Life Time, Biological Clocks of the Universe explores different dimensions and scales of time, from the universal to the personal and from the cellular to the geological, even the astronomical. 

The Life Time special weekend from Friday 16 until Sunday 18 February provides an opportunity to work together with artists and discover their practice. During the extensive program with talks, masterclasses and performances, artists and scientists, designers and thinkers will pursue questions on bioart and biodesign practices and life science research.

Language English

Program Life Time special weekend
During this weekend, you can see how hard disks dissolve in acid in the chemical garden by Thomas Thwaites, you can listen for hours to the Longplayer, a 1000 year long music composition, and take a rest while viewing the performance Time Worth Spending by Nora Jongen and Jeannette Lili Weiss.

Program Friday 16 February
17:00 – 17:45 | Live performance An Incomplete Life
18:00 – 20:30 | Cryo-Sites: Ice Tasting 
20:30 – 22:00 | Aftertalk & drinks

Regular admission / free entrance from 16:30

Program Saturday 17 February
15:00 – 18:00 | Workshops 
- Xandra van der Eijk 
- Jiwon Woo 

- Heather Leslie
18:00 – 19:00 | Dinner & drinks
19:00 – 21:00 | Presentations & talks 
- Sarah Davies (The Longplayer Trust)
- Cheng Guo (winner BAD Award 2017), 
- Nora Jongen & Jeannette Lili Weiss (Time Worth Spending)
- William Myers (Chairman of the BAD Award)
21:00 – 22:30 | Aftertalk & drinks

Tickets € 15,- (incl. dinner). 
Students € 10,- (incl. dinner).  

Tickets are available on Eventbrite. Please note: there is limited spots available for the workshops, you need to register for the workshops separately (included in the price). 

Program Sunday 18 February
14:00 – 15:00 | ARTOGETHER: guided tours in Dutch and English for young with old. 
15:00 – 15:45 | Live performance An Incomplete Life

Regular admission 

Life Time special weekend

Chemical Garden

For Chromobytes, Thomas Thwaites dissolved digital electronics in acid, and experimented with column chromatography, which is used by chemists to separate liquid mixtures in to their constituents. The artist and scientist partially dissolved hard disks in acid. This acid mixture was dripped with sodium silicate to precipitate into artificial stalagmites.

Longplayer 
Longplayer is a one thousand year long musical composition. It began playing at midnight on the 31 December 1999, and will continue to play without repetition until the last moment of 2999, at which point it will complete its cycle and begin again. From 16 – 18 Februari, MU will be a temporary listening post. 

Time worth spending 
Time Worth Spending is an exercise in being idle by Nora Jongen and Jeannette Lili Weiss. In our always-busy culture, being idle can seem an impossible indulgence - or a total waste of time. It feels uncomfortable because it might be perceived as being lazy. But empty time is good medicine and active inactivity essential for creativity!

Cryo-Sites: Ice Tasting 
Cryo-Sites by Susana Cámara Leret & Sissel Tolaas is a collaborative research project that investigates LIFE in and through ice. The display, at MU, showcase the project in process i.e. investigations into methods of working as well as topics of importance. On 16 February we will host a tasting - and a conversation event on the topic of ICE. 

The topics / menu will be: 
1. Waiting, 
2. Accumulating
3. Revealing. 

Invited Experts, related communities and practitioners, will address the various narratives surrounding ongoing transformative processes within frozen diverse environments.

Feel free to come listen to the conversation. 

Workshops Saturday 17 February

Xandra van der Eijk: Build your own hydrophone 
The message behind Seasynthesis is that we should all be listening to our oceans. Through sound, we may gain a valuable understanding of the activity of both man, aquatic life and the planet, over a vast distance. In this masterclass, we will construct our own hydrophone with inexpensive parts that can be found around the house, in the waste bin or the hardware store. You will leave ready to explore the underwater world, and we hope that your recordings will become part of a larger effort to collectively map the oceans through sound. 

Limited spots available! Please sign up via Eventbrite.

Heather Leslie: Can we design our plastic-pollution free future?

Bags, candy wraps, cigarette butts and drinking bottles have at least one thing in common: they are all found in the plastic soup, in waters around the world. Plastic long outlives all of us who use it and is on track to become a legacy pollutant of the

Anthropocene. Plastic has been powerfully framed as a problem of the oceans,
but our urban landscapes, indoor environment and food chain are also contaminated by persistent plastic. Environmental scientist Heather Leslie from the Dept. of Environment and Health, VU, Amsterdam organizes a workshop in which participants will discuss how plastic technology bit us back, and entertain ideas about designing e.g. packaging materials that are not destined for the plastic soup - or to be monotonous messages to the geological future. What if these designs were infused with a human intention of harmony with natural ecological systems and ourselves? Join this workshop to gain more knowledge in environmental processes of living and
perishing, and to think about designing great stuff without a pollution afterlife.

Limited spots available! Please sign up via Eventbrite.

Jiwon Woo: Grow your own Makgeolli
Mother’s Hand Taste (Son-mat) is a culinary ode to the personal touch. In the workshop, participants will explore the complex relationships between intangible cultural heritage, microbiology, immigration, and notions of a ‘transient self’. We will examine living organisms on our hands, especially yeast, and its effects on the taste of fermented food that every culture has been inherited in different forms for more than thousands of years. By Investigating Korean word “Son-mat (hand taste)” through artistic and scientific means, participants will think critically on the origins, authenticity, and preservation of cultural heritage. They will leave the workshop with their own hand printed growing hand yeast petri dish, Korean rice wine Makgeolli that they cooked with their own “Son-mat”, and a critical reconsideration of his/her own heritage.

In collaboration with Freek Appels, Institute of Environmental Biology, Microbiology group, Utrecht University

Limited spots available! Please sign up via Eventbrite.

Where MU
When Friday 17 – Sunday 18 February, 2018.
Registration & tickets via Eventbrite.