Primer is a collaboration between Diakron and Aquaporin. By bringing together science, humanities, technology development and visual art, Primer seeks to explore histories, imaginaries and the aesthetic dimensions of emergent technological systems. Our activities are long term collaborations with artists, thematic exhibition projects, public private partnerships in collaboration with Aquaporin, workshops and events, collaborations with external partners and network activities.
Since 2017 Primer have held seven exhibitions at Aquaporin. You can browse the projects here. In 2018 The New York Times published an article, introducing the thinking that led to Primer, as well as the exhibition on display at the time. Later on in 2019 we published a text, introducing select projects and methodologies developed in the first two years. In 2019 Primer exhibited at Moderna Museet, as part of the exhibition Mud Muses.
At the time of writing, we have three long-term collaborations with artists Jenna Sutela (FI), Emily Jones (UK) and Emil Rønn Andersen (DK). The collaboration with Emily Jones has been delayed due to Covid-19 and will open late 2021. With Jenna Sutela we are developing a set of bio-mimetic wearables in collaboration with Aquaporin as well as a number of industrial and artistic partners due to be released in 2022-23. Emil Rønn worked at Primer from late-2019 to late-2020, while developing a novel light-setting and visual simulation technology, he has worked on since 2014.
Together with Emil Rønn Andersen we developed a commision for the 13th Shanghai Biennale. The project is called Scries and was produced in collaboration with environmental researchers from DTU Environment, The Niels Bohr Institute and dept. of Geosciences at Copenhagen University. The work is made up of an ongoing stream of short video clips, that frames a reflective sphere in its relationship to a set of environments. The work comes out of a series of artistic experiments using Emil Rønn Andersen’s technology to explore aesthetic qualities within climate science.
