Scoby, fungi, metal, Arduino, hooks, and air pumps. An experimental residency exploring biomaterials and up-cycled electronics.
MAXRES — Material Experience Residency by Koyne Program in collaboration with Caracara Collective. Helsinki, Finland.
*Mev-4. (It’s part of the installation When everything works I’m not there). 2024
EN
mev-04 is an installation that breathes. A numerous set of dried reishi mushroom legs supports and suspends a body made of bacterial cellulose membrane dyed with activated charcoal. Elements that seem fragile when isolated become resistant in their collective assembly. Traversed by an air pump that rhythmically switches on and off through a microcontroller, the piece translates a machinic gesture into an organic cadence.
The work is situated on the threshold between the living and the artificial: a technology-assisted organism that reveals the porosity between both spheres. The airflow acts as a minimal vital force, a mechanical breath that activates a matter that does not seek to imitate the human, but to inhale and exhale from its own hybrid condition. Like an autonomous prosthesis, it pulses within a technobiological environment where the invisibility of air becomes visible through its movement.
In resonance with Jane Bennett’s notion of Vibrant Matter, mev-04 proposes that every materiality possesses agency, affecting and being affected. Here, air, synthetic materials and circuits assemble into a shared poetic metabolism. The breathing programmed via Arduino not only grants hints of life to the assemblage, simulating a vital act: it also establishes a direct relationship between zeros and ones and tangible materiality, building bridges between both worlds. mev-04 embodies a non-anthropocentric temporality: a hybrid, machinic, intermittent life that resists the linearity of productive time and opens a space of possibility for alterity.
Within this sensitive ecology —this technopoetics— the electronic and the biological no longer oppose each other: they co-produce, affect, and mutually sustain one another.
