The World’s Green is Rotting Lime is an ecopoetic audiovisual installation that speculates on future ecologies emerging from plastic pollution. The work follows the discovery of a new parasitic flower morphospecies that has evolved to adapt to the infiltrating amounts of microplastics found in the earth’s layers. The story takes place in the Cacupangan cave system in Pangasinan, the Philippines, a subterranean kilometers-long labyrinth of tunnels and underground rivers. Taking its color from the acidic green plastics of Mountain Dew soda bottles which are commonly upcycled and repurposed across rural provinces, the emergence of the flower reveals a history and future far beyond its isolated habitat.

The work resulted from the artist’s ongoing field research on coastal climate adaptation strategies between the Philippines and the Netherlands, uncovering how crisis adaptation is shaped by local environmental, economic, and cultural conditions. The work is inspired by conversations with writer Nicola Sebastian from artist residency Emerging Islands and geo-engineer Hagg Perez who both have been working in and with the region for years. We discussed the rapidly changing environment that the increasing tourist industry brings, the impact of climate crisis and the adaptation strategies of both human and non-human communities.

The title of the work takes reference to a line in ‘Ruins of a Great House’ by Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott. Set on an old plantation built during the colonial era in the Caribbean, the poem compares the decay of the building to its colonial past. The interacti e scent design of the installation is created using a combination of various ingredients, such as Mountain Dew liquid, dried Rafflesia Arnoldii (corpse flower), dying orchid petals, and lime juice.

Context ‍

Standing high on garden fences or transformed into flowers, lanterns, stars, signs and other forms of decoration, but also a common sight on the shores and in the gutters, the bright plastic uranium color of Mountain Dew bottles has become an integral element of the island green color palette of the Philippines. It’s one of those things you can’t unsee once you’ve paid notice. The adaptive use of the plastic bottles reflects a certain kind of resilience, creativity and resourcefulness that characterises a lot of the island's communities mentality. Although labeled as ‘recyclable’, many plastic bottles such as the ones from Mountain Dew can only be recycled into low grade plastic with limited functional uses or are only accepted at specific recycling facilities, so many ‘recyclable’ plastics simply end up in landfills or the ocean.

And there are more plastic forces at play. Tracing geological traces of geo-engineering across the area, rural areas within the Philippines are rapidly changing as a result of commercial efforts to increase touristic infrastructure. Plastic plates are now a common material used to stabilise the earths layers. The plastic here replaced natural building resources due to trading deals between the Western contractors that guide this process and their plastic suppliers, also from the west. The region needs designated protected areas that prevent corporate and governmental greed to enforce profit over preservation. Hagg proposes promoting geotourism: tourism that sustains or enhances the distinctive geographical character of a place.

What happens when the remnants of our plastic world continue to infiltrate our ecosystems? Merging with rivers, oceans, forests and caves. I started imagining what a radical adaptation would look like. Caves, due to their isolates state, are a perfect hatching place for microclimates. The closed off conditions help species evolve a lot faster and more specific to their environment. We need to look for radical and queer strategies of survival. The work imagines a fictional cave flower that is part of one of the queerest flower species I know of so far: the corpse flower. Native to only a few countries in Southeast Asia – including The Philippines – the large parasitic flower mimics the smell of rotting flesh once it blooms to attract flies for their pollination and reproduction. It's entire survival is dependent on attaching itself to a specific vine it likes. If any species would find a way to survive a plastic infested cave system, I could imagine the corpse flower would find a way. Perhaps the discovery of such a species, in a not-so distant future, might help label its environment as a site for geotourism. Yet, if we get to a future this far, there might not be much left to be protected.

Xenofossils is a series of future artefacts emerged from human interventions on Earth’s ecosystems. The pieces speculate on new fossils, entities and alliances that might unfold in our postnatural future, a fusion of natural and human-made ecosystems beyond a nature-culture dualism. The work is based on the artist’s ongoing research on the use and development of artificial coral reefs, used in the fight against the extinction of this fundamental life form. Visitors have the chance to immerse themselves in the work to get to know the symbiotic and unified voice(s) of the coral. What might they tell us about their experience of the world, which now finds itself between organic and synthetic matter? The works are created in collaboration with ceramist Funda Baysal using ceramic 3D printing as a process of reconstructing natural materials, drawing parallels between print layers and geological layers.

