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.

Usually, before the emerge of a hydrothermal vents, an underwater vulcanic eruption takes place. It is simply beautiful to watch:

Habitat : Cave

Hej! We’re researching the olm (proteus anguinus) which is a little water salamander that lives in the darkest zones of the caves. It can be found along the subterranean streams in the karst areas of Adriatic coast in Europe, specifically in southern Slovenia, Croatia, Italy, France. The olm is a really cool being and is used in scientific research as a model for the evolution of highly specialized sensory adaptations in dark water environments. Probably it could give leads on research towards eternal youth, which is specifically associated with their low metabolic rate and cold environments it thrives in.

It’s quite interesting to investigate on these blind aquatic salamanders, which thrive their entire life in darkness and live up to 70 years on an average which tags it to the longest lived amphibian in the world. Did you know it can survive without food for up to a decade? Wow! Wish  we humans could lead such a minimalist lifestyle! We start here, our research to dive into the darkness, to look without sight, without light!

FOREST1 - Boreal Forests and resilience

STEP1: RESEARCH

Reading, analysing, processing about Boreal Forests as systems
How do boreal forests collect, manage water?
How can boreal forests can teach us to make cities resilient to floods?



Boreal forests constitue the Earth's largest carbon reservoir in soil below ground and in the permafrost, equal to the amount above ground in tropical forests. The 16,6 million of km² of boreal forests constitute 15% of the Earth's land surface and 1/3 of the Earth's forest cover, in a circumpolar band throughout the northern hemisphere through Russia, northern Europe, Canada, and Alaska. They countain more surface freshwater than any other biome. They are caracterised by long, cold winters, and short, dry and warm summers ; and are composed by both evergreen and deciduous trees. Wetlands and bogs are common, with soils being laden with peat and permafrost.
According to the IPCC, global waming is felt twice stronger in these forests, leading to a shift in ecosystems. Evergreen trees being sensitive to warm climates, they slowly leave space for more deciduous trees, that are expected to be 15% more present by the end of the century.

Boreal forests are very efficient ecosystems in term of water management, that lead to store great quantities of carbon, and be resilient ecosystems to wildfires, rainfall, floods.

With climate change, many cities will have to deal with greater rainfall and floods.

How can boreal forests teach us to make cities resilient to floods?




Draft poster of the research



Boreal forests work as resilient ecosystems where biodiversity is rich. Different strategies work together to thrive despite the harsh environment.


SEASONAL STRATEGIES
Evergreen and deciduous trees have different strategies. The latter absorb less than 1% of their volume in water in summer, while in winter, they have a higher transpiration and lower absorption by soil. Deciduous trees can absorb up to 25% of water, and have immediate water transpiration after saturation ; while in winter, when leaves fall, they have a low transpiration and high absorption by soil, leaving to a lower year-round transpiration.
These two families participate in rainfall, through transpiration. Less trees would induce a decline in transpiration, and thus a weakening of rainfall.


LAYERS
Boreal forests have a system of layers that work together. For example during periods of rain, canopies intercept up to 70% of the rainwater, which then evaporates directly from them. The precipitation that falls then either infiltrates the gronud, flows on the surface, or evaporates. This works along with the slow metabolism of the whole ecosystem that benefits from limited daylight and thus requires less water and nutrients.


WETLANDS
Different kinds of wetlands, organic wetlands and mineral wetlands, work together, enriching boreal forests. Organic wetlands (bogs and fens), are made of nutrient poor soil covered with at least 40 centimeters of peat, making the decomposition process slow, leading to a slow release of carbon. They are carbon sinks. Mineral wetlands (swamps, marshes, open water) have nutrient rich soils, and are covered by less than 40 centimeters of peat. They act as sponges that absorb water and release it during drought ; and filter, store and transport large amounts of water.


SAFE NETWORK
Trees of the same species work together : they fuse roots to share water and nutrients, also allowing for a free flow of carbon between trees thanks to mycorrhiza fungi that grow between roots. They are saving points in case of catastrophe such as wildfires which destroy the forest above soil. The trees can later grow from these roots and fungi that saved nutrients.


MANAGING ENVIRONMENT
Different species of lichen and moss coexist and work together in boreal forests, however peat moss (sphagnum) is the most present one, along with feather moss. They both constitute 95% of the ground cover. It can hold up to 20 times its dry weight in water, and forms a 50 centimeters thick mat. It grows from broken pieces of bigger plants, doesn't have a developed root system, and doesn't need light. It adapts to its environment by creating its own habitat, acidifying its surroundings.
Feather moss filters waters, regulates the nutrient uptake and minimises nutrient losses.


PEAT MOSS
Peat moss has particular leaves that expands to collect the most water possible instantly. Their rhizoids are also particularly effective to absorb water, the attraction between the rhizoids and the water molecules being stronger than being the water molecules themselves.


All these are part of the global complex system that boreal forests are, and help it thrive in a harsh climate.




What can we learn from boreal forests to make cities more resilient to heavier rainfall and floods in the future?

Group Desert _ Dung Beetle

Analyzing the desert, in our case focused on the hot desert, there is an efficient animal learned how to deal with this extreme dry environment by using dung from other animals, the dung beetle.
Dung beetles are an essential part of the ecosystem by proceeding the dung by tunneling, burying, and fragmenting it. This whole process not only quickly and efficiently removes dung from the surface, it brings all those important nutrients back down into the soil, making the soil fertile and our pastures productive. 

In its tunnels systems they are also protected from the extreme heat.

To transport the dung with balls the dung beetle is one of the strongest animals in comparison to its own body size. It can lift up 250 times their own weight, they are extreme strong force generator to move their dung bowls.

Also an interesting aspect is how the society of dung beetle lives, they have a reproduction system including to implement the eggs into the dung balls and brought into the end of the tunnel system. They are an efficient society by sharing the taking care part of the offspring.

Amazonian Water Lily blossoming in the dark - video

Marine group focusing on the GIANT TUBE WORM

We decided on having a closer look at the one of the mysterious creatures living deep down below the surface of the high seas: the Giant Tube Worm. At an average depth of around 2000 m below sea level, it survives without sunlight and is only found in the highly toxic environment of hydrothermal vents*, protected by the tube it builds around itself and supported by bacteria living inside of its body. These bacteria feed on the chemicals from the vent fluids and produce sugar which they supply to its host. This way, the Giant Tube Worm can not only stand the extrem conditions that surround but actaully depends on them.























* Hydrothermal vents are the result of vulcanic activity. Cold seawater enters cracks in the seafloor and is heated by hot magma. The vent is formed when the hot fluids reemerge to the sea.