PROJECTS
Collective and collaborative installation to create an Internet for Bacteria network - [2023]
Work in progress
Hyperconnected Bacteria is the first collective action of our speculative undisciplined (art and science) project to generate a symbiosis between the internet and bacteria, which creates other possibilities for the Internet of Bio and Nano Things (IoBNT) beyond the nature-extractivist and exploitative discourse of these developing technologies. The project explores other possible relations among living entities that embrace the uncontrollable nature of the living and leave aside the human interaction between the mentioned entities.
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Based on the project Interconnected Nature - Internet for Bacteria, through an open call and a collaborative effort, Bio-IoT mediating devices will be placed in different soils around the world to allow bacteria to exchange information based on electrical signals through the Internet. It is an interconnection between them, in which humans do not interact, do not extract and do not benefit from the information that is shared. With the idea of one day enabling bacteria to perform horizontal gene transfer through the infrastructure of the Internet of Things, this action seeks to begin building the network that would allow the superorganism of Hyperconnected Bacteria to emerge as a Queer form of life.
| Bio-digital Interfaces | Biocomputational Art | Non-human Digital Networks |
Generative sculptures based on bacteria DNA - [2022-2023]
In collaboration with the microbiology laboratory CorpoGen
Co-created with the creation laboratories' participants
The sculptures of the project Other [tiny] forms of life are generated from the 16S gene of bacteria found during a collective and communitarian research. Using a parametric design program, the digital genetic code obtained through the sequencing of soil samples is converted into a three-dimensional version of the well-known cellular automata: the game of life. The 16S gene, responsible for identifying the bacteria, becomes the seed for this artificial life game to create the sculpture.
Other [tiny] forms of life is an expedition to discover the microbiodiversity that inhabits and shapes three parks and a wetland in Bogotá. The communitarian creation groups were in charge of investigating which bacteria and fungi are present in these public spaces, with microbiology, molecular biology and metagenomics techniques, and with artistic processes such as drawing, photography and generative modeling of sculptures based on the genetic code. Created together with the microbiology and biotechnology laboratory CorpoGen, as an articulation of methodologies to collectively explore, think and create.
| Generative Sculptures | Metagenomics | Bioinformatics |
Interconnected and expanded generative sculptures - [2023]
Work in progress
Altiplano Cyborg es un organismo vivo que surge como creación colectiva, comunitaria e interespecies, cuestionando las relaciones coloniales, violentas y extractivistas contra los territorios y la vida. A partir de la información genética de los microorganismos presentes en los suelos se crean las esculturas generativas usando arcilla de elaboración propia mezclada con una muestra del suelo del que se secuenció el ADN. Esculturas generadas y constituidas material y poéticamente por el microbioma de cada territorio. Las esculturas a su vez se interconectan a través de internet para generar, en realidad aumentada, otros posibles microbiomas al intercambiar los suyos.
| Generative Sculptures | Metagenomics | Expanded Reality |
Blueprints of a near-impossible mediating device - [2022]
Proposed by Natalia Rivera
Master's thesis at the New Media Class of the Berlin University of the Arts
IfB-Phage is a near-impossible mediating device for the symbiogenesis of a digital-bio hybrid organism between bacteria and the internet. A device to create a queer form of life, a hyperconnected bacteria su- perorganism. In the same way Bacteriophages mediate the horizontal gene transfer process among bacterias, the IfB-Phage allows bacterial communities in the soil to perform horizontal gene transfer through the Internet of Things infrastructure. Each Phage is able to sequence the DNA released by bacteria to the environment and transform it into di- gital information to be sent to the cloud, and at the same time retrieve other genes from the cloud to synthesize and release them to the soil, to be available for other bacteria.
| Blueprints | IoBNT | Speculative Device |
Nomadic network for demonstrations - [2021-2022]
Project by Natalia Rivera and Jung Hsu, in co-creation with Mutante and MedienHaus/
Co-created with the participants of the co-creation workshops
Bi0film.net, our open project, praises bacterial resistance in contrast to the reductionist discourse of war. We took one of the Hong Kong movement’s icons, the yellow umbrella, and adapted it based on an open resource created by Andrew McNeil, to be used as a parabolic WiFi antenna. Other than covering, hiding, and protecting the user, Bi0film.net helps them communicate. The umbrella can act as an antenna for a mini server, a repeater or a router, increasing the range, while building a nomadic network that accompanies the demonstration in the streets. In the move, the network connects and disconnects organically. Demonstrators can join the virtual Bi0film to chat, share files and store them. ​We aim at facilitating the connection to alternative networks, and at the same time acknowledge the importance of seeking autonomy in our communication technologies, now when internet censorship is used as a tool of repression on the part of authoritarian regimes.
