I enjoy the idea of working with nature for other reasons than necessity and survival, a perspective that I pushed at the ENERGY conference in Riga and something that the people from Ask Nature emphasized at the the Bioinspired Forum in Stockholm, which I attended yesterday. We need to thrive and not just survive and curiosity and biophilia are great drivers. As Sheikh Yamani, former OPEC oil minister said: “The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones”.

The topic of this Bioinspired Forum was Biomimetics and Fibers. Most of the speakers were affiliated with research institutes and educational institutions and elaborated on materials and technologies inspired by nature, such as the salt and paper battery, cellulose nano papers and superhydrophobic surfaces, but there were also a bunch of designers and architects present and one of the goals of the event was to connect all of these people.

A general consensus was that exciting and promising as bio-inspired innovations might be they are pretty useless as long as they stay in the research labs. Scientist need to get together with people who can create tangible examples of what these innovations can be used for if they want to communicate them to a wider audiences and they need to transition from market push to market pull.

Durapulp, a paper pulp material, was brought up as as an example of how this can work. The development of Durapulp was encouraged by the design trio Claesson Koivisto Rune who came to Södra Pulp Labs requesting an eggbox like material that could withstand water and in the end being communicated in the form of a biodegradable chair for kids the material gained massive publicity.

Last weekend I made a one day visit to RIXC’s ENERGY festival in Riga where I listened to about nine hours of presentations, ran through a pretty extensive exhibition with energy related art works and gave a presentation. It was a complete overload and I’m still catching up on all the new and unfamiliar stuff, but I’m a previous fan of Michel de Broin and was really happy to find some of his videos there, as well as a video of the “Solar Do-Nothing Machine” by Charles and Ray Eams.

I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe. -Buckminster Fuller (I Seem To Be a Verb)

Stem Sounds and Bush-scopes are gadgets for exploring nature. The Bush-scopes lets you sample video far into the bushes, up high in the trees and deep down into cavities. With Stem Sounds you can listen to and record the sound of sap moving up in tree stems in the spring and creatures gnawing away behind the bark.

But what’s the point of doing this? Can we, and should we, use art and design to make it more attractive to interact with nature, and is it rational to use technology to mediate nature? That’s roughly what I will talk about when I present these projects at the ENERGY festival in Riga on October 10.

Stem Sounds and Bush-scopes have both been developed under the Strange Eden umbrella at the Interactive Institute’s Art & Technology Department. Photographs taken at GATE – The Greenland Park Art & Technology Event in Kista, Stockholm.

Physical representation of the “Winfile.exe” icon in Windows 3.x (at the office).

Ola Pehrson appears like a fly on the wall, observing and reflecting on the everyday, capturing his present with humor, warmth and razor-sharp insight…

Färgfabriken, Stockholm 2009-09-02 – 2009-11-08

from the video set in Årstaskogen…

from the construction at Milliken Gallery…

The Turing test plays an integral part in Intelligence, I found it oddly coincidental that a week after the opening Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for the way in which Turing was treated after the war.

“Turing’s homosexuality, which was illegal and considered to be a mental illness during his lifetime, resulted in a criminal prosecution in 1952. He accepted treatment with female hormones as an alternative to going to prison … On 8 June 1954, Turing’s cleaner found him dead … the cause of death was cyanide poisoning. When his body was discovered an apple lay half-eaten beside his bed … Turing’s mother strenuously argued that the ingestion was accidental, due to his careless storage of laboratory chemicals. Biographer Andrew Hodges suggests that Turing may have killed himself in an ambiguous way quite deliberately, to give his mother some plausible deniability. Others suggest that Turing was re-enacting a scene from Snow White, his favourite fairy tale” – Wikipedia