Interview with MACHT NATUR Team: Exploring the boundaries of our uncanny future
Macht Natur opened at STATE Studio from August 13- September 12. The exhibition displayed the results culminating from the three-year long research project “Farming the Uncanny Valley” conducted by Berlin University of the Arts, YOUSE, STATE, and FRAUNHOFER UMSICHT. Unbore sat down with research team members Stefan Schwabe, Dr. Angelika Trübswetter, and Dr. Christian Rauch to get their insights on the exhibition and their work investigating societal unease towards biotechnology and the Bioeconomy.
MACHT NATUR Opening at STATE Studio ©2020 Eike Walkenhorst
Tell us about yourselves. What inspired you to conduct interdisciplinary research?
Stefan Schwabe: So, to make a long story short, Jannis Hülsen and I started to work with bacteria couple of years ago, and we developed a process to let it grow into 3D shapes. And during several exhibitions and presentations, we realized that not only the material itself is very interesting but also the reactions of people—how they imagine potential futures and cultural embedding of this new material and this new technology. And this led us to ask UdK University (Universtät der Kunste, Berlin University of the Arts) if they would give us the structure for this research project.
Dr. Angelika Trübswetter: For me, I am a social scientist, and I was working at the Centre for Conservation and Research when I got to know Stefan and Jannis. And that’s my base where I got to know the potential of different perspectives working in an interdisciplinary research context to give answers to complex issues we’re facing now in our world. For me, there is a lot of power in this field of interdisciplinary research. That’s why I am working here.
Dr. Christian Rauch: For me, it was during my time as a physicist working in the laboratory— especially during my PhD phase in England where I was part of an EU funding project— I realized more and more how little within my research community aspects of societal responsibility and, in general, the idea of what this all does. What we were developing was really resonating but no one was really talking about that, and it was frustrating me a lot. And on the other hand, like on the side of public, there were my friends, and no one really knew about what was happening in research and that frustrated me a lot. After my time there, I started to do lots of grassroots projects, such as science slams, and organized a few campaigns there. I then switched from research to science communication fully in 2012. First, for an institute where I was developing the Technology Knowledge Transfer Office where I could learn a lot about what research institutes really need. And then in 2014, State was founded.
Knowledge Transfer, Workshop ““Brummtier”, May 2019 © Stefan Schwabe 2019
Tell us about your collaboration “Farming the Uncanny Valley”.
Stefan: The project was a great opportunity to meet different scientists and experts in different kinds of disciplines around the field of Bioeconomy. We went there and possibly asked questions that are rarely asked about their personal motivations, what are their curiosities, and also their thoughts on how society might react to their work.
Angelika: On the side of the team for us, it is really an amazing thing to have those other perspectives. Especially Jannis and Stefan, who obviously have really different access topics to complex topics like Bioeconomy. For us, it was really interesting to see how such complex topics can be assessed through experiences.
Stefan: That was one thing that Jannis and I always meant to push—going into the zones of unknowing and where we also are non-experts. We certainly had an image of where we wanted to go, but it was a challenge to keep everyone on board—also to help everyone to find a confident feeling in these zones of not knowing. Trying out something new— new methodologies— it is really great now to see how the whole team grew together. Also, we got this idea of confidence to work that way. It is interesting from my perspective.
Chris: And I guess also in general it was really amazing to work for such a long time on a project. It was a three-year research project, so it was a real journey for all of us. For us with STATE and for me personally, it was the first long term research project that we did within the company. And that’s just extremely interesting. You have a very diverse set of organizations and people working together. It was amazing to see. I have never experienced, for example, such a deep assessment of backgrounds of people— like Angelika and Sabrina from [YOUSE and FRAUNHOFER UMSICHT]. Also, everything related to the collaboration with UdK, as a university and Jannis’ people, was really cool to work with and go into depth.
Photo credit: ©2020 Eike Walkenhorst
Can you describe what the Bioeconomy is for our audience and how does it play into topics such as the climate change and extinction of species?
