During this years Ars Electronica festival the Lentos Museum in Linz exhibited Ecology of Techno Mind, a retrospective from the Kapelica gallery in Ljublijana, Slovenia.

The Kapelica gallery dedicate “special attention to projects that topicalize the reverse engineering of nature with their direct application of technologies and biotechnology on the human body”. I’m not a body art connoisseur or practitioner. I am however very interested in the reverse engineering of nature. And whether or not I like body art I admire the galleries idealism. According to the galleries curator, Jurij Krpan, the role of the gallery is to unite people who have something to say and, though it may sound a bit 80’s, enter debate and change society. Over the years Kapelica have had over 150 exhibitions. I got a sense that they at the very least has succeeded in creating debate in Slovenia. Here are three of my favorite pieces from the exhibition…

Junior’s Return

I find Philip Ross’s work very inspiring and interesting. In particular Junior’s Return since it connects to my current work and research on living systems. In Junior’s Return plants are grown in networked hydroponic systems. “The system keeps its enclosed plant in a dwarf state by supplying only enough resources to survive but not thrive. I kept a broccoli seedling alive for almost three years using this technique” says Ross. Junior’s Return shows that crops can be sustained in artificial environments. “However, they have long since ceased being the subject of farming or gardening. They are increasingly becoming the subject of science and technology.”

Robot Rabbit

Robot Rabbit by Paul Granjon says “robot, rabit” with a rate of one word every second. A counter is incremented with each word and the (real) grass is automatically watered by a pump when the soil dries. The installation “questions and comments on the effects of exposure to an exponentially growing and more capable technological environment. Robot Rabbit is an automatic installation that opposes the inflexible rhythm of the machine to the biological growth of the live grass”. Admittedly I didn’t get this deeper meaning at first. Until I read about the piece I thought the point was that the rabbit sounded like a frog. Anyway, I love Granjons humor and can really recommend his book Hand-made Machines.

Eat a Bit

Eat a Bit introduces the first utensils of Digital Kitchen. Digital Kitchen will allow processing of “eat a bit” recipes and using open source software and 2D/3D printing technology it will allow production of edible objects. The actual printing equipment didn’t make it to Ars. I haven’t been able to find anything about the project on the web so I’m not sure if it even exists, but the concept intrigues me…

Living systems are inhabited by organisms with complex forms of communication and information processing. Suitcase Science is an attempt to package these systems and tap into them in order to form new alliances between nature and technology.

Suitcase Science represents a turn from the Modernism’s use of technology to control nature to a postmodern use of nature to enliven technology. By approaching living systems as technology Suitcase Science challenges traditional views of nature and suggests that new relationships to nature can be formed.

More concretely the Suitcase Science project investigates how living systems can be sustained in portable controlled ecological life support systems (CELSS) and how system parameters like environmental conditions, volatile organic compounds and electrophysiological activity can be intercepted and interpreted.

Suitcase Science is a project sprung out of the recently started Strange Eden Lab at the Interactive Institutes Art and Technology Program, it was most recently shown at New Media Meeting 3. Suitcase Science is a work in progress, more information will be available at SuitcaseScience.net as the project develops.

Suitcase Science is a collaboration between Erik Sjödin and Michel Bussien.

PHOTO: xCLINIC

Yesterday I attended a very inspiring talk on art and resilience with Natalie Jeremijenko and Sverker Sörlin. The talk began with a presentation of Natalie’s new project: The Environmental Health Clinic, and ended with a discussion between Sverker and Natalie.

The Environmental Health Clinic is a response to the issue of resilience and an attempt to patch natural systems that have crashed in urban environments. The clinic recognizes that in the process of making environmental work newsworthy issues have not been made local enough. Consequentially people are left wondering why nothing is happening in their neighborhood and what the hell they should do.

To address the situation people, wittingly called impatients, can come to the environmental health clinic with their concerns. The clinic analyzes the problem and issues a prescription that helps the impatients cure their concerns.

One such prescription is noPark.

“NoPark returns “no parking zones” … to low growth mosses and grasses … These microparks continue to provide emergency parking space for fire trucks and exasperated Fresh-direct delivery persons. But the other 99.9% of the time they now do something more … For all the same rationales that apply to green roofs, greening the no-standing zones is a good thing”.
- noPark

A decade ago a project like noPark would probably be done as an underground action, but according to Natalie the era of guerilla interventions is over. Artists (like Steve Kurz) now face getting arrested on terrorist charges for their actions and few are willing to take such risks. Instead the environmental health clinic seek to achieve results in a collaborative and orderly fashion. For example impatients get to buy shares in the noPark lots. The shares pay for legal installation of the lots but they also provide a sense of ownership that secures their long term survival.

Other projects that Natalie presented included birds, frogs, bats, and urban space stations. All very interesting but I’m going to fast forward to the discussion between Natalie and Sverker that followed her presentation.

Natalie and Sverker frequently returned to the conflict between traditional environmentalism and new forms of social-ecological interaction. While traditional environmentalist believe in “do not touch, do not interfere”. Natalie believes that the best way for us to cohabit with non humans in urban contexts is by actively interacting with nature. Sverker is on the same track. According to him we are starting to realize that “using is not equal to loosing”. Urban ecological diversity is not preserved by stepping aside but by intervening and we should use new technology to build new ecosystem services. Parks are excellent examples of this, they exist because they are used by people. According to Sverker there is a park in Stockholm (I forgot which) where there are sixty organizations who depend on the park for their activities. Their various interests provide for the parks diversity.

After many turns the discussion eventually drifted over to whether or not basing art on science is important. According to Natalie science with its high standard and structures of accountability is a social representation that we trust. The problem with science is that the public can’t to participate in discussions with scientists on equal terms. Cultural workers on the other hand are wide open for criticism from anyone and art can therefore function as a communicative device for science. In other words science gives art credibility and art communicates science.

After about one and a half hour Sverker rounded of by asking Natalie how far we can go in our efforts to redesign social and ecological interaction.

S: Can we have bears on Manhattan?

N: Bears are interesting in the way they challenge domesticity. There are Black Bears in New Jersey. Can we design technologies that enable urban bears? - Yes.

The talk was arranged by Mejan Labs as part of Changing Matters - The Resilience Art Exhibition at The Swedish Museum of Natural History. The exhibition closes September 7th 2008.