What Drives Us Together
Visitors interact with The Backpack of Wings at Driving the Human (image: Camille Blake).
I almost didn’t make it to Driving the Human: Seven Prototypes for Eco-Social Renewal. As we began to taxi down the runway at London Heathrow, the captain came over the tannoy to inform us that Berlin airport was closed, shut down by climate activists who bravely glued themselves to the runway or cycled rings around security to evade capture. Flights were diverted or grounded, so we sat and waited as the pilots read out updates from Twitter, before inviting us to sit up in the cabin with them – a rarity post 9/11 – to watch the planes landing. As flight delays go, it wasn’t a terrible hassle. All I missed in the end was a drinks reception. But it made me reflect, guiltily, on how I was flying 959km to experience a festival dedicated to mapping the ways humanity can respond to the climate crisis.
After setting fire to 5,004kg of jet fuel (according to the ICAO Carbon Emissions Calculator) I was in the German city for a three-day festival dedicated to the penultimate stage of Driving the Human. A three year-long project connecting artists, designers and technologists with scientists and engineers, Driving the Human is concerned with prototypes, not finished products. Rather than present neatly encapsulated concepts, each project aims to develop a dialogue with the audience that may encourage a perspective shift – sometimes quite literally. Visitors could play a video game as an Arctic ice microbe, connect to an Internet of Animals, and roleplay as an AI-connected fungus.
Driving the Human held its festival at Silent Green in Berlin.
Driving, in this context, doesn’t describe a forward motion – the curators interpret it as an engagement with what propels or motivates people to change their thoughts and actions. This, they argue, is why bringing together a variety of disciplines to bridge the gap between the arts and sciences is key. “The urgency of climate change creates pressure for a certain speed at which we have to find solutions. That is a trap,” says co-curator Vera Sachetti. “It's only by bringing together all the different disciplines, giving them time to have a meaningful exchange, that through those frictions and encounters we can create new insights on how we can get on with our lives on this planet in a way that is not harmful to the environment and [is] respectful of other ecosystems.”
Each project is an ongoing dialogue between the designers and their audience, so holding this open weekend is a vital part of the Driving the Human process. Focusing on prototypes, explains Sachetti, is a direct response to the superficial engagement with science that accompanies design’s tendency to propose technological fixes for social problems. “Solutionism is a very old fashioned idea,” she tells me over breakfast one morning. “So often these days you have designers with these technological projects that validate what they’re doing by saying, ‘I worked with scientists.’ It becomes a justification.” The connections offered by Driving the Human gave designers the time and space to develop working relationships with science institutions (the programme has been led by Germany’s Acatech, Forecast, the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design and ZKM), and allowed them to spend time in their labs or research bases.
Giving designers an audience to interact with their prototypes was a key aim of the festival.
Sachetti’s co-curator Freo Majer, artistic director of international mentorship program Forecast, is positively gleeful about the genre-busting nature of Driving the Human. “This is not normal,” he says. “It doesn’t happen enough. We hope people will copy us.” The opportunity for risk-taking and intellectual freedom over the three-year duration of the project is the result, he stresses, of generous support from Germany’s Ministry for the Environment. A call for submissions was opened in 2020 and more than 1,000 entries were whittled down to 21 concepts presented in Berlin last year. Now, seven selected prototypes are working towards a final presentation in 2023. This festival was an opportunity to have the public in for a test drive.
Much like the enormity of the self-created challenges currently faced by humanity, the seven projects, when taken together, are mind-boggling in their breadth and depth. Held at Silent Green, a former crematorium turned culture centre, six of the seven prototypes were set up in a subterranean hall accessed via an industrial-scale ramp. While prototypes may suggest a level of unfinished-ness, the level of production design was high. The spaces of the old crematorium were lit up like a spaceship, with pink and blue neon lights (another win for the bisexual lighting trend) guiding the way. The key, Sachetti told me, is to work with light and sound teams that specialise in theatre and cinema. It’s a trick more curators could get on board with to create atmospheric micro-worlds for their shows – if they have the budget.
Trons ‘R’ Us by Akwasi Bediako Afrane is made of discarded e-waste from Ghana.
Most imposing in scale was Trons ‘R’ Us, a tower of patched-up technology that thrummed and whirred away like the lovechild of a mech suit and a Heath Robinson illustration. Artist Akwasi Bediako Afrane creates his Trons out of discarded machinery harvested from Ghana’s e-waste dumps (see Shawn Adams’s essay about Agbogbloshie in Disegno #30), bridging the gap that sees the country’s natural resources destructively mined for rare earth minerals, only to have the world’s tech detritus spat back out onto it.
