V2_ Knowledgebase

A multitude of individuals, groups and institutions will form a massive intelligent swarm that would move roughly along the unfinished “Highway of Brotherhood and Unity” in the former Yugoslavia. The road was made in sixties in the massive voluntary campaign of the peoples of all nationalities that constituted Yugoslavia. The expedition is meant to generate new projects, new art works, new networks, new architecture and new politics based on experience and knowledge found along the highway. Projects developed from the expedition will lead to exhibitions, publications and symposia of “Europe Lost and Found” in Stuttgart and Ljubljana in 2007.

This project is an exploration of the use of rhinoscripting – specifically in terms of data interpretation. The script takes data from a GPS, heart rate monitor, and stopwatch. During a 12 mile run, I tracked my heart rate, pace, latitude/longitude and elevation. This data was then interpreted by the script – generating a form that visualizes the relationship of the data to one another.

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.

N55 is a platform for persons who wants to work together, share places to live, economy, and means of production. N55 is based both in Copenhagen, and in LAND.

The project is inspired by nature’s ability to process and conquer even artificial materials and surfaces in order to sustain and enforce itself. Nature’s immense strength and power is accompanied by an aesthetic that indicates a peaceful progression of time. The emergence of moss, fungi and plants, as well as their disappearing, brings life into the inanimate materials and objects. The project explores how we can design materials that respond to nature and its resilience.

Open Columns is a system of nonstructural columns, made from composite urethane elastomers and can be deployed in a variety of patterns to reconfigure the space beneath them. The system is a mutable architecture that responds to its inhabitants by changing its shape based upon the carbon dioxide (CO2) content in the air. It is capable of learning about its environment by directly acting within it. The genesis of this research and design comes out of an interest in self-organizing systems, which exhibit phenomena of nonlinearity, instability and adaptability. Open Columns is part of a research project exploring computationally inspired and augmented materials for responsive architecture.

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.

Protei is an oil spill cleaning machine. Protei is a family of unmanned robots (drone) that sails. It is articulated and some versions are inflatable. Oil drifts downwind, so Protei need to be able to sail upwind to capture more oil. Protei is an innovation using conventional technologies, it is therefore immediately possible to build it at a low cost with conventional materials. Protei is developed Open hardware, so everybody can use, modify and distribute our designs. Besides oil spill cleaning many other applications are envisoned for this revolutionary drone.

The beauty and wonder of nature have provided inspiration for artists and architects for centuries. Since the 1960s, the increasingly evident degradation of the natural world and the effects of climate change have brought a new urgency to their responses. Radical Nature is the first exhibition to bring together key figures across different generations who have created utopian works and inspiring solutions for our ever-changing planet. Radical Nature draws on ideas that have emerged out of Land Art, environmental activism, experimental architecture and utopianism. The exhibition is designed as one fantastical landscape, with each piece introducing into the gallery space a dramatic portion of nature. Work by pioneering figures such as the architectural collective Ant Farm and visionary architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, artists Joseph Beuys, Agnes Denes, Hans Haacke and Robert Smithson are shown alongside pieces by a younger generation of practitioners.

Recycled island is a research project on the potential of realizing a habitable floating island in the Pacific Ocean made from all the plastic waste that is momentarily floating around in the ocean. The proposal has three main aims; Cleaning our oceans from a gigantic amount of plastic waste; Creating new land; And constructing a sustainable habitat. Recycled island seeks the possibilities to recycle the plastic waste on the spot and to recycle it into a floating entity. The constructive and marine technical aspects take part in the project of creating a sea worthy island.

On-going research project. The project “Reveal-it!” envisions the idea of revealing on-site data about the citizens’ consumption processes and its interrelations with energy-related infrastructures publicly in urban communities. It proposes a participatory intervention for interactively discovering and visualizing this data via public projection on urban surfaces. Images of real-world deployments and design process can be seen in our Flickr set.

The RSA Arts and Ecology Centre is an organisation whose role is to catalyse, publicise, challenge and support artists who are responding to the unprecedented environmental challenges of our era. Using their inspirations, RSA Arts and Ecology aims to create a positive discussion about the causes and the human impact of climate change through commissioning, debate, interdisciplinary discourse and a high-profile website. The RSA Arts and Ecology Centre was set up by the RSA in 2005.The centre's head, Michaela Crimmin, says "Artists have always had a powerful relationship with the natural environment. Equally artists continually question and re-examine society's notions of progress. We need their unique perspective on the enormous challenges ahead - on the relationship between environmental issues, and not least climate change, and people."

The future of water is the subject of tension. Water is both disposable and sacred, a muse for artists and a necessity for life – a source of healing and of conflict. The Earth has abundant water, but only a very small proportion is available for human use. How should this be managed and sustained, and what would a water-scarce future look like? SURFACE TENSION brings together work by artists, designers, engineers and scientists to explore the future of water, playing on its physical properties, its role in politics and economics, and ways in which it may be harnessed, cleaned, and distributed.

‘The Body is a Big Place’ explores organ transplantation and the ambiguous thresholds between life and death, revealing the process of death as an extended durational moment, rather than an event that occurs in a single moment in time. This bio-art work is a large-scale immersive installation comprising a 5-channel video projection, a fully functioning bio-sculptural heart perfusion system, an undulating aqueous soundscape, and a single channel video work. ‘The Body is a Big Place’ re-enacted certain defining aspects of the human heart transplant process. The heart perfusion device was used to reanimate to a beating state a pair of fresh pig hearts in 2 performances staged during the exhibition. Rather than sensationalising these performative events, the artists sought to encourage empathic responses from viewers, activating the bodies of viewers by appealing to their somatic senses and fostering their identification with the hearts they were watching. This opened up the possibility of a deeper awareness and connection with viewers’ own interiors.