Henriques is an artist, researcher and tutor at the Digital Craft course and the Living Station, with a vast experience in interdisciplinary practices which includes art/design/engineering/science, with a critical approach to how we have been dealing with the natural environment. At WDKA Henriques is implementing sustainability in the academy curriculum, based on system thinking and making.
Henriques has a background in the combination of art & science, and his interests go from symbiosis of the living with the non-living, communication with other specimens to bio-robotics. He considers nature as an inspiration and a necessary force and knowledge to shift the human-centered development of the technological world.
Henriques believes that education is the main pillar for the development of a sustainable world where we educate ourselves and help students make ecological decisions.
You can find Ivan Henriques at WDKA on Mondays, Tuesdays and the mornings of Wednesdays. You can email him at:
The WATER FIELD LAB – MAAS EDITION elective is the second edition of the Water FieldLab that it took place on specific location in Rotterdam – the waterways around the WdKA: Leuvehaven, Bierhaven, Rederijhaven, Scheepmakershaven, Wijnhaven, Oude Haven, Haringvliet, Boerengat, and Buizengat. The specific context, the experts and stakeholders connected to the Maas are providing specific input. Through experimentation and research on site the aim is to get to know the challenges of this local setting.
Throughout the centuries, due to the activities that happen in and around Rotterdam Port and climate change, the water ecosystems in this environment have changed completely. We have been exploiting the Maas waters for our human-centred economic benefit, resulting in threatening the environment which leads to the lack of biodiversity of fauna and flora.
CHANGING PERSPECTIVES
How can we bring awareness, care to the river, and transform the way we interact with it?
Through the centuries the industrial activities on the Maas River have changed its landscape above and underwater which decreased the biodiversity in this specific ecosystem. The whole river becomes a research environment for participating students that will be introduced to Nature Inclusive Design, zooming in and out, from micro to macro.
Students have worked with small groups and created a campaign to make the Maas become a real entity, in which the tutors have engaged the students to give voice for this endangered ecosystem. Some questions were made for the students to reply during their research and project development:
Can we consider Rotterdam rivers as a being? More-than-humans?
What if we design together and for other species?
Would it be possible to add real value for the river and all the life which is still striving to live there?
Who is the Maas?
The aim of this elective is to give inputs for the students to think and execute ideas of how to integrate nature in the design, shifting the human-centred-design perspective to a direction where the living is present. The students investigated the species that are in the plan for re-integration in this landscape.
Assignment
How can we bring awareness to the Nieuw Maas?
Within this 5-days elective, students were asked to develop:
A ‘floating journal’: each day you will create drawings, photographs, make notes, collages’, recordings etc. We would like you to challenge you to illustrate your experiences, what you have learned and what has brought your attention on that specific day. Please note that this can be anything; NOTHING IS WRONG!
Next to this individual assignment we would like you (and your group) to contribute to an ‘interactive’ map which visualizes your explorations and documentation of the the waterways around the WdKA; Leuvehaven, Bierhaven, Rederijhaven, Scheepmakershaven, Wijnhaven, Oude Haven, Haringvliet, Boerengat and Buizengat.
For the final presentation on Monday 13th, we would like you (and your group) to create a concept/poster/campaign/installation/video etc.) that generates awareness of the biodiversity and/or shows the importance of the water (Nieuw Maas) for the city and its residents.
Program:
Tuesday 7/6:
On the first day, tutors Aldje van Meer, Ivan Henriques and guest artist Mark IJzerman, had a one-hour introduction about the elective for the students. We divided them into smaller groups, and we had four boats to explore the waterways around WDKA in a 5-hour boat trip. While students were collecting water samples, Mark Ijzerman was explaining his new project where he collaborates with sessile, and also experimenting with real time underwater sounds. Students were equipped with diverse cameras, sound recorders and scientific tubes to collect as much data as possible to inspire them in their creation. They have collected different sorts of samples: water, sound, video, photos, organisms, and sediments from above and underwater.