The artificial coral reef takes us on a reflective journey of a possible postnatural future where coral as we know it has become extinct and human-installed artificial reefs are the only entities left to tell the story. The genesis of this artwork came from a 1756 scientific paper of coral illustrations, sparking an interest in this endangered ecosystem that was largely undiscovered at the time it was published. A poetic reflection of ‘more-than-human’ perspectives and technological mediation emanate from these coral ‘ghosts’. As a plural entity, its being carries opposing perspectives on what it means to be alive in the world. The visuals are co-created with AI models speculating on artificial coral structures, and the script is co-created by machine learning model GPT-2, which is trained on texts from an amalgamation of writers and critics, such as Donna J. Haraway, Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton, Jean Baudrillard and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing.

Context

Artificial reefs are one of the many tools used by marine conservationists to restore coral reefs around the globe, they are made from a variety of natural or synthetic materials, and come in an infinite number of shapes and styles. The goal of these artificial reefs is generally to provide a stable growing area for corals, and habitat for fishes and all the other organisms that you would find on a natural reef. Over the years, artificial reefs have a lot of praise from those who have worked with them, but a lot of criticisms from scientists who see it as working on the symptoms and not the problems that face coral reefs.

Jean Baudrillard argues that we take 'maps' of reality television and film as more real than our actual lives. These simulacra or hyperreal copies precede our lives, such that our television friends may seem more 'alive' to us than the real person playing that character. Timothy Morton argues that the world as we know it has already come to an end. Global warming is perhaps the most dramatic example of what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects”—entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place.

What future unfolds from a landscape of dead coral corpses and immortal artifical reefs? What will these artificial reefs eventually become for future generations?

‍

How can we explore kinship with and between more-than-human entities? And how might future ecologies adapt to the climate crisis? Following a set of scenario projections described in the scientific reports of The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2021, we venture into local ecosystems in search of future species that might exist on this planet. Working with worldbuilding techniques, speculative storytelling methods and generative artificial intelligence tools, we will explore the habitats and perspectives of species that have yet to exist. Focusing on the specific conditions of a selected ecosystem and related changing weather conditions, each group will collectively develop a storyline from the perspective of an evolved more-than-human species that has adapted to the projected climate scenario.

Continuing the mythology of the techno-deity Maria, Possible Void is a tapestry depicting a story of creation. The tapestry merges non-extractive scientific imagery through electrical resistivity tomographies and ground-penetrating radar scans across Luzon with fictional scenes of underground discoveries. The structure of the scene mimics the deepening layers of Earth and is inspired by the commonly used narrative structures across illustrated stories, such as Dante’s Inferno and The Garden of Unearthly Delights.

Holoparasite is a performative lecture that speculates on future plastic ecologies. Paraphrasing elements from ‘Plastic Matter’ by Heather Davis and ‘Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination‘ by Ann Laura Stoler, the performer guides the audience through a performative lecture. The narrative touches upon queer kin with plastic, plastic pollution in our bodies and environments, the parasitic quality of the Rafflesia flower and colonial aspects of waste circulations.

The work follows the fictional discovery of a new parasitic flower morphospecies that has evolved to adapt to the infiltrating amounts of microplastics found in the earth’s layers. The story occurs in the Cacupangan cave system in Pangasinan, the Philippines, a subterranean kilometres-long labyrinth of tunnels and underground rivers. Taking its color from the acidic green plastics of Mountain Dew soda bottles which are commonly upcycled and repurposed across rural provinces, the emergence of the flower reveals a history and future far beyond its isolated habitat.

‍

How to Wake Up The Ghosts is an immersive audiovisual installation. An artificial coral reef takes us on a reflective journey of a possible postnatural future where coral as we know it has become extinct and human-installed artificial reefs are the only entities left to tell the story. The genesis of this artwork came from a 1756 scientific paper of coral illustrations, sparking an interest in this endangered ecosystem that was largely undiscovered at the time it was published. A poetic reflection of ‘more-than-human’ perspectives and technological mediation emanate from these coral ‘ghosts’. As a plural entity, its being carries opposing perspectives on what it means to be alive in the world. The visuals are co-created with AI models speculating on artificial coral structures, and the script is co-created by machine learning model GPT-2, which is trained on texts from an amalgamation of writers and critics, such as Donna J. Haraway, Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton, Jean Baudrillard and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. The sculpture – embodying an artificial coral reef – is 3D-printed using wood fibers.

