ARTIFICIAL NATURE TRANSPOSIUM
Transdisciplinary Symposium on Artificial Life and Sustainable Complex Systems
AALBORG, MUSIKKENS HUS
This event was made possible thanks to the support of
The Artificial Nature Transposium (ANT): Transdisciplinary Symposium on Artificial Life and Sustainable Complex Systems connects researchers and industry leaders working with data science and complex systems, specifically in the areas of soft ALife (emergent AI, artificial life modeling), hard ALife (robotics and AI), wet ALife (synthetic biology, biochemistry, disease modeling), sustainability research (ecosystem modeling), and arts & design (music modeling, and computational modeling of material architecture).
ANT brings together researchers working within the emerging areas of Artificial Life and Complex Systems, aiming to understand and synthesize life-like systems and apply bio-inspired synthetic methods to other science/engineering disciplines, including AI, Robotics, Computer Modelling, Synthetic Biology, Bio-Materials, and Bio-Architecture, among others. Sustainable development of technologically-mediated complex systems is at the core of ANT, and for this discussion, we bring a transdisciplinary group of innovators, boundary-pushing companies, and creatives in the room. The symposium creates opportunities for experts from diverse fields and sectors to come together to further our understanding of how sciences and technologies of Artificial Nature can advance human–society–nature interactions.
What is Artificial Nature
Artificial Nature extends the systemic approaches of Artificial Life—a field focused on the simulation and creation of living systems. This interdisciplinary field interrogates and leverages billions of years of evolutionary processes in organic life to inform and enhance engineering and creation practices. By studying the diverse, complex, and adaptable designs found in living organisms, researchers are gaining valuable insights that are increasingly influencing various engineering disciplines and the broader Sciences of the Artificial. The principles derived from natural systems and their theoretical extensions are being continually applied to engineering and scientific endeavors, demonstrating the potential for life-as-we-know-it and life-as-it-could-be to inspire innovative solutions and query fixed notions about what life entails.
| 8.30 | Coffee & Registration |
| 9.00 | Welcome and Introduction by Elizabeth Jochum & Cody Lukas |
| 9.15 – 10.00 | Keynote Lecture: Phil Ayres “Beyond Metaphor: histories, advances and futures of living architectures” |
| 10.15 – 11.00 | Keynote Lecture: Hanaa Dahy “Advancing climate-neutral architecture through annually renewable resources and digitalization” |
| 11.00 – 11.45 | Moderated Questions & Discussion with Hanaa Dahy and Phil Ayres (mod. Markus Löchtefeld) |
| 12.00 – 13.00 | Lunch |
| 13.00 – 14.30 | Plenary: When Art and Science Meet – Anca Horvath “Life As Material” – Jonas Jørgensen “Soft Robotics and Ecological Aesthetics” – Kresten Jon Korup Kromphardt: “Uncoupling food production from farming and fishing” – Kasper Lynov “Why should we give a shit? An aesthetics-driven approach to science communication” – Moderator: Markus Löchtefeld |
| 14.30 – 15.30 | Poster Session and Coffee Break – Alberte Spork “Bug Lab” – Karin Victorin “LumenMind – Exploring Agency and Imagination in Sustainable Human-Machine Ecosystems” – Anna Elisabeth Thomassen Vadsten, Sidse Rebien, & Nikoline Lisbeth Holme, “Human Litter” – Victor Vadmand Jensen “Aligning Political and User Visions of Ethically Acceptable Healthcare AI” – Andrea Tešanović ”Soft Robotics” – Søren Lyngsø Knudsen “Vocal Imaginaries” |
| 15.30 – 16.15 | Keynote Lecture: Fara Peluso |
| 16.15 – 16.30 | Discussion and Wrap up |
| 17:00 | EDEN Exhibition Opening – Speech & Bubbles |
Keynote
Hanaa Dahy
Advancing climate-neutral architecture through annually renewable resources and digitalization
This talk will be about the new vision of sustainable architecture and its paradigm shift, starting the design process as a resonance of the available local resources, not through a defined geometry and a given building typology. The benefits of the digital era we are living in including the strong advancement of fabrication technologies and digital computational modelling and simulation, became a strong accelerator towards diverse advancement facets in this field. The developments done sofar in this area through the BioMat groups in Stuttgart and Copenhagen will be elaborated. Further expected interesting and open discussions with the renowned audience will follow.
