V2_ Knowledgebase

The project shows in encyclopaedic breadth topics that define contemporary mobility. The topics are organized in three large chapters (culture, economy and system) and twelve themes ranging from mobile space to fuel. Each theme again is examined in the scale of the car, the region, the world and time. Throughout the themes, the project intends to show the link between individual experience and global effects.

Biomodd is an open source and co-created art project fusing computer waste and living biology. Essentially, Biomodd creations are computer systems with living ecosystems inside of them. Taken together they form a global art project challenging presumed notions of opposition between nature and technology in different cultures. The project started in 2007 during a residency of Angelo Vermeulen at The Aesthetic Technologies Lab in Athens, Ohio. Since then multiple versions have been built both by the people that originally came up with the idea, and by other communities throughout the world. Up till now, Biomodd versions have been created and showcased in Athens (Ohio), Los Baños and Manila (Philippines), Sint-Niklaas (Belgium), Maribor (Slovenia), and New Plymouth (New Zealand). In 2011 a new Biomodd project will follow in the Netherlands, and in 2012 in New York City. As open source art work, Biomodd can be built and improved upon by anyone.

The Flock House Project is a group of self-contained ecosystems migrating around New York City's five boroughs. What if mobile, self-sufficient living units were the building blocks for future cities? By reflecting the future of urban space and building off of what is already there, Flock House is a group of migratory, public, sculptural habitats that are movable and modular with the ability to merge. In a time when growing urban populations are faced with environmental, political, and economic instability, and when dislocation and relocation is important to consider and reconcile, Flock Houses are choreographed throughout urban centers in the United States and three planes of living (subterranean, ground, and sky).

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.

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 curtain integrates an efficient organic living carbon sink into an interior space. The curtain produces an amount of oxygen equivalent to a mature broad leaved tree – it is a dramatically enhanced house plant. The curtain is composed of an array of algae bioreactors. A network of indoor air, power and nutrient supply lines weave the bioreactors into a single membrane. The nutrients are supplied by the building’s waste water. The curtain is nourished by the CO2 from the exhalation of the inhabitants. It is directly responsive to the users and the environment; each module operates autonomously and sensors activate select modules as appropriate to the changing levels of CO2 within a space. The modules then expand and contract with circulating air revealing a mechanic-organic organism that is continuously refreshing the air.

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.

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.

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.