital images, internet art, microcontrollers, and scientific displays. In it, creatures have emerged from the melting permafrost to join the Institute and return to modern-day cities to examine their climates. The creatures wear headdresses of bones and fossils, inspired by Eastern European carnival costumes that denote the changing of seasons. They acknowledge the effect of human activity on the Arctic Circle, and anticipate increasing climate migration due to military fuel consumption. The Institute tests for environmental toxins to identify places of relative safety, through small hand-built quasi-scientific devices that test the air and soil. The work also addresses queer migration, and re-defining the idea of home in the current political climate. It incorporates plant knowledge to influence the endocrine system, reducing human desire for late-stage capitalism and war at a biological level. Sites tested by the Institute include former military bases, including WWII sites in Europe, and Newtown Creek, the location of one of the United State’s largest oil spills, where my family lived when they emigrated to New York City. The work evolves as the Institute installs servers in partner organizations as the project moves from place to place.

Screening: Hard to Be a God with 502 Bad Gateway
4:30-7:30 pm

For one night only, artist duo 502 Bad Gateway will screen Hard to Be a God (dir. Aleksei German, 2013). In the film, a group of scientists travel to a planet of humans stuck in the middle ages. They struggle not to intervene and begin trying to help the society progress. The film is adapted from the book Roadside Picnic, a primary inspiration in 502 Bad Gateway’s recent works.

About the Artists

Amelia Marzec is a New York based artist engaging with communications infrastructure to inform a speculative future. Her work has been exhibited at SIGGRAPH, MIT, ISEA (Canada), University of the Arts Helsinki (Finland), ONCE Foundation Contemporary Art Biennial (Spain), NODE Forum for Digital Arts Biennial (Germany), and is part of the New Museum’s Rhizome ArtBase. She has been a resident at Eyebeam, Ox-Bow, Harvestworks, and ZK/U Center for Art and Urbanistics in Berlin. She was a fellow at NYSCA/NYFA, A.I.R. Gallery, a Tow Fellow at Columbia University, a visiting artist at the Center for Integrated Media at Calarts, a grantee of the Research Foundation of CUNY, and a nominee for the World Technology Awards for Art. Her work has been featured in Wired, Make, Hyperallergic, Neural Magazine, Metropolis Magazine, Creators, Time Out New York, and the front page of Reddit. She holds an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design, and a BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts.

502 Bad Gateway is the artist duo of Alexander Baumann and Robert Ruth, whose collaborative artistic disciplines include motion capture performance, oil painting, 3D game development, sculpture, vintage tech restoration, building audio synthesizers, animation, and filmmaking. Their practice focuses on integrating their artistic methods with deprecated technologies from many different eras, drawing on the history of usage to underline the intent of the work. Their work has been displayed in solo exhibitions at T293 gallery in Rome, Sof:Art gallery in Bologna, Flux Factory in New York, and as part of a group show at AROS art museum in Aarhus, Denmark. They have performed on stages at the New Museum’s DEMO Showcase in Manhattan, ZeroSpace in Brooklyn, Standard Vision Studios in Los Angeles, and many underground New York venues. Their performance practice includes solo audiovisual narrative productions as well as collaborations with Club Cringe, Von, Uffie, Kevin Peter He, Kink Out, and Team Rolfes. With a foot in the world of experimental film and live performance, and the other in fine art and installation, 502 Bad Gateway desires to break the traditionally static, immutable nature of gallery work, by incorporating the real-time responsiveness of interactive live performance

This event takes place in conjunction with Flux IV‘s current exhibitions, Itinerant Signal Institute (Rite of Spring) and 502 Bad Gateway: Error is Shadow.