Post-Extractivist Gardening

Post-Extractivist Gardening:
Seeding Symbiotic Relations between Soil, Microbial Communities, & Energy Technologies through Research-Creation

by Matthew Halpenny

My artistic practice is shaped by the belief that large scale systems-based research questions cannot be approached from a single disciplinary lens. Interdisciplinary artists and designers can offer a unique vantage point towards these types of research questions as these fields place an emphasis on highlighting unseen relations across disciplinary subjects [1][2]. Within my practice I follow the methodology of research-creation (hereby, R-C), which is best summarized as research-based art or design paired alongside a written thesis. The artistic process becomes part of the research “[which] results in a hybrid written thesis and artistic object, installation, or action exhibited and documented” [3]. While projects within my practice change, they are always rooted in R-C, systems, art, and ecology. By ecology I am not referring to solely ecosystems, but more broadly as the study of relations (i.e., social, political, natural, and techno-ecologies). [4][5]. To explore this interplay of relations within climate and energy technologies, I created the durational art installation, Slow Serif. This work exhibits a “post-extractivist” garden of microbial fuel cells (MFCs) that powers the slow, ongoing, procedural generation of a novella about extractivism. Through this artwork and the R-C leading to its creation, my practice aims to cultivate experiential knowledge [6] on my research topics through the viewers ongoing interaction with the work.

The Materiality of Energy & Art-Research

Before discussing Slow Serif, it is important to understand the inspiration behind the projects research topics and how they relate to both the technical aspect (MFCs) and conceptual framework. The majority of global power systems rely on extractive energy sources such as hydrocarbons (e.g., coal and oil) [7][8]. Hydrocarbons generate an abundance of energy, but at the emissive cost of releasing millions of years of geologically compressed carbons [9]. While MFCs currently operate on a smaller scale, they have the potential to act as a localized counter to the current dominant modes of extractive energy production through their slow, regenerative production of metabolic microbial energy. This energy comes from the MFCs cycling ions within the soil, generated as a byproduct of communal microbial metabolic processes [10][11]. Alongside their practical application of generating energy, MFCs encapsulate an ideology of a more slow, caring, and symbiotic cultural relation to energy technologies. Unlike most energy technologies where humans, technology, and nature largely remain separate, MFCs require a continued unison. MFCs house an ecological mesocosm, an environment that becomes akin to a garden that requires ongoing symbiotic exchanges between humans and non-humans. The non-human exchange in this relationship provides the MFCs with microbial energy, and the mesocosm with water, sunlight, and human care. In contrast to extractive energy, microbial energy is innately communal and cannot be extracted from the ecosystem it occurs in [11]. This means MFCs cannot utilize more ions than these communal processes are generating, hence we must be patient with our energy, abiding by a “slower” temporality in relation to the geological deep time of extractive energy sources it [12]. MFCs are a unique combination of regenerative soil-based energy technology and feasible implementation in community scales make them perfect candidates for gardens in both urban and rural energy imaginaries. Through Slow Serif I experiment with the notion of MFC energy gardens, the accessibility of their fabrication, and their capacity from experiential teaching.

While Slow Serif is the artistic manifestation of this R-C project, an equally important portion was the documentation process of learning how to fabricate MFCs. Through the documentation and packaging of process, my practice of art-making doubles as a means to generate and distribute knowledge around socially mobilizing and utilizing MFC technologies. The methodology used to format this knowledge is inspired by the anthropologist Arturo Escobar [13]. His philosophy, a variant of Transition Design, focuses on a transition away from climate change through design research methodologies rooted in local, community action. An important segment of his methodology is self-replicability (e.g. making designs open-source), which allows the research to naturally flow to the individuals and communities who need them. The MFCs used in Slow Serif follow this philosophy. The process during my learning arc was formatted and publicly disseminated in the self-replicable form of a free MFC fabrication guide. This guide branches into several accessible fabrication methods based on different resource availabilities and includes a repository of open-source 3D printable MFC files (shown in Figure 2). The pairing of fabrication and critical theory under the roof of one project is sometimes referred to as “critical-making” [14]. When my practice is viewed through this hybridized lens, the relationality between sustainable energy, MFCs, and Slow Serif begins to emerge.

