Piece Title: Holobiont Urbanism
Date: May 2016
Show Title: TIME-SPACE-EXISTENCE
Venue: Palazzo Mora // 2016 Venice Biennale Collateral Events
Team: This project is led by Kevin Slavin's group Playful Systems at the MIT Media Lab. Creative, scientific, development and production collaboration with: Ben Berman, Jun Fujiwara, Dr. Elizabeth Henaff, Regina Flores Mir, Dr. Chris Mason, Devora Najjar, Miguel Perez, Tri-Lox, Chris Woebken, with contributions from Timo Arnall and Jack Schulze and local beekeepers in Brooklyn, Sydney, Venice, and Tokyo.
Additional Contributions: Made possible by the generous support of the Mori Building Corporation, Tokyo.
Summary: Our collaboration with bees as “citizen scientists” to reveal microbial signatures in cities has been more than a scientific method. It is also a provocation to see our cities from different scales: we are seeking to engage with them as complex and adaptive biological superstructures.
More information about the background of the project and related publication.
Description: The scientific term “holobiont” reframes plants and animals as more than isolated individuals. Instead, they are symbiotic networks consisting of the interactions between hosts and their associated microorganisms. This could include bacteria in the gut, or in the soil.
Cities -- from Brooklyn to Sydney to Venice to Tokyo -- are no different. They are built for humans, cars and boats, but they host trillions of other invisible residents whose lives are intertwined with our own. To understand which microbiological residents live where, we gathered samples from each location. We turned to citizen scientists to gather this material for us: the honeybees of urban beehives.
As bees traverse the city, they come into contact with a vast array of microbiological material which ends up as “bee debris” in the collection tray at the bottom of the hive. Gathering this material from the tray, we’ve run it through advanced metagenomic sequencing to identify local microorganisms, and used the data to generate visualizations.
The intentions of the work are not only to produce novel findings, but to fuel a novel imagination for the roles of humans, animals, and microbes in the cities we all share.
Materials: live bees and their hive, live edge wood, dynamic data visualizations of microbial taxonomy, glass loupe, thermal imagery
Installation View
Detail View
Process
