Artists Statement

Hacnum Exhibition. Various locations, May 16 – 21

Ecosystem Services Estimation Experiment

This artistic provocation seeks to estimate the orders of magnitude of critical ecosystem services fundamental to all planetary life processes.

It is common to describe our relationships with society, the world, and the biosphere with metaphors from economics, which has specific understandings of value. Today’s prevailing economics conventions are unable to recognize intrinsic value of the ecosystems on which all life depends. In cultures overdetermined by concepts from economics, we are left without adequate discursive instruments to socially or politically address the importance of ecosystem contributions to life on Earth.

This experiment consists of 1 square meter of wheat, cultivated in a closed environment. Critical inputs such as water, light, heat, and nutrients are measured, monitored and displayed for the public. This procedure makes palpable the immense scale of ecosystem contributions, and provides a speculative reference for a reckoning of the undervalued and over-exploited “work of the biosphere.”

Conception: Disnovation.Org, Baruch Gottlieb
Web Developer: Jérôme Saint-Clair
Hardware Developers: Vivien Roussel, Thomas Demmer
Installation, 1m2 Of Automated Cultivation, Led Grow Lights, Camera, Live Video Streaming
Production: Imal (Be) | Coproduction: Biennale Chroniques (FR)
HD Exhibition Views: https://www.flickr.com/photos/n1c0la5ma1gr3t/albums/72157717940705013
Live stream: https://lss.earth

https://disnovation.org/lss.php

• disnovation.org is a research collective set up in Paris, France, in 2012, whose core members include Maria Roszkowska (pl/fr), Nicolas Maigret (fr), Baruch Gottlieb (ca/de) & Jerome Saint-Clair (fr). They work at the interface between contemporary art, research and hacking, and compose tailor-made teams for each investigation together with academics, activists, engineers, and designers. More specifically their recent artistic provocations seek to empower post growth imaginaries and practices while challenging dominant techno-solutionist ideologies. Their research includes artworks, publications & curation.