Since the start of global waste trade in the 1970’s, we can track political streams of waste from Western countries towards Southeast Asian countries, where waste accumulates as a result of global export deals and the waste management industry. Involuntarily, marine debris also gathers via gyres, such as The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the world’s largest collection of ocean plastic in the North Pacific Ocean. These waste streams are leaving their marks. Human waste has already seeped into geological layers as we can find plastic materials fused into natural sediments as plastiglomerates. Meanwhile, ecologies are learning to adapt to these new artificial islands floating in the ocean as neopelagic communities are traveling the waters towards new land.
‍
Maria Islands’ is a fictional archipelago made of plastic debris. Here, a techno-deity called Maria cares for the island and brings to life new species that have evolved to adapt to life with plastic waste. The future archipelago is shaped by collective imagination on what a new understanding of sensemaking and co-existence can look like, one that unifies technological, ecological and precolonial spiritual knowledge. How might people co-exist with other species in this new reality? What rituals, cultures and technologies can emerge?

How to Wake Up The Ghosts is an immersive audiovisual installation. An artificial coral reef takes us on a reflective journey of a possible postnatural future where coral as we know it has become extinct and human-installed artificial reefs are the only entities left to tell the story. The genesis of this artwork came from a 1756 scientific paper of coral illustrations, sparking an interest in this endangered ecosystem that was largely undiscovered at the time it was published. A poetic reflection of ‘more-than-human’ perspectives and technological mediation emanate from these coral ‘ghosts’. As a plural entity, its being carries opposing perspectives on what it means to be alive in the world. The visuals are co-created with AI models speculating on artificial coral structures, and the script is co-created by machine learning model GPT-2, which is trained on texts from an amalgamation of writers and critics, such as Donna J. Haraway, Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton, Jean Baudrillard and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. The sculpture – embodying an artificial coral reef – is 3D-printed using wood fibers.

Queer Mercury (17 min) is a visual exploration into the possible utopian impulse embedded in queer collectivity. Queer futurity, as explained by Jose Esteban Munoz, is essentially about the rejection of the ‘here and now’ and an insistence on potentiality for another world. More important than defining an end goal is striving for, and moving towards, more inclusive worlds. The three protagonists reflect on how Dutch ballroom culture pursues this utopia by creating an inclusive space in which all gender identities and expressions are welcome.

From Then to Here proposes a collective quest of sensemaking and imagination: where are we now, and where do we go from here? Departing from Peters’ practice and following a collaborative worldbuilding proces, the artists co-imagine a transcendental space with portals into alternate realities. They are worlds, existing somewhere between the present, the no-longer-conscious, and the not-yet-here. Taking place on different spatial and temporal paths, each world amplifies the others in the space. As the present is not enough, From Then to Here presents divergent imaginations of how futurity can be explored and portrayed. Together, the artists developed a navigation tool prototype for transcending thinking paradigms in the real world. Departing from the realm of Liminal Vision’s practice and combining elements from divination practices such as the tarot and the I Ching with games of incomplete information like poker as well as fantasy role-playing games, the gameboard aimed at guiding visitors through a reflection process linked to the different portals presented in the space. Later, this prototype was developed into a citygame directed by Louisa Teichmann.

‘Rather than evading the (digital) wetlands, The Overkill wishes to design a route through its muddy paths, navigating the Postdigital constellation of the swamps as a playground to hybridise, as material under transformation and a womb for monstrous mutation.’ Earlier this year I was invited as artistic researcher and guest curator to respond to the theme following my own research. Inspired by @ipnevesmarques’s book ‘YWY, Searching for a Character between Future Worlds’, (thanks for the gift @sergirusca 💚) I’m happy to present Amphibious: on the embodiment of fluidity and the swamp as fertile grounds for hybrid identities 🐛🐛 phygital beings navigating the entangled network of multispecies realities presented by the swamp, showing us all sorts of ways to co-exist. They are shapeshifters, gods and deities, monsters and glitches. 🪻 THURSDAY 🪻
(2, 3) Live performance: Trans-species Sonic Narratives by @kiikamor 🍁 FRIDAY 🍁
(4) Live performance: Transpecies Passage by @maneldeaguas 🪷 SATURDAY 🪷
(5) Screening: Tr333 by @babe__lin
(6) Screening: Surge by @frequentlyaskedquestion
(7) Live performance: POTOP, swallow me by @radina_kordova 🫚 SUNDAY 🫚
(1, 8) Screening: ‘Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind’ (1984) by Hayao Miyazaki
(9) Guided game session of Oceans: Evolution (thanks @reinoutscheepers @noorlorist for the try-out 🦑)