Biography
Hanaa Dahy is a registered German Egyptian architect who established her (BioMat@Copenhagen) research centre within her associate professorship at Aalborg University-Copenhagen as well as her company-sector named BioMat TGU@TTI GmbH in Stuttgart in 2022 based on her first (BioMat) department during her first professorship at the University of Stuttgart in mid-2016. Her first architecture office was established in Cairo since 2003. She holds European and international patents, won tens of Design Awards including the Materialica and MaterialPreis Awards as well as the Excellence Award for Women of outstanding achievements in the Architecture and Construction in the Middle East- Top 3 in 2020 and was invited to showcase her BioMat work in the Biennale of 2023 in Venice from the ECC (European Culture Center) in which a shortlist of the Design Award Top 3 was nominated.
Keynote
Phil Ayres
Beyond Metaphor: histories, advances and futures of living architectures
Applied metaphorically to Architecture, the term ‘living’ has been used to describe certain forms, qualities of space and spatial experience that posses dynamic attributes but fall short of the characteristics normally ascribed to Artificial Life systems. The emerging field of Living Architecture seeks to move beyond metaphor and imbue architecture with properties of autonomy, self-organisation, adaptation, interaction and emergence through the use of technology and/or the coupling of biological complexes. The design, production and upkeep of such Architectures present challenges to orthodox architectural knowledge and practice, but their investigation and development also presents significant opportunities for expanding architectural knowledge, defining new ecological relationships and shifting towards a more inclusive, equitable and sustainable building practice.
This presentation will showcase research work from the Chair for Biohybrid Architecture, based at the Royal Danish Academy. This research investigates different approaches and models that tentatively probe aspects Living Architecture – from materials grown with fungi to structural lattice designs that exploit topology and geometry as possible computing substrates. This work will be placed within a historical context that reveals early practices of Living Architecture extending back to the early 18th Century, a current context that is rapidly expanding this historical foundation and will speculate on the future context for Living Architectures.
Biography
Phil is Chair Professor of Biohybrid Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy – the first Chair of its kind within the Danish research context. Design research within the Chair focuses on the coupling of technical and living complexes to create novel materials and architectural systems. Particular focus is placed on the use of technical weave systems and microbial fermentation as enabling technologies – technologies that are foundationally rooted in humanity’s social and cultural development, yet remain deep reservoirs of innovative potential, particularly in relation to improving the accessibility, inclusiveness and sustainability of building practice. Research within the Chair has been pursued in the context of the EU funded projects flora robotica and Fungal Architectures, the EIC funded project Fungateria and the recently awarded 5-year Carlsberg Foundation Semper Ardens Accomplish project Kagome Architectures.
Keynote
Fara Peluso
Towards radical complexity on becoming others
Sustainability and innovation are not a simple and straightforward path; rather, they must recognize the value of complexity and the power of vulnerability, especially when their goal is to act towards a planetary justice.
Biography
Fara Peluso is a Berlin based bio artist and researcher at the Karlsruhe University of Art and Design. Through speculative research Peluso plays on how to connect human beings with nature, living organisms and biological processes in a deeper relationship. With a strong interest in biology, Peluso pursues her deep research on algae taking constant inspiration from them, enquiring into their poetic and agency through a transdisciplinary and speculative methodology. Fara Peluso wants to contribute to raise critical questions considering it a role belonging to artists and designers, she asks how the design of new tools through a speculative methodology can be applied in this way. Fictional artifacts that tell the story of a possible future scenario about the quality of our lives, attitudes and choices.
Panelist
Jonas Jørgensen
Soft Robotics and Ecological Aesthetics
Soft robotics designates a novel approach to designing robots anchored in the simple idea of using pliable and elastic materials, such as silicone rubbers, rather than metal or plastic. Over the past decade, soft robots have caught the attention of not just researchers but also artists and designers. In this short talk, I will delineate a few selected aspects of what I refer to as an emergent “ecological aesthetics of soft robotics”. This aesthetic attends to how soft robots come to behave in life-like ways within different settings and how robots might inhabit their environments in the future.
Biography
Jonas Jørgensen is an Associate Professor in the Biorobotics section at the University of Southern Denmark and co-directs the SDU Soft Robotics research lab. He holds degrees in physics (BSc) and art history (BA, MA) from Copenhagen University and Columbia University, and a PhD from the IT University of Copenhagen. His research and writings on soft robotics and robotic art have been featured in academic journals, anthologies, and conference proceedings. Jonas has presented at international conferences such as ICRA, HRI, and MediaArtHistories, and his art projects have been exhibited at prestigious venues including Ars Electronica, MSU Museum of Contemporary Art, and Science Gallery Dublin.