Wednesday 8/6
Researcher and environmental lawyer Jessica den Outer was our second guest, who explained about the rights of nature with focus in the Maas River, and after her presentation she gave a theatrical workshop to be realized with the students in duos: one student play role a human and the other student a non-human in order to create a dialog. In a second moment a collective interactive map, where they have located their samples on a printed map. Afterwards, together with tutor Ivan Henriques and Sandrine D’Haene, students were invited to look at the water samples under the microscope. Many microorganisms were found, that gave them more insights to which direction their final awareness assignment would be.
Thursdays 9/6
The students were working in class developing their assignment with the research they have done so far.
Friday 10/6
Prior to the last elective day, tutor Aldje van Meer met the students at the New Institute, meeting Klaas Kuitenbrouwer and get to know about the new Tuin en Zoöp. After the meeting the students returned to WDKA to continue their assignment.
Monday 13/6
In the last elective day, the students presented their inspiring research and project, with diverse ideas: a video-poem projection, algae beer, a Water Museum re-using an old silo located at Buizengat.
The Water Fieldlab is an educational program from WDKA (initiated by station coordinator Aldje van Meer) that takes place in Rotterdam and abroad to explore different approaches about water. Through experimentation and research on site and dealing with the topic ‘matter’ at hand, students get to know the challenges of this ‘local’ setting. This hybrid and cross-pollinating approach will allow for all current and future stakeholders to connect remotely and reflect on common issues both intimately and globally.
WATER EVERYWHERE!
The Water Fieldlab started its first edition outside of WDKA walls, that happened during the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021 – How to Live Together, hosted by ECC – European Cultural Center, in Venice at Palazzio Michael. From the 3rd until the 16th October 2021, students had lectures of several professionals involved with the water rising issue in Venice to explore shallow waters from the Venetian Lagoon and get inspired by the Giardini exhibition site. The 20 young designers students, from the 3rd year’s Commercial Practice (CP), went to Venice together with tutors Ivan Henriques, Skye Maule-O’Brien, and coordinators from the CP Catelijne van Middelkoop and Charlotte Bik to perform the WATER EVERYWHERE! program.
“‘Water Everywhere’ started out by approaching ‘water as matter’ and questioning ways in which water, as we know it, can be investigated as a source, medium and matter and at the same time, regain meaning through artistic practice. With this meta-level approach and in-depth take on new material ideologies, multiple projects and research spin-offs were developed that illustrate several ways in which water can be re-imagined through experimental investigation methods, visualization, and materialization.”
(CP, Water Everywhere program 2021).
In the final day, students presented their ideas related to water in a 1 min video, expressing new ways of interacting with it, how to create other ways of transportation, communication and how to live under and above the water.
Projects that bring the ‘hard’ sciences into art are increasingly being exhibited in galleries and museums across the world. In a surge of publications on the subject, few focus on regions beyond Europe and the Anglophone world. Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art assembles a new corpus of art-science projects by Latin American artists, ranging from big-budget collaborations with NASA and MIT to homegrown experiments in artists’ kitchens.
While they draw on recent scientific research, these art projects also ‘decolonize’ science. If increasing knowledge of the natural world has often gone hand-in-hand with our objectification and exploitation of it, the artists studied here emphasize the subjectivity and intelligence of other species, staging new forms of collaboration and co-creativity beyond the human. They design technologies that work with organic processes to promote the health of ecosystems, and seek alternatives to the logics of extractivism and monoculture farming that have caused extensive ecological damage in Latin America. They develop do-it-yourself, open-source, commons-based practices for sharing creative and intellectual property. They establish critical dialogues between Western science and indigenous thought, reconnecting a disembedded, abstracted form of knowledge with the cultural, social, spiritual, and ethical spheres of experience from which it has often been excluded.
Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art interrogates how artistic practices may communicate, extend, supplement, and challenge scientific ideas. At the same time, it explores broader questions in the field of art, including the relationship between knowledge, care, and curation; nonhuman agency; art and utility; and changing approaches to participation. It also highlights important contributions by Latin American thinkers to themes of global significance, including the Anthropocene, climate change and environmental justice.