Stefan: Most of the people we were working within our workshops—most of our audience—didn’t even know what the Bioeconomy was. So, they were not at all aware of what the strategies were about. It’s also in the process of being shaped. This term is not a finished term, but that with their thoughts, they can participate in shaping this term. How it relates to the climate change and the extinction of species? This, of course, is something they all know from their daily lives. They have discussions and debates on family dinner tables, with friends, and so on.
Chris: Well, we all know that we can’t go forward like this. Our organized systems, our economy, the way we treat our planet, and the way that we relate to it has all brought us to a situation where we now we feel it. We are close to a collapse. And many of the key figures that you look at, the rate of the species extinction, carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere, or any other of those critical domains tell us all the same thing. We have to change deeply how we go about treating the world. And the Bioeconomy is a critical concept that sets out to answer that. It’s a concept that the government has brought forth as a way to try to marry the economy and ecology again and find a different way of dealing with the environment. I think there is a pathway. It is a working component in our attempt to answer these critical threats we are facing and certainly not.
What are the most important issues do you think Europe is facing in terms of its Bioeconomy and which are the areas that are most vulnerable?
Stefan: I would say it depends on if we don’t look only at Europe but at the rest of the world. In Europe, there are certainly topics that people are rather aware of and ones that they are not. So green technology, for example, many people are aware of, and there are many preconceptions about this and very little pre-existing knowledge. Compared to the preconceptions that people have regarding degrees of humus and soil, there are not as many people that are really aware of this problem, but it is actually surrounding us. It is really dramatic. We also realized during our project that the topic of air we included in our exhibition is very abstract for people. It is all connected to climate change and to the air we breathe, but as we can’t see and can’t grasp it, it is really abstract for people to think about solutions— how to behave with such a fluid matter.
Chris: I guess a really interesting framework for that, I refer to the concept of planetary boundaries that was in 2009 research from Stockholm and was a Nature publication. They tried to look at where we stand in terms of our consumption, in comparison to the boundaries of the planet. There, for example, the biodiversity loss, the nitrogen cycle, and the climate crisis are the top of issues to address. I guess that is the basis for policy recommendation. So, that needs to be addressed most critically and needs to be married with how we as a society go about that. I don’t know if you have heard of this donut economical model. It’s another layer on top of this planetary boundary. It relates these planetary boundaries to our plans for society. Basically, what we need and how much we can do. I think that’s kind of a first part. Amsterdam as a city adopted for its new green strategy, and that kind of goes in the direction where we both look at what we need and what we can do as a society, but also where our boundaries are.
Outdoor Laboratory, Workshop “Fruchtform”, July 2019 © Stefan Schwabe 2019
What has been the most interesting outcome of your workshops? Which outcomes do you think have the capacity to alter human behaviour patterns when it comes to their relationship with their natural surroundings?
Angelika: For me personally, it was very emotional to see what journey people went through, and why they were participating in our workshops. The workshops were one and half days long, and we had participants from 13 to 82 from cities and small villages. It was really diverse. It was really great to see how deeply they got involved in the workshop and also what a strong impact the workshop had to them. We noticed this because we had telephone interviews six or eight weeks after the workshop, and we had a chance to talk to 68 of our 98 participants again. So, this was on a personal level very, very emotional for me. From a professional perspective, the central result is more our discourse field. We looked over all nine workshops, where the intersections are, and what people within the nine workshops talked about. So, that was really interesting to see the small “dreieck” (triangle) that we developed. You can also see it in the exhibition. For us, this discourse field shows the topics that are relevant to people, and what we should talk about. And within the “dreieck” (triangle), it’s also a lot about power and responsibility and justice. These are the main results we concluded.
Stefan: Maybe to add, how can we change behaviour patterns? It’s still complex, and I don’t know if we really want to do that—if that’s our intention. But we can observe that it sometimes happened. What we did during the workshops that we had throughout the whole project “Farming the Uncanny Valley”, we were working a lot with the term of uncanniness—unease towards new technologies. Moments when we don’t know. We have a weird gut-feeling—when we don’t know if we think something is good or bad. We tried to include in every workshop in the beginning an irritation moment on an emotional level that every participant had to go through. This was meant to be a moment where people are asked to get out of their comfort zones—where people are asked to really dive into a thing and to think about it. That’s to do with this surrounding, the setting of the workshop where we chose very amazing places. Actually, we were at an old cemetery, for example. A big cemetery, which is still used as a cemetery, but it is also where urban gardening is happening. So, we are discussing this whole notion of where does life go and what are we made from. These surroundings, ‘irritation moments’, had a big impact on these moments of self-reflection.
