V2_ Knowledgebase

Active Environments is a project which reveals one small piece of a vast puzzle which is slowly, but persistently becoming our reality. The project is based on the idea the Internet of Things. It is a system that supports and enables people to connect their environments to the Internet with a purpose of monitoring their health. In this way, helping people to take greater control over the state of the environment they live in or care about. This is achieved through the access to their real-time data send by a networked environment connected through a Pachube platform. The system uses social network mechanisms to connect people and create communities around a mutual interest—an environment they care about. In this way, facilitating civic responsibility and local cooperation, supporting people to actively use the technology at their hands. It would also functions as a platform for the comparison of different environments' health, based on the data they send.

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.

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.

"Oil Compass" explores the potential of the future effects of oil spills on oceans through the convergence of past records with present real-time data. Kasia Molga has attempted to envision possible future response for the novel oil spill cleaning technology called Protei: a swarm of autonomous sailing robots that would monitor and clean up oil spills. It is an interactive visualisation depicting “past”, “present” and possible “future” scenarios of oil spills in world's oceans; and threats which oil rigs and tankers carry while scattered all over the planet. Based on Google Earth API, it take live data visualisation of oil tankers and oil rigs and juxtaposition it together with the 10 worst spills in the history put together with data of energy consumption (and therefore need for oil) all over the world. "Oil Compass v.1" was produces in V2_ in Rotterdam as a part of Protei development - unmanned drone which can clean waters - brainchild of Cesar Harada

Our technical vision is to create a fully open-source energy monitoring and control system that is suitable for domestic and industrial application. The current system contains the following modules: emonTx, emonBase, emonGLCD, emoncms and can be configured for the following applications: Home energy monitor PV system monitoring Heatpump monitoring Solar hot water monitoring Hot water tank monitoring Water consumption monitoring

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.

For the Sevilla Biennale I worked with Ecologic Studio to implement a layer of electronic intelligence and monitoring to augment their systems of biological response for StemCloud. The basic variables in the system were Water + Nutrients + CO2. The CO2 was to be provided by the visitors by blowing into the tubes. The goal for the monitoring system was to track the amount of interaction (and thus CO2) units were receiving, save this to a database to compare to the other variables over time, and reflect this through the intensity of the LEDs such that units which had received less CO2 would glow brighter to attract attention.

The Environmental Health Clinic at NYU is a clinic and lab, modeled on other health clinics at universities. However the project approaches health from an understanding of its dependence on external local environments; rather than on the internal biology and genetic predispositions of an individual. The clinic works like this: you make an appointment, just like you would at a traditional health clinic, to talk about your particular environmental health concerns. What differs is that you walk out with a prescription not for pharmaceuticals but for actions: local data collection and urban interventions directed at understanding and improving your environmental health; plus referrals, not to medical specialists but to specific art, design and participatory projects, local environmental organizations and local government or civil society groups: organizations that can use the data and actions prescribed as legitimate forms of participation to promote social change.