Part of our bioresearch is to investigate the knowledge in New Making Practices within the WdKA. Therefore we made a selection of tutors, workshop instructors, lectors and education staff that explore sustainability, inclusivity, wicked problems within the academy. How do we educate our pioneers in these fields? What do we need and what do they hope for to change within the academy.
Energy is everywhere and is in everything! We, humans, and all the other organisms, use energy to carry out complex tasks in our systems, and most of the energy in the world is processed from the sun, that works as a powerhouse. The plants which are the basis of the food web also use the sun, to transform light energy into chemical energy, an elemental part of the photosynthetic process. Energy is fundamental for our lifestyle as we can’t live without it in our homes and with the electronic equipment attached to us: (smart) watches, mobile phones, bike-lights, computers, etc). In the energy lab the student will have the opportunity to dive in this ever-growing discipline, from the basic to more complex ways of harvesting energy from their surroundings and the environment.
The rise in the demand to power the post-industrial, digital society, made us aware that the conventional natural resources that are used to power these industries are in limited supply. While they do occur naturally, it can take hundreds of thousands of years to replenish the “stores”. While some places in the globe have the initiative to harvest energy from environment-friendly resources, some environmental accidents are happening on the other side of the planet, sometimes combined with the undervaluation of energy harvesting from minework, that are issues which ask awareness and action. To give an example think about these data centers and how much energy does these places expend to keep the ‘cloud’ working (the energy cost for being online).
All the Living Stations are still under construction.
background image: Kristof Kintera, We’ve Got the Power, 2003.
Recently discovered first rock paintings were executed at least 40.000 years ago. They were found in a forest cave in Indonesia, at Borneo Island. They depicted a stunning scene of a hunting party. We humans have been observing, documenting and manipulating nature – considering the ‘nature’ as opposed to humans or human creations, separated from any form of life and phenomenological events – as ‘the other’, trying to understand and categorize every specimen for our knowledge and to our benefit. The botanist and explorer Carl Linnaeus (1707 – 1778) have started the humongous work of life forms’ categorization, in which at this point in 2020, still there are quite a few not discovered yet.
Representations of all the specimens that we know have been documented in diverse kinds of mediums. Nevertheless our relation with the other living creatures has been present since the human kind exists: our food, our clothes, where we live and every single material we use, is a processed by us fragment of ‘nature’. Throughout the development of our technology we have refined systems that operate in many layers of our life, improving tools that we use from the microscopic to astronomical level. Artists, designers, technicians, scientists and engineers have been creating and developing further technological advancements through their work, which reveal questions that are important for the social, political, ecological and other aspects relevant for the evolution of our society. The artistic and designer approach to ‘the others’ brings attention from the materials we use on a daily basis, futuristic speculations, documentations and the awareness that the natural environment calls for.
Within the Covid-19 pandemic that started in 2020 we all understood that the way we have been dealing with the environment is definitively not sustainable. Several initiatives in many scales not only try to research, but also try to illustrate this sustainable future. Bio-designers search for alternatives in a form of new bio-materials, which can lead our society to a different direction in how we ‘deal’ with the non-humans. Bio-artists raise questions about the same subject in the speculation of a future creating metaphors, symbolic actions and sometimes, each time more, experimenting in lab facilities that expanded tremendously in the last two decades all over the world, including DIY facilities and instructions about how to ‘play’ with other organisms at home. Creators with curiosity and/or learned scientific knowledge (or with a minimum of scientific background), have a special function in the bio-art and bio-design disciplines: they have the knowledge acquired and valuable tools that helps in the collaboration with professionals from other disciplines and this knowledge is also added as an artistic tool. This interdisciplinary field where art / design / science becomes a platform for the creation of artifacts and bodies of knowledge, however it is a paradoxical field. For example, if we take the ‘plant’ as a subject, you can approach it in different angles, from its history, color, inter-relations with its surroundings, taste, form, etc. In one of the plant-communication angle, scientist Monica Gagliano (Research Associate Professor in Evolutionary Ecology, & Senior Research Fellow at the Biological Intelligence (BI) Lab, University of Sydney) through scientific methods is establishing a communication with plants (which means the plant has a sort of ‘intelligence’). At the same time the plants are the main food source that we humans and other specimens have, and also becomes a ‘material’ explored further in the bio-design industry. In which role would a bio-artist or bio-designer approach it (the plant)? If the plant is considered an intelligent being, would it have any law protecting it as an intelligent life form? Ethics plays a big role when working with other living organisms, especially with, for example, on a one hand, the availability of CRISPR technology which is the most popular form of the powerful gene-editing technology, purchased easily via a webshop for any customer and on the other hand, the contamination of terrestrial life forms in space (by our activities). The biologist and philosopher and biologist Humberto Maturana affirms that the problem is not the technological advance, but who is making it.
