The book offers a survey of creative practices that engage with soil in all its dimensions. While I expected land art and pottery, I encountered edible soil, a floating food forest, hidden soil soundscapes, co-production with non-human collaborators, a decomposing SUV, explorations of earthworm’s perception, life within damaged soil ecosystems and many other works that call for a shift from control to care
Category Archive: bio
Colomina and Wigley offer an alternative history of architecture from the point of view of microbes
Zone2Source, a “testing ground for art & ecology” in Amsterdam, is exploring a new form of democracy where not only the voices of people are heard, but also those of trees, animals, fungi and billions of other life forms
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What can plants teach us in the context of the climate and ecological catastrophe? What is the untapped critical and creative potential of plants? What are the ethical and social consequences of our cultural marginalisation of plants?
Curated from new developments in synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, robotics, engineering, biology, and art, this survey demonstrates the myriad ways in which our perception of what it means to be alive has dramatically changed. Where do we draw the new lines?
This year, the Triennale di Milano examines the global issue of inequality through an impressive inquiry encompassing architecture, design, technology, bioscience and data
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Giovanni Aloi delves into the history and representation of plants in art, advocates for a change in our relationship with the botanical world, and presents an alternative history of art that foregrounds the truly indispensable contributions of plants
The performance and installation explore death from a more-than-human perspective, embracing overlooked stories of transformation in post-wildfire environments
Adrián Balseca investigates the relationships between economy, ecology and memory, as well as the power dynamics linked to extractivism and the exploitation of nature
Sensing machines mapping the Arctic, hormone-altering vapour, sweating bacteria, songs from the swamps…. This year’s Open Fields Conference was packed with mind-blowing discoveries
In this episode, Maja talks about her research into human/dog/wolf co-evolution; the possibility to create a hybrid of the human and the dog species; her experiments with biologically manipulating her own body so that she could breast feed a puppy; taboos around the female body and more
The book outlines new approaches to understand scientific practice in general and art-science in particular, showcasing how art can provide a unique perspective on the meaning and potential of collaboration
PL’AI is a process lasting several months in which plants grown from seed and an AI-robot whose perceptual world is limited to them, interact with each other
15 years of investigation by the Center for PostNatural History. Featuring essays and photography by founder Rich Pell, and a catalog of PostNatural organisms
How do artists, designers and activists use performance, biohacking, robotics, synthetic biology, photography or gaming to probe and challenge the capitalistic abuses of plants, soils and the communities that take care of them?
The series combines speculative elements with rigorous scientific material to explore the impact that biotechnology, commercial logic, legislation and socio-political values can have on our concept of “nature”
Across twelve case studies, this book charts the emergence of diverse forms of artistic practice and brings together accounts of how artists, scholars and activists are creatively responding to environmental destruction
Queer theory, co-dependency, desire, hierarchies, possessiveness, vulnerability or feminism… Everything you wanted to know about the close connection between mother and son
The book considers such topics as the presence of plants in the history of philosophy, the shifting status of plants in various traditions, what it means to make art with growing life-forms and whether or not plants have moral standing
How the pervasively used notion “green” is used to symbolically mask the increasing technical manipulations of nature and the environment
An interview with Laura Cinti from C-Lab about a project that uses a drone to survey unexplored part of a forest where a female specimen of one of the rarest plants in the world might be growing
The participating artists used scientific marine data to shape thought-provoking scenarios that make us consider with new eyes life conditions in polluted marine environments
Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection, realised by David Cronenberg, provides an alternative gaze on the four female wax models on display in the anatomy museum, exploring themes such as the fascination with the human body and its potential mutations and contaminations
A sharp overview of artworks that respond to the Anthropocene and its detrimental impact on our world, from scenes of nature decimated by ongoing extinction events and landscapes turned to waste by extraction, to art from marginalised communities most affected by the injustice of climate change
The methodology adopted leaves space for risk-taking, error-making and deeper connections with science institutions while opening up the development process to other disciplines and, as the festival demonstrated, to the public
The works explore the urgency of decolonising nature, of developing a deeper connection with non-human species and the emergence of new ecosystems where the artificial and the natural contaminate each other.
The exhibition illustrates the history of colonial and ecological exploitation hidden behind the beauty of tropical plants
The book takes our planetary state of emergency as an opportunity to imagine constructive change and new ideas. How can we survive in an age of constant environmental crises?
“With so many tears I started to wonder whether it is possible to cultivate some marine life in them,” the designer writes.
What is that nature we so desperately worship, seek to love, protect and save? Does it even exist?
While the Meta.Morph festival explored society’s love for nature, Laura Beloff probed into ecophobia and more specifically the disgust we feel towards creatures like ticks and other parasites
In her ongoing show in Milan, Anicka Yi highlights how our associations with smell, along with sight, breed prejudices and anxieties
While weather patterns have been disrupted -sometimes irreversibly- by technologies reliant on extractivism, these same technologies are now hailed as saviours that can protect the planet through weather manipulation
30 Italian and international artists have based their research path on the exchange, dialogue and interaction between knowledge and imagination
The film explores the invisible border that marks our oral cavity and defines the sounds and words we can pronounce. We carry with us these limits, created by our mother-tongue, becoming ourselves a mobile check-point, wherever we are
An event in Marseille offered some thoughts on ideas of sustainability, resilience and the effects of the capitalocene on non-human life
While exploring the “de-extinction” movement, artists and designers are also questioning its motives, highlighting its shortcomings and challenging the promise that we can resurrect the animals and plants that we have driven to extinction
Inspired by medieval bestiaries and observations of our damaged planet, A Bestiary of the Anthropocene is a compilation of hybrid creatures of our time
“The witch may be a technophile — she is, however, squinting skeptically at capitalism in everything that she does, and twisting technologies towards beautifully weird outcomes”
The exhibition invites us to challenge the dominant narratives about growth and progress and explore the radical implications of a speculative economic model based on the energy emitted by the Sun