The Outside Inside

Installation & film, 2019

In the permanent collection of Futurium Museum Berlin
Exhibition opening 5.9.2019

“The Outside Inside” is a series of interconnected works that imagine, prototype, and question contemporary and potential future relationships between environments, the species that inhabit these, and technology, through the lens of terraforming. 

In collaboration with Sam Conran & Anna-Luise Lorenz
*Longer project text coming soon*

Bioplastic Fantastic

Design project & film, 2014


As interactive products are growing closer and closer to the body, and scientists are making advances in the use of biological matter in materials suitable for product design, it feasible that soon biochemical processes will be taking place in and on our technological devices.

Bioplastic Fantastic investigates new types of products and interactions which might emerge from these material innovations in the fields of bio- and nanotechnology. It speculates about the future design and use of domestic products made from enzyme-enhanced bioplastics. The concept is based on a recent scientific breakthrough in the synthesis of functioning  “biological” cells made from polymers and enzymes.

Halfway between products and organisms, seven “biological devices” produce all food and energy needed for humans to survive simply by being exposed to light (through artificial photosynthesis). They produce water, vitamins, fibre, sugar, fat, protein and minerals through biological processes, allowing for a more self-sufficient lifestyle.

The devices are designed to be part of a biologically influenced domestic space, and their aesthetics are not machine-like or lab-like, to question the

common aesthetics in bio-art and design and to emphasise the design opportunities that might arise with these new types of materials: to make design more sensual, and less technical, less industrial. The loss of the natural sensuality of traditional food is substituted by a designed, artificial sensuality.

All of the device designs are based on bacteria which have similar functions in nature. They use the functional part of the biological circuit (enzymes), and combine this with non-living matter (bioplastic).

Rather than being a proposal or a solution, the project aims at asking questions and provoking discussions about which kinds of applications of bio- and nanotechnology we would want to be part of our future everyday lives.

 

Automation is entering all aspects of services and prodution, and agriculture, too, is becoming increasingly digitalised and automated. To a certain extent, robots, digital sensing, and algorithmic predictions in agriculture are already commonplace. New technologies and systems such as the blockchain and the Internet of things give machines the capability to operate even more independently, to communicate, and to make
transactions by themselves.

Autonomous Agriculture investigates how increased automation could lead to new economic and social systems in the countryside, dominated by a symbiosis between nature and digital technology. Once manufactured and placed in the countryside, Internet-connected planning and harvesting robots form part of an autonomous network of agricultural machines, operated by an algorithm.  

These machines work as an independent business with no human employees, planting and harvesting what is deemed profitable according to predictive algorithms.
The collected food is sold to people online and paid for with digital money. The robots acquire required maintenance via the Internet, also with digital money, and are serviced by humans or other robots. They then continue
their work, eventually accumulating enough capital to buy the land they are working on. One solar-powered robot harvests the healthly and drinkable sap of a birch tree, and a group of autonomous robots collects
snails in a field to decrease the need for pesticides and to sell them as a delicacy. The project explores the idea of non-anthropocentric agriculture, in which the power structure is changed. People also become a tool for the machine, rather than the machine merely a tool for people.

The project “Mousetraps No.3, 14 and 18ʺ aims at creating a reflection and discussion about the altering and design of life forms, by speculating about a future where these new life forms become commonplace, and a part of our natural environment.

The traps are designed for three different genetically and technologically modified rodents, which exist in research laboratories today. The “waltzing mouse” [1], the only one of the three that already exists in nature, has a
genetic abnormality which, because of a defect of the inner ear, causes the mouse to run in circles due to problems with its balance. The trap captures the mouse in a circular pipe which is closed at the top – due to the genetic defect the mouse will not be able to escape by walking backwards or turning around.

The “cyborg mouse”[2] is a mouse like the many rodents that have been used in laboratories to test brain implants. The trap captures the mouse by attracting it to a strong magnet, which switches off its movement controlling brain implant. The third trap is shaped like a speaker and plays birdsongs to attract the “birdsong mouse” [3], a mouse that sings like a
bird, which has been created by Japanese researchers.

^{[1] Stein, K. F., Huber Filosa, S., ‘A new mutation causing circling behaviour in mice’, Journal of Heredity, Volume 55, Issue 5, 1964, pp. 247-252.
[2] Graham-Rowe, D., ‘Robo-rat controlled by brain electrodes’, http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2237, 2002.
[3] Agence France Press, ‘Singing mouse made with genetic modification’, http://news.discovery.com/animals/mouse-tweets-geneticmodification-101221.html, 2010.}