Berlin-based Artistic Research in Science and Technology
With Helena Nikonole, Julius Holtz, Margherita Pevere, Marcus Maeder, Sybille Neumeyer
Group Exhibition | Opening: Fri, 25 Sep 2026, 8 pm, Running Time: 26 Sep – 29 Nov 2026
Berlin Science Week 2026 @ ALB: Exhibition Tour through the CHRYSALIS group exhibition: 1 Nov 2026, afternoon
Interdisciplinary Symposium | Sat, 28 November 2026
During 2025 and 2026, Art Laboratory Berlin is unfolding the new innovative project CHRYSALIS. ARTISTS IN LABS with an interdisciplinary exchange between art and science in Berlin science laboratories, kindly supported by Lottostiftung Berlin. Building on Berlin’s unique status as a global centre for arts and sciences, we aim to create new synergies based on topics of current research. In collaboration with a consortium of scientists from the Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Technische Universität Berlin, University of the Arts Berlin, the Charité and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Art Laboratory Berlin is initiating artist-in-lab residencies for internationally recognized, Berlin-based artists – Helena Nikonole, Julius Holtz, Margherita Pevere, Marcus Maeder, and Sybille Neumeyer. We are currently receiving strong outcomes in transdisciplinary knowledge transfer, artistic research, art science communication, and some new artworks critically highlighting 21st-century innovations (see below for CHRYSALIS events; the CHRYSALIS group exhibition will open on Fri, 25 September 2026).
The chosen artists are all well known for their outstanding artistic research at the interface of art, science, and technology. Each is highly experienced in integrating art with new technologies and collaborating with scientists in fields such as neuroscience, artificial intelligence, climate science, soil ecology, or biodiversity: For the CHRYSALIS project, Helena Nikonole is connecting current research on soil metagenomics with her ongoing practice with machine learning. Julius Holtz is combining his practice with interactive sound art produced through a brain-computer interface with research into neuroscience and sleep science. Margherita Pevere is exploring under-researched ponds in the city of Berlin with a focus on death as an ecological driver. Marcus Maeder is translating measured environmental variation into a sonic form that makes below-ground microclimatic dynamics perceptible as a temporal and relational process. Sybille Neumeyer (CHRYSALIS resident until March 2026) examined soil as medium for eco–logical computation, as evolutionary algorithm, and as futuring matter.
Art Laboratory Berlin, a multiple award-winning art and research platform with over 15 years’ experience in art-science research and its curatorial expertise, mediating talents, and discursive portfolio, benefits from longstanding collaborations with numerous Berlin university research institutes and a strong network in the “art-science” field. In the CHRYSALIS project, the role of Regine Rapp and Christian de Lutz is to closely mentor, creatively mediate, and constantly foster the chrysalis – the transitional state – of these critical transdisciplinary research paths.
At the invitation of Prof. Matthias Rillig (FU Berlin), Regine Rapp and Christian de Lutz from Art Laboratory Berlin contributed to the paper Ten simple rules for hosting artists in a scientific lab, published in 2021 in the journal Plos Computational Biology, forming the framework for these residencies. Beyond being open, one of the several recommendations in this paper was “Be curious about and understand each other’s holism”, which Art Laboratory Berlin considers key.
This creative dynamic process will be regularly shared and discussed with a broad public: The artists and their immediate scientific collaborators will regularly present their research and experiences in a series of talks in 2025 and 2026 and in an international interdisciplinary symposium in October 2026. Also, the artists will hold workshops based on their ongoing lab residency. Finally, their current artistic research together with new artworks will be presented to the public in a group exhibition at Art Laboratory Berlin, opening on 25 September 2026. An extensive, regularly updated online documentation will share the work in progress for a broad audience. Art Laboratory Berlin also plans a series of podcast and video interviews with the four artists and their scientific partners.
The new sound installation Change Factors, that Marcus Maeder is currently creating in context of CHRYSALIS. ARTISTS IN LABS, presents a sonification of soil microclimate data derived from the experiment on multiple global change factors at the Rillig Lab, FU Berlin. During the last years, Maeder has been visiting researcher at the Rillig Lab | Ecology of Plants (Institute of Biology, FU Berlin), experimenting in the context of the Global Change project. The new artwork Change Factors translates measured environmental variation into a sonic form that makes below-ground microclimatic dynamics perceptible as a temporal and relational process. By rendering soil temperature and humidity as audible structures, the installation foregrounds the sensitivity of soil systems to interacting anthropogenic pressures.
In the Rillig et al.’s study from 2019 (where similar responses were observed), temperature is explicitly included among the abiotic factors tested, alongside other global change drivers, and the authors report that increasing factor richness produced directional change in soil properties and processes. Their results also show that responses such as soil water repellence can become pronounced only under multi-factor conditions, indicating that combined treatments may generate effects that are not predictable from single-factor responses alone. For this reason, differences in soil temperature and humidity between treatments can be understood as emergent consequences of the specific factor combinations applied in each experimental microcosm, rather than as independent variables varying in isolation. The new installation Change Factors treats these microclimatic fluctuations as a sonic representation of ecological interaction. It invites listeners to hear soil not as inert substrate, but as a dynamic medium in which global change factors reorganize thermal and hydrological conditions across treatments.
The differences in the soil microclimate between the treatments and combinations are most noticeable as the soil dries out, when the decrease in soil water potential (the soil water available to plants) manifests differently depending on the treatment and combination. This creates a multi-layered soundscape in which temporary similarities and slight variations in measured values give rise to modulations and pulsations. In the installation Change Factors, the individual sound sources/treatments are distributed within a spatial audio system, transforming the data sonification into a complex spatial experience. // Literature: Rillig MC, Ryo M, Lehmann A, Aguilar-Trigueros CA, Buchert S, Wulf A, Iwasaki A, Roy J, Yang G. (2019) The role of multiple global change factors in driving soil functions and microbial biodiversity. Science. Nov 15; 366(6467):886-90.