Updating the defining poster
The updated poster shows the same layout as the original one (designed at the very start of the term), with the same identical categories: Eco2 (Ecology and Economy), AI and Music. This version, however, relates one experiment to each of the topics.
The updated 'My Fight' poster after term one.
Eco2
Spirulina, a blue-green algae that yields high amounts of protein, is remarkably easy to cultivate. This project aims at building an open source sensor suite to make Spirulina farming more accessible at home.
Identifying the key technical and economic challenges of enabling home-based Spirulina farming for mainstream adoption was the primer for this project. In order to be ‘the food of the future’, it has to be accessible to grow for everyone, with knowledge about it distributed in an open manner. This is why a truly open, libre and free technical setup, which could be produced in FabLabs anywhere and which could be adopted for various sizes and climates is one of the most promising approaches for a decentralized solution. This is the economic reasoning behind starting the project. In the same sense, it’s an ecological one, too: By raising attention to the potentials of Spirulina farming and its product’s consumption, we have the chance to also advocate for a far less resource-intensive, plant based alternative to animal products.
AI
How can we use AI as a tool to give other species a voice? Philosofern is an experiment into this topic framed as a dinner conversation with a fern, aided by Open AI’s GPT-3 language generation network.
This was the first experiment of this term with a distinct prototype investigating inter-species collaboration, more specifically a voice-based human-plant-interaction. For me it embodied many challenges I was planning to tackle. It used a Telegram Bot to enable a chat conversation and dealt with giving non-human entities a voice. But most importantly, it allowed me to explore the possible potentials and limitations of OpenAI’s GPT-3 natural language generation network.
Music
Inter-species collaboration should feel intuitive and engaging, thus music is the perfect language to speak. In this experiment, we used plants to engage in a musical jam session conducted in Parc de la Ciutadella.
For the final intervention we took music as a topic and medium and put it in the center of an experiment into collaboration between humans and plants. Collaborating with two fellow musicians, we brought enough to the table to make the regulating collaborative jam session feel natural and organic. It highlighted how effortless and natural it feels for people to touch and empathize with plants, only that there needs to be a formal justification to do it. This for me was the natural progression of experimenting within term one, as it combined many topics to become a successful intervention: Electronics, fabrication, design presentation, plants and finally – music.