Sandrine D’Haene

INSTRUCTOR AT THE LIVING STATION LAB 

She will soon be replaced in March.

If you have burning questions about the Living Station Lab, you want to discuss urgently your bio-project or want to give some insights, you are very welcome to contact her now at s.e.d.haene@gmail.com. You can follow her on Instagram.

Here are station skills that will resume regularly. 

Sandrine D’Haene has a scientific background and long lab experience.

She studied biochemistry in Lille (North of France) and after working in the R&D of the big food industry (Cargill, Vilvoorde Belgium), she joined the Biophysics research group at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam that focused on studying the fast events in photosynthesis with ultrafast lasers. Trying to understand the secret of Nature has motivated her to get a Ph.D. in Biophysics. Her research focused on purple and cyanobacteria that are at the origin of (photosynthetic) life (thesis entitled “Regulation of Light Energy in Photosynthetic Bacteria”).  

She later worked on several artscience projects at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VUA) artscience lab, created in 2017 by Raoul Frese and the artist Ivan Henriques, a platform that merges scientific research with art and design. She took part in the Symbiotic Machines for Space Exploration (SymSE) program with Ivan Henriques, the Bio Arts and Design award “CMD, experiments in Bio-Algorithmic-Politics” with Michael Sedbon, “l’Origine du Monde” STARTS residency with Annemarie Maes, Kombutex with Samira Boon Studio, Studiotopia with the duo Evelina Domnitch – Dmitry Gelfand and Christiaan Zwanikken, the Smart Hybrid Forms program with Špela Petrič and Christiaan Zwanikken.  

Kas Houthuijs

Kas Houthuijs is a tutor of the Living Station. Kas will be working on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and he will further develop the curriculum to build a sustainable future for all living forms.  

Kas Houthuijs has a background in neurobiology and biomedical sciences, but his real interest is in the interdisciplinary field of art and ecology. Real innovation happens where the visions of different fields can question and enhance each other.  

He also works for the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht, where he teaches BioLab for Designers as a course and at the Waag Future Lab in Amsterdam, where he teaches the BioHack Academy. 

He believes that artists and designers have great responsibility in the sustainability transition, and he tries to aid this goal through education.

If you are interested in knowing more, you want to discuss your bio-project or want to give some insights, you are very welcome to contact him.

k.t.houthuijs@hr.nl

bio

Artists and designers shine new perspectives on utilizing and getting inspired by microorganisms, as tiny factories that operate as building blocks in our society. Bio-designers search for alternatives in the form of new bio-materials and implement them on a i.e. industry scale, which can lead our society to a different direction in how we ‘deal’ with other specimens. Technology and the arts today evolve at great speed. The major crises that are happening in this world led these fields to have new ways to think and engage in different disciplines. These professionals created new links between them. Bio-artists raise questions about the same subject in new narratives, speculation of a future with 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 and instructions about how to ‘play’ with other organisms at home.

The field where art, design and science meet will become a platform for the creation of artefacts and bodies of knowledge, however, it is a paradoxical field. If we take the ‘plant’ as a subject, you can approach it from different angles, from its history, color, inter-relations with its surroundings, taste, form, etc. In one of the plant-communication angles, scientist Monica Gagliano from University of Sydney 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 become 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?

The course will also investigate what kind of approach will be taken as bio-artist or designer in this field where organisms play different roles in our ecosystem, this will lead to the discussion of ethics: would the organisms have any law protecting their intelligent life form? All of these questions will lead to shape new ways of working and what it takes to work and collaborate with other life forms. Where we normally ‘isolate’ species from our surroundings, we may have to think about how we can work as a network, connected on different levels instead of isolated beings. With a better understanding of the surroundings and interplays between species, it could be the vector for the next approach to design a ‘living community’.

All the Living Stations are recent and under constant development.

About Living Stations

What are the Living Stations?
The Living Stations is the research platform connected to the stations within the Willem de Kooning Academy. Within the Living Stations we are questioning material practice within arts and design and investigate how to make and collaborate with ‘living’ and biological systems.

The idea of the living stations builds on the concept of the stations.
Stations are learning environments in which facilities and technologies are collected so that students are able to carry out there work and materialize their ideas. In addition, it is also a learning environment where research through making takes place.

Where the stations depart from certain technology, the living stations depart from a certain context and issue. The living stations want to be dynamic learning environments were students get introduced in certain matter, materials and technologies and are at the same challenged to respond to major societal issues.
The goal is to translate global complex issues – like ecological crisises – into tangible local (educational) challenges.

