aerobic topologies:

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