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The internationally renowned, prize-winning filmmaker and sculptor, Rosa Barba (b. 1972) will be resident artist at the Schaufler Lab@TU Dresden from September 2023 until February 2024. Together with researchers of TUD Dresden University of Technology, she will be conducting research on Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The following question drives Rosa Barba: “How can we develop an alternative archive using an algorithm that both recognizes the research of traditionally underrepresented groups—such as women and scientists from the global south—and ensures that this new machine fills gaps in our cultural memory in the future?” The artist intends to analyze this question with the help of experts and colleagues at TUD Dresden University of Technology, and produce a kind of software — an almost immaterial application through which new mental or intellectual spaces are opened up for the viewer.

Barba has often collaborated with scientists and researchers, including at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, Switzerland, and at Harvard University. For more than 25 years, her extensive body of work, comprised primarily of films and kinetic sculptures, has focused on the potential of (analog) machines and visionary visual phenomena. She creates her work constructing and combining images and found footage obtained from extensive research in archives and repositories worldwide, thus bringing forgotten elements to the surface interweaving them with fiction. Her films, shot with an analog camera, explore not only the relationship between humans and nature but also humanity’s interaction with knowledge in a culture marked by a wide range of challenges. Barba’s impressive cinematic installations subtly and poetically highlight the relationships among nature, technology and humans, bearing witness to how the latter have transformed the Earth’s environment in the Anthropocene era.

The inaugural exhibition of Rosa Barba’s Schaufler Residency@TU Dresden includes her film installation “The Color Out of Space” (2015) and the sculptural work “Language Infinity Sphere” (2018) as well as a selection of teaching objects from the TUD Office for Academic Heritage’s scientific collections. The exhibition thus makes space for collaborative research at the intersection of art, science and speculation while exploring a new machine.