V2_ Knowledgebase

David de Buyser's project Acoustic Mirror_Moss, subsidized by the Flemish Community, brings technology and biology together in several ways. First, the project’s longterm goal is an installation that uses vertical moss carpets for the projection of computer-generated images. The cultivation phase, however, features several subprojects that also forge interesting relationships between technology and biology. For instance, David recently developed a MAX/MSP-driven irrigation system to provide a constant supply of water to the moss in the installation at the Visual Arts Academy in Anderlecht.

ecoLogicStudio’s installation for AILATI 2010 has been developed in collaboration with the Global Footprint Network group. We aren’t surprised to discover, through data, that the world is going towards a continuous increase of consumption of resources in relation to the biosphere’s capacity. Nevertheless we are wondering, which processes and stories could define this tendency and which are the relations between debtor countries and creditor ones? Most of the political choices today are based on data and graphics shown in these images; how can the single citizen take part in these decisions while interacting with his daily processes, his histories and his inventions? Can technology act as an intermediary, generating devices that link city, architecture and landscape with politics, society and environment? The “ECO-FOOTPRINT DATA GROTTO MACHINE” focuses on the representation in a relational architectonic system, parametrically designed, of the ecological footprint data.

BBa_K221000 is a sequence of DNA that produces an enzyme called geosmin, which is responsible for the smell of wet earth when it begins to rain. When BBa_k221000 is transformed (injected) into the DNA of E. coli bacteria, it transforms the bacteria into “living machines” that produce the smell of rain. The mystique surrounding the aroma of the Indian monsoon is encoded as a genetic sequence. This is an artistic investigation into the narrative and promises of synthetic biology. The installation comprises a mobile DIY bio lab housed in a geodesic dome. The lab is equipped with all the facilities needed to perform rudimentary genetic engineering and is built entirely out of hacked, local, homemade consumer electronics. The bacteria / “living machines” are grown inside the lab in a custom-made incubator inviting the audience to engage, up-close in critical debates around such forms of biotechnologies. The lab also functions as a pedagogical space and artist studio, as it hosts artists’ workshops and performances and also facilitates the conceptual development of artworks that are produced by borrowing tools and methodologies from the life sciences. This mobile bio lab is collapsible and can be re-assembled in a day. The entire process of building the lab is documented and made available at http://artscienceblr.org or http://hackteria.org/wiki

Earth: Art of a changing world is the second annual contemporary art season at 6 Burlington Gardens. The exhibition presents new and recent work from more than 30 leading international contemporary artists, including commissions and new works from the best emerging talent. Supporter's statement: "This second year of GSK Contemporary is an important collaboration between GlaxoSmithKline and the Royal Academy that builds on our long-standing support for the arts in the UK. Creativity and innovation are critical to our business of improving health and well-being, so we want this year's topic 'Earth' to encourage debate, discussion and creative thinking and the role art can play on the relevance that climate change has on our daily lives."

Agnes Meyer-Brandis’s poetic-scientific investigations weave fact, imagination, storytelling and myth, past, present and future. Here she develops an ongoing narrative based on The Man in the Moone, by bishop Francis Godwin, in which the protagonist flies to the Moon in a chariot towed by ‘moon geese’. Meyer-Brandis has actualised this concept by raising eleven moon geese, giving them astronauts’ names, imprinting them on herself as goose-mother, training them to fly and taking them on expeditions and housing them in a remote Moon analogue habitat. An analogue is a rehearsal for living in space. At various remote facilities around the world astronauts are practising for the phsychological challenges humans can face living away from earth. Meyer-Brandis` remote analogue habitat simulates the conditions of the Moon and will be accessed and operated from Meyer-Brandis’s control room installation within the gallery, where instructional videos, photographs and vitrines of the geese’s egg shells and footprints will be displayed. The viewer can see and interact with the geese here in the control room in real time while the artist encourages you to explore the margins of reality, in that liminal space where scientific data becomes elegiac data. Meyer-Brandis develops the contested history of Godwin’s original fiction – posthumously and pseudonymously published in 1603 as if the genuine account of the travels of Domingo Gonsales. She weaves a narrative that explores the observer’s understanding of the fictitious and the factual, with a nod to notions of the believably absurd.

Perdita Phillips is an Australian artist with a wide-ranging and experimental conceptual practice. She works in mixed media installation, environmental projects, sound, sculpture, photography and drawing. Whilst materially diverse, underlying themes of ecological processes and a commitment to a resensitisation to the physical environment, are apparent.

The installation Plantas Parlantes is a collaborative work between the artists Gilberto Esparza (MX), Javier Busturia (ES), Jigni Wang (CN), Ricardo Nascimento (BR) and Jelle Dekker (NL). Dordrecht (Netherlands), April 2010. After an initial investigation on local water planning in a context so rich and fragile as the Dutch one, the group discussed the creation of a system capable of establishing relations between the human world and the vegetable world, building a sonic sculpture formed by plants and electronic circuits where the contact between man and plant triggers sounds and poetically embodies this relationship.

SUPER KINGDOM can be viewed as a social engineering experiment for animals - a new community in the making referencing despot's palaces, gated community developments such as Alphaville in Brazil and the fortified exclusivity afforded to the wealthy and super-rich - all designed to keep urban reality at bay. CONTEXT Super Kingdom is a reference to both the utopian imaginary and biological taxonomic hierarchy and is a sculptural installation of animal 'show homes' in a woodland environment, based on the architecture of despot's palaces. It reflects both human and animal hierarchy as territorial relationship to landscape; is informed by changing habitat, the displacement of animals as a consequence of urban development and conservationist strategy, and global concerns about fluid populations and porous borders.

Enteric Consciousness 2010 is a large robotic tongue controlled by an artificial stomach filled with the living bacteria Lactobacillus Acidophulus. The artificial stomach in this installation controls and activates the robotic tongue. If the bacteria within the stomach is healthy and reproducing, then robotic tongue-chair senses the presence of the viewer/interactant reclines and delivers a deluxe 15 minute massage. When the interactant leaves the chair the robot tongue returns to an upright position. The Enteric Consciousness is a commission from the Maison d'Aillieur in Switzerland in 2010 for the Do Robots Dream of Spring retrospective exhibition.

The "Tropospheric Laboratory" allows insights into cloud cores and other matter of the apogee. The installation narrates the synthesis of clouds and shows varying conditions and combinations of art and science in the absence of weight. The "laboratory" is the gravimetric document of "Cloud Core Scanner" - an experiment and artistic project by Agnes Meyer-Brandis, carried out on board a German Aerospace Center research plane. It reflects an iridescent world, between controlled and unleashed states: artistic research on the quest for a degree of reality within constructions.

Virtual Mirror - Rain is a spatial intervention which senses the rain falling outside, and then literarily mirrors it inside the building in its original form - water. Every time a raindrop falls on a rain sensor outside, the same raindrop is being synthesized and reflected back to the sky from the floor inside. The installation makes the rain “fall up” inside. In addition to the rain sensors outside, there is one rain sensor installed in the middle of the installation indoors. By dripping water drops on it, the visitors are able to interact with the installation and to activate the drops to fall up from the floor into the sky.