Bumble Bee Installation, Workshop “Brummtier”, May 2019, © Stefan Schwabe 2019
How important is it for the disciplines of design and art to be involved in conversations related to the Bioeconomy and topics in science in general?
Chris: It relates, for me, to a very personal story of frustration with disciplinary approaches. Interdisciplinary means that if we are looking for meaningful solutions to our complex problems. There is no area anymore where you can just go about that with a one, single shot approach and not think of the context. I think what happens if you integrate design into such practices is you kind of rip open, or you create a huge divergence or an open field. You want to see it as if you have two antagonist players approaching the same thing. If you throw them into the same basket, then something happens in that huge space that you open up between the sciences and the arts. A lot of friction starts to emerge. A lot of new approaches start to emerge because friction is happening. That’s super interesting and allows others to participate as well. But we could spend hours discussing the topic.
Angelika: Maybe I can add my personal moment of happiness when we got the grant. We were in this big, not very cozy, building close to the Hauptbahnhof— close to the centre of Berlin— and we were pitching for the project. For me, it was really this moment of happiness when the project, which is led by the University of the Arts, got this grant because this is very, very unusual for the German grant structure. So, this was like a wish come true for such a project to involve design and art because it has a great impact.
Stefan: What we can add as artists or designers is a great amount of expression on an emotional level. Using non-verbal media to express things that are uncertain and ambivalent and to leave space for others to interpret their own opinions and to make them think. Also, to access their thoughts on these non-verbal levels that way. Another thought that I took away from our discussion that I also found really intriguing, is someone from Thousand America was one of the guests. She was asking how we can come back to this very close relationship with nature. And the philosopher on the panel was doubting that this was so easy in societies where we don’t have such a religious foundation and where we have lost our myths. He was suggesting maybe art and poetry could be a way to access this or to replace this religious mystery level to connect to people on an emotional and sensible layer.
Chris: A lot of things are changing now. It’s not typical that an arts university gets a grant within science communication projects. For a long time, the main focus has been just repeating the question of how science and art can talk with each other. They are always talking with different languages. How can we translate that? They don’t understand each other. It seemed that this kind of niche world of art and science was always turning itself around the same question. I feel that something really big has changed. Artists and scientists are really working together now more and more on really bringing together unique projects that are richer in the kinds of outcomes that they can create and interact with people.
Sample field as experience space, Workshop “Flurform”, July 2019 © Stefan Schwabe 2019
What is the next step that you see the project taking?
Stefan: Personally for me, what I would like to do is go back to the places that we have been with the workshops—or concentrate on local partners, rural areas where the local the Bioeconomy will be happening. Because during the workshops, we were somehow landing like a spaceship. What really is necessary is that we stay connected with people— the local activists who sometimes don’t even have the time to integrate debate and discussions into their daily life— and to open up this space, to lead this space, and cultivate that. So that a change can also be implemented on a local scale.
Angelika: Yea, I totally can agree. Maybe it is interesting to add that one thing we still have to do is put our thoughts into a publication— to have a chance to talk about the project. Yea, of course it would be great to get funding to follow it as Stefan told. We also have a lot of data, and it would be super interesting to go even more deeper, but let’s see what happens.
Chris: And I guess regarding the exhibition, it is a wonderful thing in terms of just a display of results— not only for the project, but also for the invitation to participate. But already what we have now could be really interesting for partner organizations who are interested in using this as an invitation to reach out to their audiences for conversations regarding the Bioeconomy. I guess from that front, we want to push a little bit as well and try to find partners in Germany and Europe where the exhibition may be able to go afterwards.
If you would like to follow any updates about MACHT NATUR and the “Farming the Uncanny Valley” Project, be sure to check out their websites here: MACHT NATUR and “Farming the Uncanny Valley”. Also follow our friends at STATE Studio for more exciting events and exhibitions related to art, science, and technology!