\ Campus \ S+T+ARTS: winning artistic project chosen for Area Science Park residency

The winning artist is Sissel Marie Tonn, Danish by birth and currently based in The Hague. Her project, The Sentinel Immune Self, was selected for the artistic residency at Area Science Park’s genomics and epigenomics labs, and the Orfeo Data Center. The residency, organised in collaboration with Milan’s MEET Digital Cultural Center, is one of 21 fellowships funded across Europe by the European S+T+ARTS programme, promoting collaboration between science, technology and art.

“Collaborating with MEET and the participating artists is an opportunity for us to explore new horizons,” says one of the judges, Stephen Taylor, Director of Area Science Park’s Innovation and Complex Systems Structure. “Art and science share the same creative process, so getting them talk to each other is crucial. Scientists can learn new ways of looking at and analysing research results from artists, while artists are able to imagine future scenarios inspired by science and convey them to people.”

The theme for the challenge was “Preserving sustainability and inclusiveness in the co-evolution”. The greatest challenges of our time – issues such as mass extinctions, viral pandemics and climate change – serve as a reminder that we are intrinsically connected to our ecosystems.

Sissel Marie Tonn has been exploring the ways in which human beings perceive, behave in and are interconnected with their ecosystems over the past few years, speaking to immunologists and toxicologists. She pushes her artistic research to where the confines between our bodies and our environment begin to blur. With her project “The Sentinel Immune Self”, Sissel guides us towards a reconfiguration of our notion of the self, reawakening this sense of interconnectedness.

Through the lens of an immersive, interactive animation, she reconstructs a science-fiction universe in which humans share their immune response with all other species affected by microplastic pollution. As an allegory of the process of evolution, the project is intended to warn us against the profound consequences pollutants have on us and our ecosystem.

Sissel has six months to complete her research and create her works, which will then be shown from October 2022 in the following locations: the Maxxi Museum in Rome, the MEET Digital Culture Center in Milan, Ars Electronica in Linz (Austria) and ZKM, Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe (Germany).

Find out more about Sissel Marie Tonn’s project: WATCH THE VIDEO

Watch the interview with Stephen Taylor about the contamination between art and science: WATCH THE VIDEO