Sonja Baumel | 4mins | Austria | 2009

US PREMIERE

A vision of the four layers of the (in)visible membrane: already existing skin bacteria, a communication layer, a slime mould and plants, and how theoretically this clothing could transmute into different forms, colours and functions related to environmental changes.

SCREENING SCHEDULE
Avant-Garde Science
8:00pm  Saturday, October 15, 2011
Anthology Film Archives

PRODUCTION CREDITS
Director | Sonja Bäumel
Production | Sonja Bäumel
Animation | Stephan Erben
Shooting | Nikolaus Mahatsek
Editors | Stephan Erben, Nikolaus Mahatsek
Music | Moritz Wallmueller
Costumes | Elisabeth Bäumel, Sonja Bäumel
Model | Cat Jimenez
Production Assistants | Wolfgang Lampl, Georg Schenk
Voice Over | Wolfgang Lampl

DIRECTOR BIO
Sonja Bäumel was born and grew up in Vienna. After high school she shortly studied linguistics, pedagogy and therapeutic pedagogy and successively she decided to cultivate her deepest interests, switching to the creative field. Her involvement into fashion design, deriving from her family, together with a deep fascination for the human body, pushed her to study fashion at the Fashion Institute of Vienna. After graduating in 2004 Sonja worked for several years for big companies, covering different roles of responsibility, until she realized she was satisfied with the achieved experiences and decided to study again. In 2007 she did a Bachelor of Art at the Fashion Institute of Vienna and afterwards started a Master at the Design Academy Eindhoven, which she completed in 2009. The process of her last year at the Design Academy and, the research work in art, fashion design, design and biology and the focus on design and microbiology had a tremendous influence on her personal development. The research in different disciplines and especially collaboration with biologists has been very interesting and showed her new opportunities for her future.

In her projects Sonja explores the boundaries between fashion design, design, art and science, to create multidisciplinary works. Collaborating with biologists, she wants to document the research using techniques that visualize and aesthetically transform this scientific information. She wants to confront people with the fact that our body is a large host of bacteria and that a balanced perception of the body is closely linked with a balanced perception of the self. Furthermore, a human being is not an individual person but a  hybrid, a super organism, which is only able to exist if the different forms of life in and on the body cooperate.

The human body does not end with its skin, but it is invisibly expanding into space through bacteria. Sonja believes that the symbiosis of fashion/design and science will bring new possibilities, issues and aesthetics. Fashion is a visual language; science is a language of facts and data. Fashion can give science visibility and science can give fashion scientific data and methods.

Sonja is fascinated by the body and by the (in)visible platform around it and the possible applications that this existing infrastructure can offer.