The approach that the emerging and expanding bio-design industry is also offering as a ‘sustainable dream’ is also questionable: are we substituting the ‘materials’ that we use now for other ones? Do we keep the same process and speed? Would a mango-skin textile alternative industry be the replacement for the actual one we have? Would it be in favor of biodiversity while avoiding mono-culture? These are just a few questions that one can think about and take it in consideration when working with, or feel a desire to work with other life forms. The way we have learned to investigate and research is to isolate the ‘object’ from its surroundings. That perhaps is not the most favorable way of studying and ‘working with’ other life forms – and in this case, the models which we use to improve and implement (in) our culture are inspired by nature: we know that ‘things’ in nature work as a network, connected on different levels, not as isolated beings. The ‘object’ case of study is always collected from the natural environment, isolated from the other specimens from the sample in order to be studied. It becomes an object decontextualized from its environment. We can take the human body as a representation of the complexity of an ecosystem: it is composed of algae, bacteria, viruses and human cells. With a better understanding of the surroundings and interplay between species, it could be the vector for the next approach to design a ‘living community’. The timeline of bio-art and bio-design presented in the Bio Research Website, that is continuously growing as an organism, is an attempt to demonstrate the overlap of technological discoveries together with the biological revolution. In this open map we point out relevant individual and collective groups of artists, designers, creators that can be used as guidance for which future we would like to create and share (time-line under construction).
“In mid-January, a group of computer scientists and biologists from the University of Vermont, Tufts, and Harvard announced that they had created an entirely new life form — xenobots, the world’s first living robots. They had harvested skin and cardiac cells from frog embryos, designed and sculpted them to perform particular tasks with the help of an evolutionary algorithm, and then set them free to play. The result— it’s alive! — was a programmable organism…” continue here
“In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”
Charles Darwin
This Bio Research page is a platform, a collection of knowledge linked to Bio Art and Bio Design in the broadest sense. The aim of this website is to educate, inspire and wonder you about our exquisite nature and all its inhabitants. And also to start practicing DIY (do-it-yourself) biology.Throughout the years we build a large network of artists, designers, scientists, physicists in our practice, being an artist and designer. We learned, shared, failed and continued. The content on this page is something which is in our minds for years, finally published to share with a broader public.
At this moment in our society the design of materials has never been so questioned and researched about sustainability and plasticity of the matter in itself. Through the challenges of finding materials that can fit in the human necessities, technologies are created to understand and develop these materials in a nano-scale structure, to be printed and reused, which are definitely an evolution and improvement of human techné in sustainability and the creation of cultural objects that represents our contemporary society.
We discuss the anthropocene, capitalocene and many other titles that represent the human force upon nature (as if we are not part of it) to build our objects, architectures and artefacts, however this action also leads to the destruction of the natural environment. The design cycle that we have planned is not a closed cycle. The world is polluted. Combined with this we also fear the scarcity of the resources that we are used to design. Makers, professionals of different disciplines and experimentalists push the design vector to think about alternatives that can replace the materials that will be out of ‘stock’ and create new ones to be more sustainable and effective.
The way we design still very much ‘human centered’, which means an approach to interactive systems development that aims to make systems usable and useful by focusing on the users (or consumers), their needs and requirements, and by applying human factors, ergonomics, usability knowledge, and techniques. But how does this affect the other species in the world? We use them in such a way that they are able to develop or grow according to our desires, but what is the effect on the long run for our ecosystems? What if the focus of these alternatives were in the core of the design in itself? How can we change the process of material development and our ways of production? What if we design together with the living?
