Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat

Artist duo and researchers Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat are considered pioneers exploring the tension between embodied presence, intimacy, privacy and trust in posthuman bio(techno)logical entanglement with (non-)human others. They radically deconstruct automated control technologies, bio-feedback and sensory perception, to create Trust-Systems for reflection. The artists start from the idea that experiences of intimacy and trust are embedded in public dialogue, witnessing and narrative. Therefor, their visually seductive Meeting Places function as 'Artistic Social Labs’ in public space; with participants as 'co-researchers’. During carefully hosted Meeting Rituals, they invite the public to meet through socially challenging, imaginative technologies in poetic orchestrations; and in this way to reflect on their perception of embodied experience, identity, social cohesion.

In performances and installations Public interaction is real time scanned, traced and visualized in Social Portraits; on (urban) screens, in digi-prints and networked databases. It is shown together with related artistic research in drawings; video's; smart objects, artist's books. Lancel/Maat’s work was awarded with many grants, research positions and prizes. Works are included in museum collections of ZKM Karlsruhe, IASPIS Stockholm and in private collections.

http://www.lancelmaat.nl/