For the very first time, the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) is systematically opening its doors to the creative fields: Bringing together Art, Science, Design and Technology, we are hoping to foster continuous exchanges and collaboration, creating new spaces for conversations on how the forefronts of science and technology will influence the way we live and understand the worlds around us.
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Building up a new Artist Residency at a research institute is not an easy feat, specifically not when the public domain still often understands Science and Art as contrary practices or the people working in the fields as opposite archetypes.
But science is a fundamentally creative process, just as creative practices are in many ways analytical, experimentative and inquisitive.

Welcoming artists, designers and other creatives at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, the most surprising aspects are the similarities between our fields – the curiosity, the personalities involved, the passions as well as the communities and alliances we build to inquire about the nature of things.
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There might be different approaches and toolsets in use, but in many ways we are asking the same questions:
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How does it work?
How can we observe it?
How is it fitting into a larger picture?
What can we create to understand something new?

Birth of a Pea Plant
During his residency, Shailesh BR brought together the origins of Indian film making, histologic microscopy and scientific
observation. His installation functions as a poetic recreation of a common experiment: Seven plates of seeds get each exposed to solely a certain wavelength of light– a move that not only allows to test which color of light the plants react best to, but also playfully introduces a fragmented “rainbow”. He utilizes this metaphor of the rainbow as a way to describe us as observers of nature – phenomena like a rainbow will exist whether there is an observer or not, yet it is a matter of perspective and timing whether one can witness it.
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He goes a step further and creates another variable to the installation by adding a sensor that can be triggered by the audience: observers occasionally have an impact on
the results.
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As a nod to how far our observational tools have come, we have chosen to juxtapose a short clip of “Birth of a Pea Plant”, an experimental stop-motion clip by India’s first filmmaker Dadasaheb Phalke, with a stop motion-esque clip of a growing
root under a microscope, made by the research group of Jiří Friml.

trajectories
Based on exchanges with researchers from diverse fields, such as soft matter physics,self-organization of matter, stellar dynamics, and root development Daniela Brill Estrada brings together aspects from these fields and proposes to look at bodies and architectures of matter as trajectories of
information.
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The big bang, the formation of elements and the origin of life – if all matter was made the same, what differentiates a single carbon atom that is part of a non-living system from carbon that exists within living organisms? Could the answer to this be found in the way information is stored in matter? The way it configures the form, behavior, relations to the environment and the trajectories it builds and follows? Can the bodies of animals, minerals, and planets, be therefore regarded as trajectories of information too?
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With her installation, Daniela Brill Estrada explores concepts like life-like behavior of matter, the influence of natural forces, such as gravity and magnetism on bodies and materials. She is inviting us to investigate our perceptions of boundaries between inanimate and living matter. Handmade graphite spheres wander across a plane – driven by Brownian Movements, a complex random motion usually displayed by particles suspended in liquids or gasses – leaving behind a trajectory as the visual
proof of informational processes, appearing life-like to the human eye.