| Nomadic Network | Hacked Antenna | Bio-inspired Technologies |
Speculative organisms built with recycled materials and electronics - [2019]
MICRO: Speculative micro organisms with illustration and photography with bacteria - [2021]
In collaboration with the microbiology laboratory CorpoGen
Co-created with the creation laboratories' participants
In our laboratory Expanded Bestiary we create small interactive installations with augmented reality that tell the story of new living beings that appear after the destruction of biodiversity and the environment that we humans have unleashed. Stories of cyborg, genetically modified, and mutant organisms. We built the sculptures of these beasts with recycled materials, created their story, experimented with various audiovisual media, programmed electronic interactives, and worked with augmented reality to reveal our findings in the expedition to this new world. In the MICRO version of this laboratory, participants imagined new microbial organisms, based on the possibilities offered by genetic engineering. The whole process was accompanied by scientists, so that participants were introduced to the processes of gene editing, the creation of images with bacteria, and the limitations and possibilities that science proposes for these new living beings.
| Expanded Reality | Bioart | Interconnected Narratives |
THE EXTRAORDINARY AND IMPLAUSIBLE ADVENTURES
OF BIÓFILO PANCLASTA
Traveling fair of interconnected and expanded precinematographic machines - [2019]
Co-produced with Zero en Conducta
Interactive and itinerant docu-fiction that narrates the adventures of Colombian revolutionary Vicente Rojas Lizcano, an early 20th century romantic, who under the pseudonym "Biófilo Panclasta" (Lover of Life, Destroyer of Everything) embarks on a journey around the world to bring anarchism to all corners of the earth and confront the powerful. His adventures, found in his chronicles, are presented through pre-cinematographs and expanded digitally using a mobile application with Augmented Reality and Internet of Things technologies. The experience takes the form of a traveling fair that appropriates everyday spaces, inviting people to collect the expanded content and learn the story behind this Colombian anarchist.
| Expanded Reality | Pre-cinematographs | Interconnected Narratives |
agua pasó por aquí
Interactive light installation - [2019]
Collaboration with Punkt
​The San Francisco River was so copious that the indigenous people called it "Vicachá", which means "The Shining of the Night". Its waters used to flow through what today is the center of Bogotá, now, almost nonexistent, are those of the Las Aguas fountain. At Carrera 7 it hides under the streets and at Calle 6ta and Carrera 13 it joins the San Agustín River, emerging again a few streets ahead as the Canal de Los Comuneros. Both rivers marked the northern and southern limits of colonial Santafé. What would our city be like if life had been built around the rivers? Can the recovery of the city center also be based on the recovery of the rivers and, with them, life and its diversity?
| Interactive Installation | Urban Art |
EN BÚSQUEDA BOGOTÁ
Interconnected Narratives in the city - [2014]
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En Búsqueda Bogotá is an interactive transmedia narrative that takes the city of Bogotá and uses it as a scenario, the readers become participants and go through it looking for clues that allow them to build a science fiction universe created from a futuristic context mixed between the utopian and the dystopian, the real and the imaginary. The experience consists mainly of a mobile web with an interactive e-book, which narrates the futuristic universe and serves as a search tool for participants, various urban interventions as an observation race and an audiovisual piece of science fiction in Bogotá.
| Interconnected Narrative | Urban Art | Mobile Web |
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COLORFUL TALKS
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ECHOES
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LAYERS OF COLORS LAYERS OF HISTORY
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REVIVE THE ARZOBISPO RIVER
Interactive light installations - [2013-2014]
Collaboration with Punto.lab
Punto.Lab is a collective that emerged from the collaboration between "Semillas de Luz" and "Mutante.Lab" in 2013, to create large-scale interactive light installations. Our work began in the context of the I Noche en Blanco Bogotá with the project "Colorful Talks", and later "Revive the Arzobispo river" in 2013, both in the streets of Teusaquillo, and continued in 2014 with the installation "Layers of color, layers of history" in the Museo de la Independencia and with the work "Echoes" in the II Noche en Blanco Bogotá.
| Interactive Installation | Urban Art |