Panelist
Anca Horvath
Life as Material
Life as Material is a large-scale architectural scultpure that deals with the relationship between humans, their built environment and the natural and living world. We aim to involve the audience in a conversation on the dichotomy between the natural and the artificial, and on our relationship to nature as it has changed over time, as well as on the connection between nature, design, and sustainability. The artwork is created from biocement (derived from a mixture of mussel shells and algae), vegan leather (made from dehydrated kombucha bacteria), and living mycelium. All materials have been used in design and architecture, as alternatives to current means of production. Generally, bio-materials have received attention over the last decade, and are often presented as ‘sustainability tools for the bio-economy’. Drawing inspiration from eco-feminist theories, Life as material invites consideration of humans’ role in the broader ecosystem exploring themes of care for nature and disconnect/alienation from nature, sustainability, and human interaction with the environment and encourages reflection on our relationship with living organisms such as fungi, bacteria, and algae. Finally, through this work we problematize the ethics and estehtics of ‘mothering nature’ (N. Oxman), and of using bio-technologies at scale for design.
Biography
Anca is a computational designer, registered architect and researcher investigating the relationships between emerging technologies, including computational design, digital fabrication, AI and bio-technologies, and creative practices, as well as their place in broader cultural contexts. Anca’s projects have covered a broad range of scopes and scales, from shoe insoles to urban planning and has worked as an architect, urban planner, and computational designer in Romania and Denmark. Anca holds a PhD in architecture from the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, and for the last 6 years has been affiliated with the Research Laboratory for Art&Technology at Aalborg University.
Panelist
Kresten Jon Korup Kromphardt
Uncoupling food production from farming and fishing
With a growing world population there is a need to improve food production to ensure enough food to feed everyone, while we also need to limit harm to the environment and CO2 emissions. The presentation will revolve around how Unibio has invented a completely new way of producing protein, which is one of the main components of food without the use of farming or fishing. This results in a substantial cut in CO2 emissions, land usage and water consumption compared to farming or fishing.
Biography
Kresten Kromphardt is a biotechnology engineer and PhD from DTU with a broad range of experience within industrial biotechnology. The main areas of interest spans from genome editing of microbes and characterizing the chemical ecology of fungi to working with upscaling of fermentation technology. Kresten has been a researcher for several years at DTU but has also been an assistant professor at university college Absalon where he taught Bachelor of Engineering within biotechnology. Currently employed at Unibio he works to enable sustainable food production for a growing world population.
Panelist
Kasper Lynov
Why should we give a shit? – An aesthetics-driven approach to science communication
With the threat of ecological collapse we are currently facing, one of the biggest challenges with regards to scientific communication is finding novel ways of getting people to engage and care about environmental issues. In my presentation I will address this as one of the primary functions of my work in not only entertaining the general public but also educating people who are not necessarily prepared or willing to receive learning. I will present aesthetics-driven methods on how to take the first step towards captivating an audience and how this first step of interest has the potential to cause a cascading effect leading towards curiosity, knowledge, respect and eventually action.
Biography
Kasper Lynov is a conservation educator at Copenhagen Zoo with a background in biological sciences at Copenhagen University. For over 10 years he has been involved in developing and facilitating educational experiences, exhibitions and presentations for people of all backgrounds and ages. In his work, Kasper utilizes a holistic approach to science communication, connecting issues regarding such topics as ethics, economics and the environment when addressing the complex topic of nature conservation.
Moderator
Markus Löchtefeld
Biography
Markus Löchtefeld is an Associate Professor for Sustainable Interaction Design and Deputy-Head of the Department of Architecture, Design, and Media Technology at Aalborg University. His research is situated at the intersection of HCI, Product Design, and Sustainability, particularly focusing on developing novel strategies to develop longer-lasting and repairable devices as well as sustainable prototyping and fabrication techniques. Markus obtained a PhD in Computer Science at Saarland University, Germany and before joining Aalborg University, he worked at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Lancaster University, UK and University of Münster, Germany.
