Honorary Mention
A year-long quest on keeping the combustion engine alive in a fossil free future and celebrating the power and agency that DIY culture brings. Why depend on big corporations and their promises to save the world when you can do it yourself? The Slootmotor is the one vehicle that truly delivers an alternative. Instead of relying on high-technology, incomprehensible devices, and resources from all over the world, it is powered by local, sustainable, and environmentally cooling sources. The fuel is harvested with minimal tools and DIY solutions, straight from your neighborhood pond or roadside ditch. Methane gas is many times worse for our environment than CO2, and by capturing these gasses before they enter our atmosphere, it can be used as a simple source of energy.
Through harvesting my own energy to fuel my combustion engine and supply myself with one of my greatest desires, I am bringing awareness to the processes and infrastructures that are sustaining us in the background of our society. Providing a new, more direct understanding of how desire, effort, reward, and impact balance out again. A method of bringing back means and ends together, rather than hiding the means behind complicated technology and slick devices as design has been doing for years. It might take eight hours to fill up the tank in order to drive 20 kilometers, but these 20 kilometers are the best of my life.
All knowledge, drawings, sketches, and videos are available on www.uitsloot.nl, it gives agency over our own desires.
Credits
Gijs Schalkx (NL)
https://gijsschalkx.nl
Biography
Gijs Schalkx (NL) is a designer, artist and indie engineer. The power of DIY is central to his work. By combining speculative strategies with hands-on experimentation, Gijs believes we can become agents of our own desires once more. And that (sometimes ridiculous) actions can become a catalyzing force for people to imagine how the world could be different (in a way they could never have imagined before) and to act upon things as a result.
Jury Statement
Combining speculation, an a priori ridiculous idea, and low-tech DIY practical experimentation, UITSLOOT manages to balance concepts such as desire, effort, reward, and environmental impact, and at the same time invites us to imagine a different future and present. Gijs Schalkx, an artist, designer, and indie engineer (by his own definition), proposes with UITSLOOT an ingenious, cheap, and simple alternative for obtaining energy to power his means of transport, a 50 cc Honda Cub motorbike. His motorbike runs on methane energy generated from the sediment at the bottom of the many waterways in his town. To fill the container with methane gas, the artist has developed a gas collecting station that he activates himself—in a truly performative action—by wading into the water with waders and a long pole with which he releases the methane bubbles from the bottom of the ponds. His exemplary DIY action demonstrates that the naturally generated methane that would reach the atmosphere has a greater effect on the climate than the CO2 produced by the UITSLOOT engine. Gijs’ proposal is not only ingenious but also very successful.