Orientate in the dark - An exploration of senses

The first week of bio-mimicry research gave us an insight of this fascinating species, the Olm. Our understanding of how its sensory receptors help to thrive its entire life in the darkest cave zone streamlined our thoughts towards this artistic exploration of senses!

Why do we consider the sense of sight most superior, while the other senses have an equal hand in our day to day life? How can we enhance our other senses? Would you like to awaken the other senses and experience how it is to orientate in the dark? The extraordinary sensory adaptations of the Olm help it to navigate in the dark. The exploration of how we humans could understand the surroundings in a similar way inspired us to formulate this blind game! 

This card game is designed to play among a group of up to 18 people, where the players are blindfolded and are not allowed to talk!The journey through four different phases of the game is therapeutic and helps to activate other senses.

Task 1: Touch

Task 2: Listen

Task 3: Imagine

Task 4: Taste

Why this game?

• The game helps to activate your sense of touch and communicate without speech. It allows you to step forward, slowly yet confidently without the help of sight.
• It allows you to be observant, paying attention to the minute details we usually neglect. Listen and navigate together. Outbreak your imagination, which is usually contaminated and restricted by the sense of sight!
• You are independent, strong and courageous, yet you think of the others around you, your community, the society and the planet!
• This allows for different perceptions  of smell, and how unique the mental image of an individual formed, contradicting the monotonous visuals through sight.
• Eventually this game creates relaxation for the over utilized eyes and expands creativity which results in a stress free efficient lifestyle!

The secret life of Water in Boreal Forests - Experimental performance

As a result of biomimicry study from the first week we decided to continue to work with the hydrological process in our boreal forests. Booklet of the Water Life shows the cycle of water in the forests. Marks the differences in coniferous and deciduous forests during different seasons. How the trees absorb, transpire, evaporate, and divert the water from the canopy down to the earth.



PROCESS
Precipitation
Canopy
Interception by trees
Absorption
Transpiration
Evaporation
Soil absorption
Roots absorption
Soil distribution

SUMMER

WINTER

BEING WATER

The result of a choreography should point out the diversity and differences in all those processes. In a way that students can understand the complexity of hydrological cycle

A game to celebrate the dung beetleand to celebrate what a magni cent in- sect it is. This beetle is such an underva- lued little creature, and it plays a crucial part in the ecosystem. The target for the little beetle itself is merely to feed itself on the nutrients of the dung that animals leave behind them. The beetle shares its meal unwillingly and to keep the dung to itself it hides it underground.

But by this act the dung beetle pro- vides the ecosystem and with a great service. Removing the dung from abo- ve ground to the underground makes the soil structure better and provides the earth with nutrients, making the soil prosperous for plants. The remo- val of dung keeps pests and vermin that nourish in the dung away. It also helps plants to spread by burial of the seeds that come out with the dung.

The American Institute of Biologi- cal Sciences estimates that the work that this little beetle provides just for the cattle business of America is worth 380 million dollars. Despite this important and costly work that the dung beetle provides nature and us humans with, we by our overuse of pesticides and anthelmintic constitute a major threat for their existence.

By inventing this game, we want to shed light on the important role that the dung beetle is playing for the ecosystem and we hope that the beetle in the future can get the respect and treatment that it deserves.

HAVE FUN AND GOOD LUCK!

Interpretative Embodiment Performance

Hello all,

This week we are back working with the research we did about the Amazonian Lily two weeks ago; the discoveries we made about this incredibly interesting, (and might we say, quite poetic) water plant that was the foundation for our biomimicry design.

 The theme we are working around is "Artistic Research Approach", focusing especially on how embodyment and performance can act as a form of expression to reach deeper understanding of the knowledge we have extracted from our species. It is a completely new form of working for us, which is both exciting and challenging, and truly stimulates us to explore what it means to "know" something.

This becomes very evident as we are planning our performance. It is so interesting to see how subjective knowledge can be, and the different perspectives each of us have in the group, despite having worked around the same topic.

Since the presentation of the project is meant to hold an element of surprise, we will not give further explanations of what our performance will contain... but here are some photos that might give hints on our process.

Stay tuned!

BEETLE CITY_DESERT

BEETLE CITY

How to survive in the desert?

Problems like big temperature differences between day and night, water supply, energy production and food production would be the biggest challenges for a society in the desert. Studying dung beetles in
different perspectives, from micro to macro concept for a city underneath the ground was designed. The different types of the beetle, like tunnlers, dwellers and rollers were applied to human scale and the structure under the ground.

Rainforest group - The floating community

The floating lily community - Process

This week has been very interesting. We chose to work with the Amazon water lily and focus on the reality of seasonal flooding and the challenges that presents to local communities.

The lily plant holds many interesting solutions, one of them being the intelligent management of material to create a stable structure. The leaf of the plant is actually stable enough to hold a human being standing on top of it without collapsing.

Inspired by this, we looked at the structure of the lily leaf's vein structure to understand how this worked. It shows an amazing handling of loads through a 360 degree branching system that divide the force equally in many parts of the surface, thereby making it stable.

We also looked at the structuring of the plant leaves, and got inspired by the centralized anchor and the surrounding branches of leaves connecting to it.

From this, we got the idea to recreate the leaf in a scale that could construct small communities. The leaf structure in itself would be used to create adaptability to flooding, and be stable horizontally, but able to move vertically with the fluctuating surface.

Here are some of our sketches from learning about the plant's biology and system!

Habitat: Cave

A metaphorical transformation of efficient living of Olm to a healthy sustained human behavior by activating senses in different urban context through the journey of darkness in the form of a Cave Therapy!

FOREST2 - Final Posters

Capturing, filtering, storing, distributing rainfall in Malmö.

Final posters: The Giant Tube Worm and Tube-o-polis

...how to sustain an ecosystem in a highly toxic environment.