By hacking together discarded gizmos into something interactive, Bediako Afrane wants to reconnect humans to their machines. “I amplify the idea of the prosthesis,” he says, “where these gadgets are seen as extensions of ourselves.” Old car seats placed in a circle with their backs to the Trons were wired up ready for visitors. Witnessing it for the first time on the press tour, the empty Trons ‘R’ Us felt like a foreboding spectre of human wastefulness. But later, with visitors crowding around to sit and use the VR headsets, it seemed fun, if still a touch dystopian to witness everyone hooked up to their own little world. One person even used the opportunity to sit down to have a nap – or perhaps meditate on the human condition.
Human-Bacteria Interfaces images a home filled with microbial sensors.
At the opposite end of the scale, Human-Bacteria Interfaces: An Exploration of the Present and Future of Human-microbial Ecosystems invites viewers to imagine co-living with the microscopic as a form of living ambient technology for the home. While we already cohabit with thousands of microbes, this speculative prototype imagines them as living sensors that could grow in the literal fabric of a house. The interdisciplinary team behind Human-Bacteria Interfaces brings together four practitioners from different disciplines: designer and futurist Anne-Sofie Belling; environmental microbiologist Bea Delgado Corrales; bio textile designer Romy Kaiser; and circular designer Paula Nerlich.
Bringing a lab-based project out into the wild is a challenging prospect, although they did hold workshops to educate visitors on home fermentation. To communicate the concept, the team filled a series of rooms with textile sculptures, light and sound. Visitors passed through a curtain with a close-up of a specimen projected onto it, into a series of rooms filled with a sci-fi egg timer-style bioreactor and funky organic textile shapes that glowed like a festive Louise Bourgeois installation. While this may seem like a far-out vision of future living, communication designer Anthea Oestreicher – who founded the Bio Design Lab as part of Driving the Human at partner institution Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design – is keen to underscore that anyone can have a domestic bioreactor. Are you cohabiting with a lockdown-induced sourdough starter or kombucha SCOBY (Symbiotic Colony of Bacteria and Yeasts)? Then you have a bioreactor. “We normally don’t think about design in the sense of cooking and eating and sharing with people,” says Oestreicher. “It doesn’t have to be strictly materials based.”
A visitor interacts with Do AIs Dream of Climate Crisis.
Asking student designers to work with the living materials stored in the Bio Design Lab, rather than more readily available and inert metals and plastics, forces them to fundamentally rethink their approach, Oestreicher finds. “At the beginning, frustration levels are high,” she explains. “It’s not like going into the metal workshop in the morning and coming out in the evening with a solid prototype.” Working with living materials also butts up against stringent health and safety regulations, especially in Germany. “We had this idea to put a container of kombucha outside the Bio Design Lab to let students get a kombucha on their way past,” she says. “But it didn’t [comply with] hygiene rules.”
Another pandemic lockdown mainstay – the bookclub – was the origin of Iris Xiaoyu Qu’s prototype: Do AIs Dream of Climate Chaos. Qu, a user research experience engineer at Google, feels that conversations around AI and cloud computing are often too removed from the reality of the climate crisis, despite their intimate connections. Her bookclub’s focus on climate justice inspired her to think about an AI that could understand its context in an ecosystem. “Last year I was running a machine algorithm and I could trace this data centre in Northern Virginia that I was calling to download libraries, and another data centre in the Netherlands it was communicating directly with,” explains Qu. “By clicking on a button I was invoking all these energy sources elsewhere.”
Playing as Arctic lifeforms in Monsters and Ghosts’ multiplayer videogame.
Qu’s prototype is a three-screen installation that plays a simulation of an AI-managed ecosystem built in the game system Unity, where monarch butterflies and hedgehogs flutter and scuttle merrily through a digital landscape she based on Northern Virginia. Virginia, now reported to be the data centre capital of the world thanks to its tax incentives, is suffering from deforestation, drinking water pollution, and drought risk due to the water-intensive evaporation cooling system favoured by most data centres. In Qu’s microcosm of nature and data centre, oak trees, lichen, milkweed and an underground network of mycorrhizal fungi exist in a delicate balance as the simulation cycles through day and night, and the seasons. In the middle, a data centre is tended by a solitary digital human. Qu never knows what will happen each time she runs it, but it often produces minor disasters as the weather AI brings on hot and dry summers. “I’m nervous to run for a long time because I never know going to happen,” she says. “Last time I ran it for eight hours it was pretty stable – but there were fires.”
A game engine is also central to Monsters and Ghosts of the Far North, a prototype from research architect Lena Geerts Danau and Forensic Architecture assistant researcher Andra Pop-Jurj. Their project saw them mix cartography with gaming to map the geopolitical and environmental tensions in the Arctic, where a unique ecosystem that evolved under extreme conditions is contested by the five nation states that claim its territories. As the climate warms, the race to control trans-Arctic shipping routes across a once-impassable sea is opening up new avenues for geopolitical tensions and environmental desecration. Monsters and Ghosts is Geerts Danau and Pop-Jurj’s “alternative cartography”, in which players can interact with the arctic ecosystem as six non-human lifeforms, such as an arctic tern, sea microbes, and caribou. These gaming stations became popular hangout spots over the weekends, as visitors took turns to play as different life forms, sprawling out on comfortable beanbag chairs sometimes accompanied by their (non virtual) canine companions.
