The 4th meeting on the 29th of June was devoted to probing, exploring, experiencing and reflecting on the process of the project within an exciting group of guests from different backgrounds. Chester Chuang (Designer), Maurizio Montalti (Designer, Artist), Manuel Schmaranzer (Anthropologist), Ruth Schmidt (Biologist), Manuel Selg (Biologist), Reinhold Fragner (Visualisation Expert), and Sanne Bloemink (Journalist and Writer) participated at the gathering at the Proefstation West in Amsterdam. We successfully met the main goal of the meeting, a critical evaluation of the preparations of the exhibition in the Orangerie in the Amstelpark in October. However, beyond that,the cross-disciplinary meeting was very successful in taking advantage of the collective thinking process in defining the broader scope and future aims of the project.
In the laboratories of the Microbial Ecology Department of Wageningen University and the Netherlands Institute of Ecology in Wageningen we had conducted “interviews” with microbes and asked: Who is there? Where are you from? What are you talking? How do you move? What happens when species meet? Who are your companions? Some questions could be answered by scientific methods and procedures, such as the examination of the communication of bacteria from different environments or the scanning electron microscope SEM that produced some striking insights. Other questions, however, had to be approached from a philosophical and artistic angle. If we consider the human as an ecosystem (Human Microbiome Project), how would wondrous artifacts help us to experience and thus better understand what this abstract knowledge about a change in paradigm means for concepts of autonomy and the borders of the self? How can human empathy towards microbial life in general evolve? How can an imaginary world involve the general public in an engagement of scientific research questions? Finally, how can an imaginary world that is aiming to break down hierarchies, dimensions and scales engage visitors in the fascination of the uncertain, the divided, the destructed, the distorted, the never pure, the ever connecting, swarming, open, living and emphatic in-between space?
In the laboratories of the Microbial Ecology Department of Wageningen University and the Netherlands Institute of Ecology in Wageningen we had conducted “interviews” with microbes and asked: Who is there? Where are you from? What are you talking? How do you move? What happens when species meet? Who are your companions? Some questions could be answered by scientific methods and procedures, such as the examination of the communication of bacteria from different environments or the scanning electron microscope SEM that produced some striking insights. Other questions, however, had to be approached from a philosophical and artistic angle. If we consider the human as an ecosystem (Human Microbiome Project), how would wondrous artifacts help us to experience and thus better understand what this abstract knowledge about a change in paradigm means for concepts of autonomy and the borders of the self? How can human empathy towards microbial life in general evolve? How can an imaginary world involve the general public in an engagement of scientific research questions? Finally, how can an imaginary world that is aiming to break down hierarchies, dimensions and scales engage visitors in the fascination of the uncertain, the divided, the destructed, the distorted, the never pure, the ever connecting, swarming, open, living and empathic in-between space?