During Art Basel 2026, Gallery Drei (Cologne) presented Julia Scher’s “Ameratherm Ultra Cooking Lab” (2000) at the Basel Social Club. Ameratherm Ultra Cooking Lab restages a series of works that Julia Scher realized in 2000 at the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York. The installation transforms the exhibition space into a techno-alchemical laboratory, featuring microwave ovens and electromagnetic technology arranged on workbenches, displayed, and reconfigured into hybrid media objects.
Official description:
“ameratherm ultra cooking lab’ restages a series of works that Julia Scher realized in 2000 at the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York. The installation is centered around microwaves—literally and thematically—both as microwave ovens and as electromagnetic microwaves. These are set in a kind of techno-alchemical laboratory in the exhibition space—on workbenches, in various display situations, dismantled and transformed into fantastic media chimeras. In the context of Scher’s examination of the entanglements of technology, society, and desire, microwaves emerge as interfaces, allegories, and ur-appliances of the information age.
The exhibition is also closely connected to Julia Scher’s teaching position at MIT in Cambridge. Here, in the legendary and now-demolished Building 20 and its so-called “Rad Lab,” the basics of microwave radar and surveillance technology were developed, making MIT the largest wartime R&D contractor of the U.S. and prototyping strong institutional links between government, industry, and academia. Originally intended only for the duration of the war and six months thereafter, the building was a dilapidated monument to the economic expansion of the state of war, infamous as an interdisciplinary hub of progress in the post-war, pre-9/11 U.S. Building 20 had its hand in basically everything: from the rise of the household microwave oven and the observation of cosmic microwave background radiation, to information technologies, modern linguistics, 3D printing, and early student hacker culture.”
–Baptist Ohrtmann
Julia Scher: Ameratherm – Ultra Cooking Lab, 2000. Drei (Cologne) at Basel Social Club 2026. Basel (Switzerland), June 20, 2026.
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