V2_ Knowledgebase

The Active Phytoremediation Wall System is a modular system of pods, housing hydroponic plants. Its main purpose is to encourage airflow and contribute to the quality of life through its air cleaning capacities. The project is a result of a collaborative research between Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. It is a bio-mechanical hybrid system that produces ‘fresh air’ from within buildings, thereby reducing the energy consumption. Because the plants’ roots are exposed, instead of being buried in soil, the plants’ air-cleaning capacity increases by 200 to 300 percent. The pods themselves are made from vacuum-formed plastic, and the form allows the maximum amount of air to reach the root rhizomes while using the minimum amount of material. It also creates a beautiful base for the plants. The wall system can be installed in large commercial interiors, but works equally well in small settings—a four-module system in an apartment would have the impact of 800 to

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.

Annamaria Weldon is a West Australian poet who also writes and publishes in other genres, and has done since her first feature article appeared in 1978. Working with words in different ways, she’s developed the writing practice which has sustained her for more than thirty years through changes of career, home life and location.

Christien Meindertsma explores the life of products and raw materials. For her first book, Checked Baggage (2004), Christien purchased a container filled with a week's worth of objects confiscated at security checkpoints in Schiphol Airport after 9/11. She meticulously categorized all 3267 items and photographed them on a white seamless background. Christien’s second book, PIG 05049 (2007), is an extensive collection of photographic images that documents an astounding array of products that different parts of an anonymous pig called 05049 could support. With this book, Christien reveals lines that link raw materials with producers, products and consumers that have become so invisible in an increasingly globalized world.

CyberGarden is an ongoing research project developed by Ecologic Studio. This project represents the 4th iteration and exists as a multilayered, intelligent system that passes information between these layers via material, electronic and biological information. It utilizes a network of radiation sensors and connected to custom designed and programmed robotic arms and a parametric digital model. The physical prototype and digital model engage in a generative dialogue and co-evolve over the course of each exhibition. The petri dish components are made of translucent perspex and when added to the physical model cause a change in the lighting filed. This in turn will affect the digital plan and triggers the emergence of other gardening components to be designed, cut and added on.

Translator II: Grower is a small 'rover' vehicle which navigates around the periphery of a room. It hugs the room’s walls and responds to the carbon dioxide levels in the air by actually drawing varying heights of 'grass' on the walls in green ink. The Grower robot senses the carbon dioxide (CO2) level in the air via a small digital CO2 sensor. This sensor is mounted high on a wall of the exhibition space and sends data wirelessly to the robot. The number of people in an exhibit space breathing in oxygen and exhaling CO2 has an immediate effect on the sensor. My robot takes a reading of the CO2 level every few seconds and in response it draws a vertical line in green ink on the wall. The line height pertains directly to the level of CO2 (and therefore also the people traffic) in the space. The more CO2, the higher the line is drawn - the maximum height being 1ft. Once Grower completes a line, it moves forward several millimeters and repeats the process.

NCUBATOR Hybrid Laboratory at the Intersection of Art, Science and Ecology is a physical and theoretical hub, a new art/science laboratory at The University of Windsor. Founded in 2009 it functions both as an apparatus in which environmental conditions can be controlled towards the assisted proliferation of life, but also as a site that supports the proliferation of new ideas – new artistic practices. Physically and metaphorically INCUBATOR serves as site for innovative productive and performative imaginings of biotechnology as a technology of the body – a complex ecology – that implicates each of us intellectually and biologically in the continued propagation of the life sciences.

The objective of this project was to train young people living in Kibera slum (Kenya) to assemble portable solar lamps and then test them for daily uses with the intention of starting a small production centre if the pilot phase is a success. The solar lamps will then be produced by these trained young solar technicians and first sold to the local market. A part of the production will be exported to Switzerland and sold as fair-trade. Pre-fabricated lamps will be used as solar energy learning sets in schools and workshops in Switzerland. The youths were also trained to install solar home systems.

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.

"Natural fuse" is a micro-scale carbon dioxide overload protection framework that works locally and globally, harnessing the carbon-sinking capabilities of plants. Generating electricity to power the electronic products that populate our lives has consequences on the amount of carbon dioxide present in the atmosphere, which in turn has detrimental environmental effects. The carbon footprint of the power used to run these devices can be offset by the natural carbon-capturing processes that occur as plants absorb carbon dioxide and grow. "Natural Fuse" units take advantage of this phenomena. They are now distributed in households in London, New York and San Sebastian.

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.

At the extremity of The Netherlands, to the west of Rotterdam, an extension to the port of Rotterdam has been underway since September 2008. With the construction of Maasvlakte 2, The Netherlands will become 2,000 hectares larger and the port, already the biggest in Europe, will increase in size by 20%. The construction of Maasvlakte 2 prompted the Port of Rotterdam Authority to join with SKOR (Foundation Art and Public Space) in inviting the curatorial office Latitudes to in turn ask artists to reflect on the port, its expansion and its function. Under the title 'Portscapes', an artistic voyage of discovery has taken place throughout 2009, touching on the port's architectural, political, social and ecological past, present and future. Portscapes involves artists from The Netherlands, Mexico, Austria, Spain and Great Britain. By creating events, temporary art works, performances, photography, video work and excursions in and about the port area.

Reservoir of Seasons, our microecosystem is not about presenting phenomena which many people will never experience, like dying polar bears, melting icebergs or the cooling of the Gulf Stream, but about the subtle changes we experience every day, it is an experimental project to show how we loose our springs and falls…

The curtain integrates an efficient organic living carbon sink into an interior space. Spore 1.1 is a self-sustaining ecosystem for a rubber tree plant purchased at Home Depot. In this project, Home Depot is responsible for the plant in two ways: first, an unconditional guarantee to replace any plant they sell, for up to one year; second through an implied cybernetic contract. This second responsibility is the creative content for the work, where the economic health of Home Depot is transitioned through a series of physical computing techniques to a mechanism for controlling the watering of the rubber tree. An onboard computer uses a Wi-Fi connection to access Home Depot stock quotes once per week, keeping a database of the week’s ending stock values. From the fluctuations in Home Depot stock, programs and circuitry connected to the rubber tree are controlled accordingly. If the company does well by showing stock growth, so does the plant - if the company suffers losses, Spore 1.1 does not get watered.

SUN-D’s look like LED screens, but they’re anything but that. They’re powered by daylight or distinct light sources. They interact with their immediate environment. It’s an aesthetic fusion of information and lighting design. SUN_D depicts information via sunlight and extant natural light sources. To counteract the general sensory overload due to digital media that frequently put a real strain on users, we intentionally work with a way of depicting graphics whose naturally engendered glow is quite pleasant for the human eye to behold.