Avant-Garde Actants across In/Visible Ecologies
3–5 September 2026
BNMW
TOP Lab Berlin
Schätzelbergstraße 1–3 / Industriestrasse 40 12099 Berlin – Tempelhof
As part of Berlin New Media Week 2026, TOP Lab presents ROOT/CLOUD, a three-day exhibition and public programme featuring Tanja Vujinović and Kexin Wang, curated by Xristina Sarli.
ROOT/CLOUD moves between two interconnected strata.
CLOUD unfolds through Tanja Vujinović’s AVANTGUARDIANS: virtual environments, moving images, extinct anatomies, artificial organisms and speculative habitats shaped by ecological memory.
In AVANTGUARDIANS, extinct anatomies return as contemporary digital beings. Botanical structures, fossils, corals, fungi, cephalopods and microorganisms become source material for artificial organisms, composite bodies and speculative habitats.
Rather than reconstructing nature, Tanja Vujinović asks how unfamiliar species might emerge through biological observation, computation and synthetic image systems.
The presentation brings together works from AVANTGUARDIANS, ONENESS and BLOOM, alongside passages through the virtual worlds of AVANTGARDEN. Across moving images and digital environments, forms hover between organism, sculpture, avatar and landscape.
Virtual space becomes a laboratory for ecological imagination: a place where biological memory, extinct bodies and computation can generate new relationships between living and synthetic systems.
Tanja Vujinović is a multimedia artist working across virtual worlds, moving image, sculpture, sound and synthetic image systems. Her work develops artificial organisms, speculative habitats and parallel worlds where biology, technology and imagination continuously overlap. Working with 3D environments, virtual reality, generative image systems and audiovisual installations, she constructs living ecologies populated by avatars, proto-machines and synthetic species. Her work has been exhibited internationally in museums, galleries and festivals for over two decades. Her practice draws on art history, the natural world, science, and popular culture.
ROOT descends into TOP Lab’s basement biolab with Kexin Wang’s Mycelian — Light-Guided Living Fungal Prints, a living installation in which neural cellular automata and dynamic light attempt to guide fungal growth in real time.
Mycelian is a living bioart installation that brings computation into negotiation with fungal growth. A neural cellular automata model trained on biological data predicts possible fungal morphologies, while a system of dynamic light attempts to guide photosensitive mycelium into selected patterns.
Simulation and living response unfold side by side—but they do not remain identical. The fungus deviates, adapts and reveals the limits of technological prediction.
Visitors encounter the work not as a finished object but as a process evolving across biological and computational time. Authorship becomes distributed between artist, model, light, culture, apparatus, environment and organism.
Presented throughout TOP Lab’s basement biolab, Mycelian transforms the laboratory into an evolving public biohacking station: a space where the invisible logics of living systems become perceptible without becoming fully controllable.
Kexin Wang is an affiliate researcher at MIT CSAIL and founder of Funguylab, working at the intersection of biology, optics, AI, and complex systems. Her practice spans bioart, HCI research, and artificial life — driven by a long-standing fascination with non-human agency and the aesthetics of emergence, exploring how living systems can be guided, and how they push back. Her work, including a light-guided fungal bio-printer and a natural language interface for guiding artificial life evolution, has been published at leading academic venues including SIGGRAPH Asia, CHI, and UIST. She is also a co-organizer of the inaugural MIT Media Lab Tech Art Hackathon, bringing together artists, researchers, and technologists to explore the boundaries of creative technology. As a creative tool developer, she is dedicated to building instruments that expand what artists can make and explore. Her light-guided fungal bio-printer has been warmly received by makers and bioartists alike, and is now in use across artist studios, bioart labs, and creative brands.
Together, the works ask:
If the avant-garde once claimed to lead society towards the future, what happens when that future is co-produced by fungi, algorithms, extinct organisms, technological systems and speculative species?
The cloud has roots. The underground is already computational.
PROGRAMME
3 SEPTEMBER · 18:00-22:00
19:00 OPENING + DISCUSSION
WHO LEADS THE AVANT-GARDE?
Actants, Artificial Organisms and Living Networks
A conversation with Tanja Vujinović, Kexin Wang and curator Xristina Sarli on more-than-human agency, artificial life, ecological memory and the displacement of the human from the centre of authorship.
4 SEPTEMBER · 18:00-00:00
ARTIST TALKS
19:00 · CLOUD
Tanja Vujinović presents AVANTGUARDIANS and her wider practice across virtual worlds, synthetic organisms and speculative ecologies.
20:00 · ROOT
Kexin Wang presents Mycelian and her research across bioart, AI, optics and living systems.
5 SEPTEMBER · SOS — OPEN STUDIOS 14:00-00:00
ROOT/CLOUD becomes part of SOS — Open Studios. Artists, studios and independent project spaces throughout Zebrahaus open their doors, allowing visitors to encounter the wider creative ecology inhabiting the historic industrial complex.
18:00 · TOUR
ZEBRAHAUS ARTISTS
Annika Hippler @annika.hippler
Oleksii Zolotar @zolotar__o
Sandra Schlipkoeter @sandraschlipkoeter
Sonja Nilsson @sonja.nilsson
LIVE SET 20:00-22:00 · solito caleb
solito caleb is an artist based in Berlin, moving between leftfield electronics, UK forward club-bass sounds. Co-founder of the RAPSODICA project, placing sound and visual work in unconventional spaces. Their sets lean patient and physical, built for systems and ever scattery.
FREE ENTRY
SOS programme and participating spaces:
SOS — Open Studios is initiated by the Bündnis für geförderte Ateliers Berlin, an alliance representing publicly funded studio buildings currently threatened by rising commercial rents, expiring leases and cuts to Berlin’s cultural budget. Through collective advocacy and public events, the alliance campaigns for the preservation and expansion of affordable, securely tenured working and production spaces for artists.