11 Joint Proposals 2022
Date
11 July 2022
-
11 July 2022









Zouttuin
The lines in-between the big and the small
Urpflanze
The Body Garden
Skeletal Biogenesis
Undefined - How we learned to love the noise
Mud & Flood
Hacking Heuristics
Filthy Anatomy
The lines in-between the big and the small
Paula Kaori Nishijima & Joris Koene (VU)
The interactive installation would connect life sciences, technology and participatory work, using an algorithm based on the neuronal network that learns from the interactions with the audience. It addresses how complexity and intelligence arise out of a multiplicity of simple interactions.
The repetition of these patterns at different scales - from molecules to the Cosmic Web - leads to the intersectionality of the macro and micro, the whole and the parts, the big and the small.
Can we crow edible crops on salt water to create an ecosystem that will allow the plants to thrive?
Zouttuin - giving farmland back to the sea
Anastasia Egers & Ottonie von Roeder and Wieger Wamelink (WUR)
Zouttuin is a saltwater allotment garden island floating on the ocean, that metaphorically speaks about displacement of species due to the climate crisis and sea level rise and the need for adjustment to the new conditions.
It explores the possibility of giving (farm)land back to the sea, while allowing it to remain a productive landscape. Zouttuin is looking into the adjustment of edible crops to growing on salt water and creating an ecosystem that will allow the plants to thrive.
Urpflanze – Tree morphology as a biological programming language
Mariana Marangoni & Floris de Lange (RUMC)
Urpflanze is a 3-dimensional and non-verbal esoteric programming language that defies the current paradigms of computation, presenting a radical post digital and organic alternative to computational systems.
The source code is tangible, living and self-modifying, embodied in the branching structure of a tree. It reformulates ecological and “machinic” agencies,
reframing of human perception towards non-human agents by exposing the inner logics of programming languages outside of black-boxed digital devices.
Skeletal Biogenesis
Ege Saves & Edward Jones and Miguel Dias Castilho (TU/e)
Skeletal Biogenesis explores advanced biomanufacturing techniques that emulate the processes from which much of the natural world is built: biocalcification. Bones, shells, teeth, and coral skeletons, all made via this natural process.
By taking the most elemental version of this, bacterial biocalcification, and combining it with advanced 3D printing technology the project would explore what may be the future of manufacturing within the context of the future coral reef remediation.
Can the human metabolism, in interaction with other metabolic lifeforms, create a selfsustaining system for human survival on Mars?
The Body Garden
Pleun van Dijk & Fred Erik and Julia Rijssenbeek (WUR)
The Body Garden critically reflects on the role our bodies, which constantly produce skin, hair, and sweat among others, could play to support regenerative life support systems for humans in an interplanetary context. This idea has captivated space research for years and sprouts a range of critical questions about our lives and how we see science as the key to unlocking interplanetary living.
Ultimately, the aim of the project is to create an immersive installation that embodies this research from a critical design perspective.
Undefined - How we learned to love the noise
Jasper Zehetgruber & Rodrigo Leite de Oliveira (Amsterdam UMC)
In an increasingly interdependent world, humanity is facing the ethical and practical limitations of binary sensemaking, bringing ‘order’ to the world with categories such as good/evil, female/male, nature/culture, science/art and the digital 1/0.
Technologies such as the DNA editing tool CRISPR are expressing this human urge to alter and order the structures of nature. Reflecting on the intrusive methods of CRISPR and subverting its binary origins, Undefined is a speculative attempt to inject a non-binary mode of sensemaking into humanity’s collective memory.
How can we move beyond confined dualistic perceptions about other living beings, by learning from Invasive Alien Species?
Growing Heterotopia, transcending barriers of native-alien classifications
Minji Choi & Julia Rijssenbeek (WUR)
While human-induced climate change and globalisation accelerate modifications of the environment, humans are travelling along with germs, animals, and plants. Consequently, ecological barriers are constantly shifting. As such in the future, it will be progressively difficult to demarcate between alien and native. How can we move beyond such confined dualistic perceptions yet dominant in our thinking about other living beings, by learning from Invasive Alien Species? Growing Heterotopia, transcending barriers of native-alien classifications explores how to live together with IAS in a more ecological and holistic approach.
Homo plastikos: the anatomy of a plastic empathy
Rae Yuping Hsu and Juan Garcia Vallejo & Maartje Rietdijk (Amsterdam UMC)
We are born into plastic soup, pumping 1.5μg/ml of microplastics through our body with each heartbeat.
This project maps a multimodal field of life and death under plastic becoming. From the gradual degradation of plastic objects emerges a plastic subject, implicated in a polymerized network of geopolitical and material conditions. Employing various modes of inquiry, including but not exclusively, artistic and scientific ways of knowing, we begin to conceive how the plastic subject’s agency is formed and shaped.
Read all about the three winning teams in the article below ↓