The living stations do not remain in the building of the WdKA but wants to step outside.
Collaboration is sought with other disciplines; colleagues from the Rotterdam School of Applied Sciences, scientist, local experts and entrepeneurs. We’ll seek for sustainable relations and collaborations through working together on local projects which matter.

The Living Stations are developing the following projects and programs;
Rooftop garden
The rooftop garden is initiated by the SPIN collective (students WdKA). The rooftop garden aims to be a student run space and become a place for; gardening, a place for well being, a place which supports eco-literacy and education which addresses climate change .

Trashbunker
In collaboration with municipal companies and communities like BlueCity and colleagues from the Rotterdam School of Applied Sciences we would like to build upon the student initiative the trash bunker. The trash bunker is a place were students can exchange resources and where materials can be re-used. The trashbunker is run by student assistents.

The LivingLab
We are setting up an elementary, basic biolab where students get introduced into collaborating with living systems and get aquinted with topics regarding biophilic and regenerative design.
The plan is to collaborate closely with science partners, colleagues from the Rotterdam School of Applied Sciences and Bluecitylab. The Living Lab will open in September 2022

Fieldlabs
Fieldlabs – are temporary labs at different locations in the city of Rotterdam where we focus on very specific topics that matter; for example; water, air, energy, food, wind and waste streams

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Why Living Stations?
The underlying ideas of the living stations were further developed by a new series of theoretical concepts; think of the so-called ‘Material Turn’ and the ideas surrounding post-humanism.

Within the The material turn the traditional divide between idea and matter is questioned and rejected as this has been established by Plato and Descartes. It also means to question and reject the divide between culture and nature.
And go towards new ecologies and forming new practices in thinking through matter and through material conditions.

So far, everything we make has been for the benefit of us humans. What does it mean to make when you don’t put people at the center of this process. In our (natural) human centered thinking, as artist and designers, we are depending on the technical appropriation of the material world. This appropriation is becoming more and more problematic and complex when things, algorithms, nature, animals; everything beside humans claim agency.

Current debates about climate change and decolonization have made us more aware of how everything is interconnected. This also means that we know that the technologies and/or materials we use in our practice do not stand alone. Technology is not neutral. This makes it necessary for us to take responsibility in education to think critically about which materials and technologies we use.

Technology is not neutral. We’re inside of what we make, and it’s inside of us.
We’re living in a world of connections – and it matters which ones get made and unmade.
Donna J. Haraway

How do we educate ourselves and how can you help students make better ecological decisions?
The urgency lies for us, in the fact that we not only want want to think or talk about this issues – but want to build on a perspective for action.
Through research and practice we build on several (educational) projects and programs which aim to help our students to come up with new perspectives – instead of becoming paralyzed.
An important question for us is to learn how to investigate, materialize and visualize our ideas without exploiting others and the world. Within the living stations we want to explore what it means to make when you don’t put people at the center of this process.

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Who are involved in the Living Stations?

The Research Group is a dynamic platform and collective within WdKA that research and questions 21st century making practices led by Aldje van Meer, in collaboration with Emma van der Leest, Ivan Henriques, Nadine Möllenkamp and Brigit Lichtenegger. Together they develop the living station in close collaboration with tutors, instructors and students from the Willem de Kooning Academy and with their professional network. 

Aldje van Meer currently works as senior lecturer at the Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences. In this position she is teaching, researching and exploring technical innovations relevant for artistic professions. She advises, inspires and implements the use of technology in the curricula of the Willem de Kooning Academy. Within the stations she is coordinating professional development and supervising research (through making).

Emma van der Leest is graduated in 2015 with a bachelor’s degree (honours) from the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. Form Follows Organism: The Biological Computer is the title of her research and book on biodesign and the shifting role of a designer working collaboratively with scientists. Throughout the years Emma has developed a number of different working materials. She is also the founder of BlueCity Lab, an experimental and prototyping laboratory in the former Tropicana water park in Rotterdam. Her goal is to lower the threshold for anyone interested in working with micro-organisms and waste streams in the development of new materials.

Ivan Henriques is an artist, researcher and tutor at WDKA. Henriques works in multimedia installations examining living systems. He explores in his works hybrids of nature and (technological) culture creating new forms of communication between humans and other living organisms. He considers nature as inspiration and a necessary factor in the development of the technological world. Ivan developed the interdisciplinary group Hybrid Forms Lab and directs the mobile residency program EME (Estúdio Móvel Experimental, since 2008). His works are exhibited internationally, participating in festivals, residencies and talks.

background image: Tomás Saraceno, ALGO-R(H)I(Y)THMS, 2009.

Bio Art and Design

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).

Purpose of this website

“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?

Emma van der Leest & Ivan Henriques