V2_ Knowledgebase

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

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.

The pulser pump is a simple, water powered mechanical device, also known as a bubble pump. Components of this pump have been used for various purposes, including the extraction of oil or in refrigeration cycles. Heat driven bubble pumps are most common, but this particular design of a pulser pump using the turbulent flow in a stream to trap air has yet to become common. The two main benefits of this pump are that it has no mechanical or moving parts, and that it doesn't use any chemicals, only the water from a stream. Once installed near a stream, the pump can lift water using only the energy from the stream.

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.