Temporality, Art, and The Garden

Slow Serif is a durational and participatory installation about care, non-human kinship, and energy temporalities. It slowly generates a novella displayed upon an e-ink screen. Surrounding this screen are three MFCs housing moss, each of which is wired into a power management circuit and microcontroller for text generation. The novella in each installation is uniquely generated from Markov models, a type of probability mathematics, trained on selected texts with themes of media geology, slowness, and ecology. Within the installation at Digital Ecologies (2022), these texts were Geology of Media by Jussi Parikka (2015), Another Science is possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science by Isabelle Stengers (2018), and Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor by Robert Nixon (2013) [15][16][17]. Due to the systematic nature of the project – the complexity between the moving parts of probabilistic generation and human interaction – the outcome of each installation cannot be predicted. This yields occasionally poetic but often familiar renditions of the thematics that informed the work. These generated texts anchor the visual to the ongoing natural processes while providing material for critical reflection. When the mosses inside Slow Serif’s MFCs photosynthesize, they instigate a process of microbial metabolism which is converted to energy by the MFCs. The energy generated through the MFCs is extremely slow relative to extractive energy sources as we must gather energy in real-time and not extract. The energy is then stored in a supercapacitor until it accumulates an amount that can be used by the electronics. Over the span of hours or days these ions collect and eventually open a circuitry “flood-gate” which pulses the e-ink screen, powering it on and adding a single word to the novella.

In contrast to the geologically violent extractive methods required for most energy technologies, Slow Serif’s use of MFCs is structured as a garden. Gardening suggests continuity, to remain alive and continually provide, they require continual care, maintenance, and patience [18]. This stirs two embodied avenues of understanding together. Firstly, the act of maintenance requires consideration of the whole system. For a garden this may be the soil, the sun, water, microbes, insects, etc. Its maintenance demands that we “draw connections among different disciplines, [it] is an act of repair or, simply, of taking care — connecting threads, mending holes, amplifying quiet voices” [19]. Secondly, one must also learn to listen and engage in a “more expansive environmental politics that account for relations, and that tune in to the world-making projects of other organisms” [20]. The garden is a place of kinship between human and non-human, it must be symbiotic if it is to flourish, it is a space of “making-together” [21]. Within Slow Serif the garden takes on a type of hybrid form which I call an energy garden. When we provide care to the garden, we receive energy. This garden must exist in a post-extractivist realm, for if we take too much (i.e., ionic extraction), the microbes will perish. They cannot be extracted or uprooted, we must listen and adapt our energetic needs to theirs, resulting in a slower temporality of energy consumption. This, of course, is not unique to energy gardening. All gardening demands the gardener adapt their notion of time to the natural cycles that dictate growth and harvest. While discussing the relation between art, gardening, and botany, Laurie Cluitmans denotes this as a shift away from “calendar time” and an adoption of “circular time” [22]. It is this migration to a space of kin-based and meditative circularity that Slow Serif attempts to instill through experiencing the “slow” gardening of a novella.

To experience the novella, one must circle back to the installation to witness progress. This leads to a real-time, experiential model of regenerative energy output, disrupting what we may innately consider normative timescales of energy consumption. These timescales are a product of capital-centric extraction that we have come to expect as the status quo [23]. It is difficult for one to imagine the imbalance between nature and the energy demands of modern technology since we are removed from perceiving how extractive energy ‘immediacy’ requires ongoing damage to natural systems. Slow Serif makes this temporal contrast visible through its ongoing experience and engagement. Slow Serif draws on the meditative experience of gardening and its symbiotic mindset. “For centuries, the garden has been regarded as a mirror of society, a microcosm of the larger world, reflecting on a small scale the broader relationships between nature and culture” [24]. By gazing into this garden-mirror, a socio-cultural reflection on technology, energy, and nature is shown by placing the natural system centerstage for the viewer without removing the direct relationship this technology has on it.

Conclusion

Through my R-C practice and Slow Serif, I attempt to make knowledge sharing more interdisciplinary and accessible to those without specialized disciplinary vocabulary and skillsets. One method of implementing this comes from Slow Serif’s experiential nature, which seeks to provide a more tacit knowledge sharing methodology. Both Slow Serif and the Transition Design inspired design methodologies employed are aimed towards communicating the impact of energy technologies on climate by illuminating the relationality of human, technology, energy temporalities, and natural systems. Slow Serif is able to explore these relations through experience by structuring the work as a garden that instigates human and non-human kinships that require maintaining and continuity to generate the novella portion of the work. Just as Transition Design suggests methods be reproducible, I hope the methods within this article are utilized openly and freely wherever they may offer aide.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for their funding contribution to this research-creation project, provided through the Joseph Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship. The work detailed in this article and SSHRC’s funding are contributions to my in-progress thesis project, titled Gardening the Cybernetic Meadow, through an individualized M.Sc. in Research-Creation at the Université de Montréal. Slow Serif is a part of this thesis project’s ongoing research-creation, as are segments of the research authored for this text.

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