Wasteland 2023: Streams of Waste explores the multifaceted challenges posed by waste in today's world, which is driven by capitalism, a growth-focused economy, inequalities, environmental crisis, extractivism and techno-optimism. How can we critically explore and deconstruct the well-established assumptions about waste and its management?Wasteland creates a meeting ground for researchers, artists, and activists to examine how waste-related issues are deeply intertwined with ecological, political, economic, and social realities. This year's theme delves into the dynamic nature of waste as a constantly moving entity. We trace its planetary paths, from creation to disposal, and examine how geopolitical power dynamics shape its impact on local communities, ecosystems, and living beings spanning different temporalities. In times marked by mounting environmental problems and ever-increasing production, it's important to examine the dynamics and effects of pollution and critically reflect on the limits of growth.The festival invites you to gain deeper insight into our reality and begin to imagine possible alternatives. Wasteland brings together a broad range of voices to unravel complex journeys that materials and digital records take before and after being labelled as waste. We explore the connections between the global North and global South, shaped by centuries of colonialism and structured along supply chains and waste flows that uphold existing systems. These systems have ushered us into the Capitalocene, an era characterised by capitalism's significant role in the ongoing ecological crisis.

‍

STATEMENT

While natural ecosystems function in a never-ending cycle of efficiency and reuse, humanity extracts, transforms and discards materials on a planetary scale. Waste resulting from these activities takes a myriad of forms, ranging from mining by-products to spent nuclear fuel, industrial pollution, unwanted clothing, discarded electronic devices and never-to-be-revisited digital files. Today waste constitutes the most abundant and enduring trace of humankind on the planet (Hird, 2015), with pollutants present in the air, soil, water, ice as well as in living organisms all over the world, even in regions where humans have never set foot (Parker, 2020).Since the onset of mass production and increased consumption, waste generation has grown exponentially.

Today affluent countries of the Global North, including the Netherlands, produce great amounts of waste per capita, which only continues to grow. While in the recent years, considerable efforts have been put into improving recycling technologies and capacity, the Netherlands currently constitutes the biggest exporter of plastic waste to South East Asia and a prominent contributor to marine debris (Navarre et al., 2022, Plastic Soup Foundation, 2022). The work of waste management is invisible.  We pay to have waste taken away. Dealing with it is typically regarded as mundane and highly routinised work. However, as Bruno Latour puts it, while “ordinary” practices and institutions, such as those involved in waste management “appear to be absolutely apolitical, ... in their silent, ordinary, fully routinised ways they are perversely, the most important aspects of what we mean by living together ...  (Latour, 2007).

Obvious and invisible flows of waste, moved by millions of hands, ships, waters and wind currents often follow colonial patterns and global power inequalities, which they continue to reproduce.  (Liboiron, 2021).  Although seen as banal, waste constitutes a major global environmental issue, but unlike climate change which receives growing attention, waste flows remain remarkably out of sight, and out of mind (Clark, 2013).The festival sets out to follow their journeys to explore connections and urgencies that bind living beings and ecologies close by and far away.  

The world as it is is a program about sharing different technological, ecological and philosophical lenses through which we can observe, interpret and relate to our surroundings. “The world-as-archipelago hangs not on the universal, but on the particular: it is the world opened up by the polyp that builds a reef, the mushroom that connects a forest. Not the New World, nor the Old World, but the World as it already is, going about its cycles. It is world-building because the world is always building itself. As it is, the archipelago stands up against the Continent, an idea that rewrote the world in its image, and whose steel and plastic monuments are bringing us to our planet’s sixth mass extinction event. The archipelago responds as it always has: by being alive. It is an irrepressible cacophony. It is indiscernible fluidity. It is embodied paradox. It is the world insisting that we follow its lead: to be ecological, decolonising, and co-creative. To be here, together, and alive.” – @nicolaseabass for We, the Archipelago PROGRAM

