artist book, 152 pages, published with SCHLEEBRÜGGE.EDITOR
2025

In this assemblage of diverse media, Carolin Melia Brendel explores the agency of air by drawing together distinct onto-epistemologies of space that are conditioned by air. The book is based on the joint artwork with Helena McFadzean, Aerobic Topologies I-XVII, in which they collaborated with symbiotic cultures of bacteria and yeasts that digest spatial conditions into their own becoming through aerobic fermentation. Documentary artifacts and traces of contrasting forms of knowledge agential throughout the artistic process – microbial, aerobic, logistical, infrastructural, geographical, corporate – are revisited, historically examined and critically juxtaposed in a vibrating material-discursive tension. These pages unfold a space unsettling anthropocentric paradigms of knowing. It troubles analytical demarcation as an epistemological condition and corrodes attributions of agency and authorship, giving rise to methodological speculations on transdisciplinary intra-action and onto-epistemological practices under the disciplinary label of “artistic research”.

“How Brendel relates to the artistic work with her academic text is characterized by a sensitivity and analytical acuity that makes it an outstanding piece of work and an example of artistic research in the best and most complex sense.”Andreas Spiegl, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

This work was realized with the support of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research Austria and the Swiss Artistic Research Network. 

https://www.schlebruegge.com/de/content/aerobic-topologies

Video 6’10’’ and article
2020

The video work investigates the cybernetic gaze as a focal point of the quest for system design and manipulation. Based on a reflection on the common historical roots of cybernetics and digital capitalism, it deals with risk models from complexity science, a current form of cybernetic knowledge that has gained political relevance in the face of (un)anticipated events such as the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID pandemic.

The visual material of the video mimics the cybernetic principles of systems analysis by making use of the intrusive gaze of a microscopic camera to research artefacts of current cybernetic epistemologies. These include graphs of systemic risk models developed after the financial crisis to predict disruptions at the European Central Bank, and simulations of the spread of viruses that informed the Austrian government’s pandemic management. The audio elements allude to the principle of system control by imitating the sounds used in neurofeedback programs to manipulate the frequencies of brain waves. On the linguistic level, the principle of system interrogation is referred to by playing fragments of interviews I conducted as finance sociologist with complexity scientists who develop predictive risk models for central banks and governments.

By turning the cybernetic gaze in on itself, a closed feedback loop arises that traps the viewer in the spiral of n-order observations and addresses the counter-performativity, reification and agency of models in calculative infrastructures.

Video and sound installation 10’43’’
2019

With the animal-like, distorted 3D body object, which glitchily rotates around its own axis and aesthetically refers to digital user interfaces of financial traders, the work interrogates the calculative measurement and depiction of reality by mathematical risk models of finance and their massive failure in the run-up to the financial crisis of 2008.

In a timeless loop, quotes from economic publications are heard that reference the discourse on the enhancement of risk models after the financial crisis and its persistent attachment to the pre-crisis premises of mathematical forecasting. The mode of being trapped in the self-referentiality of calculative paradigms, becomes unpleasantly tangible through shrill minimal techno sounds that are constantly repeated and accelerated to an unbearable degree.

Installatively, the fetish of the optimizable model of technocratic regimes and its disastrous excesses are called into question.

video installation, video 14’55’’, text, black chalk 
2022

Being infrastructure. To be and remain in one place, to be played on, traveled over, to be used. Attracting. Being here without decision, without agency. Located, fixed, heavy, immovable, built into the earth, essential.

Field research with the body and the camera at three different train stations and their surroundings. With these artistic methods, I investigate the experience of transfer infrastructure. Kirchberg am Wagram. Hospental. Frankfurt am Main. Exposing myself to the conditions of existence of structural traffic arrangements, I install myself at these places like them. Wavering between their perspective and my own and the in-between. Persevering, sensing the discrepancies that arise for social, organic bodies at transit sites.

Making use of physical methods and cinematic means to grasp what Marc Augé calls non-lieux and to interrogate this anthropological theorem of functional places devoid of meaning, history, identity and relation. I choose a different approach, beginning with the vantage point of material structures. Extending the ethnographic method, I let the body decipher the space. My body as a seismograph that gauges, decodes, interprets, enters, generates, describes this public space. And the cinematic gaze that weaves itself into it.