Poster Session Lightning Talks
Alberte Spork “Bug Lab”
Karin Victorin “LumenMind – Exploring Agency and Imagination in Sustainable Human-Machine Ecosystems”
Anna Elisabeth Thomassen Vadsten, Sidse Rebien, & Nikoline Lisbeth Holme “Human Litter”
Victor Vadmand Jensen “Aligning Political and User Visions of Ethically Acceptable Healthcare AI”
Andrea Tešanović ”Soft Robotics”
Søren Lyngsø Knudsen “Vocal Imaginaries”
In conjunction with the symposium, a public exhibition will be opened at Kunsthal Nord, navigating the boundaries of what we define as living in the world today, as well the various ethical and existential ramifications that such definitions play.
EDEN
More Information at:
“As our knowledge and abilities to manipulate life increase, so does the need to make sense of where we are going. Art can play an important role in creating cultural meaning and informed involvement that are needed in order for our society to comprehend the very significant changes we are facing.”
– Oron Catts & Gary Cass
The concept of “life” is something that every person intuitively feels they understand, claiming to easily distinguish that a tree is alive and a rock is not. However, within the scientific community, there are over a hundred different definitions of life, some of which list five, six, or even seven key criteria for living organisms. Some researchers base their work on an organism’s ability to sense, encode/decode, and analyze information as the primary method for identifying life. Experts at NASA claim life to be nothing more than “a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.”
Every day, new research and innovation further chip away at our normalized anthropocentric understanding of life, defining the ethical parameters for how we interact with the world around us. This includes interactions with other living organisms, the environment, and other human beings.
Eden is an exhibition that challenges normative perspectives of life, exploring alternative ways humans perceive and interact with other forms of living processes. At a time when we must overcome our anthropocentric understandings of life to tackle the multilayered environmental challenges we face today, at the end of the Human Goldilocks Era, this exhibition is particularly relevant.
Along the walls of the gallery, visitors are confronted with a range of transdisciplinary artistic works, all pushing the boundaries of what we call living and invoking reflection on the ethical justifications behind our interactions with the living world around us. These works effectively parallel a wide variety of geological, biological, and technological living processes, blurring the borders between systems.
The works are created through art-science collaborations with researchers from all five of Denmark’s largest universities.
More Information at:
More Information at:
As a part of the event Artificial Nature Transposium (ANT): Transdisciplinary Symposium on Artificial Life and Sustainable Complex Systems (December 6, 2024), PhD students and Post-doctoral researchers are invited to present posters on their ongoing research.
We invite contributions by early-career researchers working across fields that deal with complex systems. These include, for example, the topics of soft ALife (emergent AI, artificial life modeling), hard ALife (robotics and AI), wet ALife (synthetic biology, biochemistry, disease modeling), sustainability research (in all its forms), as well as the arts & design (including but not limited to: the visual and performing arts, art history and cultural studies, architecture, industrial and urban design). Taking part in this poster session, early career researchers will have the chance to present their work to a diverse audience of leading academics in the field, fellow researchers, and the general public. In this way, the symposium will provide an opportunity to network, learn, and build a like-minded community working around such topics in Denmark.
Please send an abstract of max. 250 words, your name, university affiliation, and department. Send your submissions via this form.
The deadline is 1 November 2024.
The ANT event brings together researchers working within the emerging areas of Artificial Life and Complex Systems, aiming to understand the use of natural materials in architecture and synthesize life-like systems by applying bio-inspired synthetic methods to other science/engineering disciplines, including AI, Robotics, Computer Modelling, Synthetic Biology, Bio-Materials, and Bio-Architecture, among others. Sustainable development of technologically-mediated complex systems is at the core of ANT, engaging experts from diverse fields and sectors to come together to further our understanding of how the sciences and technologies of Artificial Nature can advance sustainable human–society–nature interactions.
Organized by scholars and researchers from Aalborg University and the University of Southern Denmark, the one-day transposium will take place at Musikkens Hus in Aalborg on 6 December 2024. The keynote speakers at the event are bioarchitecture visionaries Hanaa Dahy and Phil Ayres, and bio artist and researcher Fara Paluso. The transposium aims to be a space for transdisciplinary conversations between industry and academia, therefore panelists Jonas Jørgensen (SDU), Anca Horvath (AAU), Kresten Jon Korup Kromphardt (UNIBIO), and Kasper Lynov (Copenhagen Zoo) will take part in a transdisciplinary plenary discussion “When Art and Science Meet”, moderated by Markus Löchtefeld.