V2_ Knowledgebase

Future Cities Lab’s HYDRAMAX Port Machines project proposes a radical rethinking of San Francisco’s urban waterfront post sea-level rise. The proposal renders the existing hard edges of the waterfront as new “soft systems” that would include aquatic parks, community gardens, wildlife refuges and aquaponic farms. A synthetic architecture is introduced that blurs the distinction between building, landscape, infrastructure and machine. Using thousands of sensors and motorized components, the massive urban scale robotic structure harvests rainwater and fog, while modulating air flow, solar exposure and intelligent building systems.

Based on the BEAM robotics (Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics, Mechanics) the exhibition depicts a series of over 100 small autonomous robots with different morphologies and characteristics. A large installation shows 50 cricket-like small robots imprisoned in droplet glass shapes creating a kind of jungle sound environment. Other robots look like small trees or move around like insects. BEAM robotics is presented here as a new kind of (artificial) life.

is there a horizon in the deep water? is a performance by HeHe that reconstructs, in miniature, the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in an outdoor swimming pool. This event triggered the BP oil spill, the largest ever recorded marine oil spill, causing immense damage to ocean and coastal wildlife habitats across vast areas in the Gulf of Mexico. Any suggestion that an open-air swimming pool might suffer the same fate as the Gulf of Mexico and become polluted for the sake of art is provocative and absurd. In fact, during the performance harmful or poisonous substances do not contaminate the pool, unless you consider art to be corrosive and corruptive. The work aims to bring home to audiences the significance of the disaster, albeit on a very small scale.

Plants are moving creatures. Their movements generally remains invisible to us, because their muscle and nerve-like systems operate at a very slow timescale and their rooting in soil confines their motion to the movement of branches and leaves. These restrictions give plants an enormous disadvantage compared to their main aggressors: animals and humans, in many instances resulting in a loss of biodiversity and even extinction. In the prototype that Ivan Henriques developed during the V2_ Summer Sessions a plant is provided with an off-the-shelf motor system. The potential of the plant to sense when it is being touched is used to set the motor in action. By doing so, the plant is able to speedily drive away in response to human touch.

Chris Bosse, Tobias Wallisser and Alexander Rieck founded the Laboratory for Visionary Architecture [LAVA] in 2007. It was established as a network of creative minds with a research and design focus and has offices in Sydney, Shanghai, Stuttgart and Abu Dhabi. LAVA explores frontiers that merge future technologies with the patterns of organisation found in nature and believes this will result in a smarter, friendlier, more socially and environmentally responsible future. The potential for naturally evolving systems such as snowflakes, spider webs and soap bubbles for new building typologies and structures has continued to fascinate LAVA – the geometries in nature create both efficiency and beauty. But above all the human is the centre of their investigations.

The projet is a recycling center made of recycled cars. Because of the development of the public transportation system and the depletion of their resources, personal vehicles are going to become obsolete and their number will significantly decrease. Instead of throwing them, we will use them as resources. Composed of 74% of metal, they provide good material for construction. Therefore, manufactured products which have polluted their entire life are the base of our new environmental device. In its functioning, it uses and recycles all of its energies. It provides new materials and services to the city. It is a wonderful laboratory which experiments a new kind of project that inverts the current one way process turning resources into wastes. We dream of a project that would turn wastes back into resources, something that would looks like: Wastes + Pollution + CO2 -> Resources + O2

The lumiBots are small, autonomous robots that react to light. They can leave glowing traces which slowly fade away, so that older, darker trails are visible as well as newer, brighter ones. This way, generative images that consistently change are generated. They are appealing just for the glow effect, but also have a deeper meaning for the robots: They can follow the lines with their light sensors, and amplify them whilst preferring brighter (newer) and broader (more often used) trails.

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.

"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.

"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

Open Energy aims to develop a platform to explore new systems of visualization energy use and to optimize it accordingly, both in domestic and industrial environments. The system is built along two dimensions: first one, Energy Monitoring Device, which investigates open hardware devices in which monitoring power consumption, and a second dimension, Open Energy Visualization (Data Visualization / Augmented Reality App), which explores new ways of real-time visualization power consumption in domestic environments. These systems will allow us to amplify our knowledge about the dynamic behavior of energy anywhere. Open Energy is a prototype of energy infrastructure completely Open Source.

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.

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.