Credit: DISNOVATION.ORG

LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEM (Ecosystem Services Estimation Experiment)

DISNOVATION.ORG (Maria Roszkowska, Nicolas Maigret & Baruch Gottlieb)

Nomination

http://disnovation.org/lss.php

This artistic provocation seeks to estimate the orders of magnitude of critical ecosystem services fundamental to all planetary life processes. It is common to describe our relationships with society, the world, and the biosphere with metaphors from economics, which has specific understandings of value. Today’s prevailing economics conventions are unable to recognize intrinsic value of the ecosystems on which all life depends. In cultures overdetermined by concepts from economics, we are left without adequate discursive instruments to socially or politically address the importance of ecosystem contributions to life on Earth.
This experiment consists of 1 square meter of wheat, cultivated in a closed environment. Critical inputs such as water, light, heat, and nutrients are measured, monitored, and displayed for the public. This procedure makes palpable the immense scale of ecosystem contributions, and provides a speculative reference for a reckoning of the undervalued and over-exploited “work of the biosphere.”

Credits

Conception: DISNOVATION.ORG (Maria Roszkowska, Nicolas Maigret & Baruch Gottlieb)
Web developer: Jerome Saint-Clair
Hardware developers: Vivien Roussel, Thomas Demmer
Production: iMAL | Coproduction: Biennale Chroniques

Production: iMAL Brussels
Coproduction: Biennale Chroniques, Aix-en-Provence
With support from: Production Intérieure Brute, ArTeC Paris, Le Labomedia Orléans, CNC (Dicréam), University of California Irvine

https://vimeo.com/544776068
https://www.flickr.com/photos/n1c0la5ma1gr3t/albums/72157717940705013

Biographies

DISNOVATION.ORG is a research collective set up in Paris in 2012, whose core members include Maria Roszkowska, Nicolas Maigret, and Baruch Gottlieb. They work at the interface between contemporary art, research and hacking, and compose tailor-made teams for each investigation together with academics, activists, engineers, and designers. More specifically their recent artistic provocations seek to empower Post Growth imaginaries and practices by challenging the widespread faith that “economic growth” and “technological fixes” will solve the ecosystemic disruptions they produced in the first place.