Shedding the Skin with Feral and Synthetic Creatures’ is a two-day gathering exploring various ways of designing with / for change. Playing with tensions and connections between the feral and the synthetic, the block-chained and the un/bound, the premeditated and the unconscious, this event brings together creative practitioners across various eco-socially focused projects to share their transformational methods, approaches, and reflections. The program presents co-creative experiments with feral care, synthetic sensing, algorithmic mysticism, and ocean literacy offered as a 2-days flow of workshops, talks, sharing circles, films, and an exhibition. The daylight program is accompanied by a convivial nocturnal encounter to celebrate the coming hibernal solstice, inviting all present creatures to become feral, synthetic, and everything in-between. The event is set up as a collaboration between @zipspace.nl and @uroborosfestival , and a continuation of the Uroboros 2022 festival program that took place in Prague earlier this year. This time, the program brings together Rotterdam-based artists and initiatives exploring embodied, technological, and otherwise situated experiencing of eco-social change. PROGRAM
Program
‍
SATURDAY | Shedding the Skin with Feral creatures 12:00 – 12:30
Introduction to Shedding the Skin
.zip and Uroboros 12:30 – 14:30
Feral Gifts, Creatures, Friendships
By Markéta Dolejšová and Jaz Hee-jeong Choi
The Feral Gift 14:30 – 15:30 BREAK 15:30 – 16:30
DataFusion and the Zoöp Project
By Klaas Kuitenbrouwer
Het Nieuwe Instituut 16:30 – 17:30
Scent of Time (hybrid)
By Victor Evink and Emilia Tapprest
Liminal Vision 17:30 – 19:00
A drop is not a river
By Yannik Güldner, Anne Vera Veen and Leon Lapa Pereira
Wasteland NOCTURNAL ENCOUNTERS 19:00 – 00:00
Drinks and music
Line-up: Kaarst, S X M B R A, So... Much.. Emotions… SUNDAY | Shedding the Skin with Synthetic creatures 12:00 – 14:00
Sensing the Synthetic
By Lenka Hámošová
Uroboros Loops 14:00 – 15:30
Poetic AI (online)
By Kwan Suppaiboonsuk and Abdo Hassan
AIxDesign 15:30 – 16:00 BREAK 16:00 – 17:00
Love your Journey, bestie🔥💅
By Derk Over
Queer Arcana 17:00 – 19:00
Blockchain chaos
By Michal Kučerák
Uroboros Program
EXPO and FILM Ongoing
Hybrid Landscapes
With contributions from: Lance Laoyan, Cyanne van den Houten, Ymer Marinus, Martyna Miller, Deborah Morah, Roos Groothuizen, Liminal Vision, The Feral Gift, Bianca Carague, Charlotte Brand, Telemagic and Erik Peters

What do you feel when thinking about the future of artificial intelligence technologies? Curiosity? Hope? Angst? With the current tempo of change, many may experience being lost and confused. Luckily, tomorrow has not happened yet, so we all have a way of influencing it. Join us for the workshop session to imagine how we can achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with AI technologies.

In the ‘Preferable AI Futures’ workshop, we use the futures thinking methodology to imagine positive AI narratives for the days to come. In 2 hours online session, we take you on a healing journey across the spectrum of possible futures to narrow down to those that could bring a hopeful change. In these explorations, we use SDGs as moral guidelines that help us find ideas for AI products and services that could make these forecasts come true. The results of the workshop are prototypes, the hopeful artefacts of the positive change that we want to see in the world. This workshop aims to explore the anxieties and prejudices we have around this technology and, instead of imagining the easy-coming-to-mind dystopia, focus our gaze on preferable AI futures.
‍

The workshop was facilitated at a few occassions:

for AIxDesign in October 2020
for UROBOROS festival in May 2021
for Umanesimo Artificiale in May 2021
for PRIMER conference in June 2021

‍

Following The Ozard of Wiz, Erik and Djuna co-create 'sometime come to someplace' a 3 part installation with trash ideas, complicated love and a gentle space that everyone can participate in. Add your object of trash to the brain, write a love note and wrap it up to fill the big heart or gather and share courage at the soft buttocks… 'If we walk far enough, says Dorothy, we shall sometime come to someplace.'

Create with us! Before or after a performance, every day during the Christmas holidays and come to the festive unveiling on January 8! SOMETIME COME TO SOMEPLACE is free to visit on the stage.

‍

‍