A hologram of a mythical bird in The Backpack for Wings.
Taking the perspective of the non-human is a recurring theme in Driving the Human. In The Backpack of Wings: Modern Mythology, artists Hyeseon Jeong and Seongmin Yuk investigate the scientific explanations for cross-cultural myths about animals predicting disasters and speculate about the future of the field of animal data to foretell climate change. Their installation was a tech smorgasbord linked by glowing neon cables, featuring two animated short films, an LED billboard, computers loaded with their website for a speculative Internet of Animals, and a dark room where you could see a (real) hologram of a (mythological) bird.
Driving the Human connected Jeong and Yuk with the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour, which runs pioneering studies examining whether, for example, goats can sense impending earthquake eruptions. The Institute also gathers data from GPS transmitters fitted to animals (one of which – the titular backpack – was displayed in the installation) is used to monitor migratory changes that correlate to climate change in a process called biologging. The transmitters also contain sensors that can record air temperature, humid and wind speed – all useful information for monitoring a changing atmosphere. This prompted Jeong and Yuk to imagine a future where animals and humans are increasingly geopolitically entangled by issues over data. “It’s already happening,” Jeong tells me. “The antenna for the animal trackers [pings] to the International Space Station, and Russia has now blocked all the data from coming to Germany."
Altars for assasinated activists in Eliana Otta’s Virtual Sanctuary.
Not all of the prototypes were super high tech. In the Kuppelhalle, Silent Green’s 17m-high cupola, artist Eliana Otta had installed Virtual Sanctuary for Fertilizing Mourning, a piece that was at once site-specific and concerned with grief from half the world away. Set within the whitewashed niches of the old crematorium, feathers and seeds from the Amazon decorated altars housing portraits of indigenous leaders and activists assassinated for protecting the rainforest. Visitors could wander through the space and explore these memorials with Otta’s narration of her time spent in the forest with community members spoken into their ears through headsets. Projected onto the cupola itself was the recording of Otta’s visits taken with a 360-degree camera she wore strapped to her head for the duration. Despite its heavy subject matter, Virtual Sanctuary wasn’t depressing. The portraits of the slain people were realised in a naive style on lo-fi rainbow scratch paper, and much of Otta’s footage featured delighted children playing with her headset. The footage has been turned into virtual tours, accessed through the experimental platform Luto Verde, which allow people to explore the landscape that the memorialised laid down their lives to protect.
One protoype eschewed tech almost entirely in favour of plants. Sedikah Benih is based on sharing plant seeds and traditional horticultural knowledge between communities in Bandung, a city in Western Indonesia. Artist Vincent Rumahloine and environmental activist and community leader Mang Dian brought a greenhouse full of chillis to Driving the Human, inviting visitors to sit and learn about their initiatives bringing diverse groups of residents together over community gardens and meals.
Sharing chillis and stories at Sedikah Benih.
I was lucky enough to bag a spot on the Sabulang Bentor workshop, a collaboration between Sedikah Benih and Soydivision, a performance art collective of Berlin-based Indonesians. Rumahloine and Soydivision’s Ariel Orah collaborated with chefs at local restaurant Mars to create an immersive meal where attendees moved between food stations to collect different courses of Indonesian dishes (with spice levels sadly adapted for Western palettes), eating with a different group of strangers each time. Any social awkwardness quickly evaporated over the delicious dishes and sharing of stories, as Rumahloine and Orah riffed about culinary culture differences and their amusement that tempeh – a struggle meal for those on a tight budget in Indonesia – is wildly expensive and hard to come by in Germany. As we left into the winter night, everyone was handed a stash of chilli peppers to take home.
Coming away from the weekend with my mind overflowing with ideas, the paper baggie stuffed with chillies was grounding. Having smuggled them back through customs (adding biosecurity transgressions to my environmental crimes), the peppers are something tangible and – in the spirit of Sedikah Banh – easily shared. Some have been directly gifted to a hot sauce enthusiast friend, others preserved in small bottles of olive oil that I can gift to guests over the holiday season. I saved the seeds from a handful that I cooked with and hopefully by next spring, when Driving the Future draws to its conclusion, I’ll have some seedlings to plant out.
Words India Block
Photographs Camille Blake
Driving the Human has been initiated by Forecast with cooperation from acatech – National Academy of Science and Engineering, Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design , and ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruh.