_Haberlandt_ is a vending machine for food crops, a bio-reactor for growing a superfood—Arthrospira platensis micro-algae—and an automated avant-cuisine machine. It is an array cyborg, a mechatronic ecosystem where life and technological systems coexist—a sustained but open system with inputs and outputs typical of an entity that depends on a chemical energy exchange. The machine produces algae as the ultimate goal, and it needs recharging with a minimum amount of nutrients, being able to reduce this cycle of exchange to algae for human consumption (output) and waste human urine (input). It is a super-reduction of traditional agricultural systems, synthesized and compacted to produce hyperlocally an engineered product designed to be inserted into today’s society. The dispenser a potential ecotone—a transitional area between two plant communities – for urban citizens committed to a sustainable production and consumption, something so lacking in a globalized and asymmetric world.

Links: http://haberlandt.blablabla.org/

blablabLAB was born out of the development of a prototype framed by the “Lightscapes” workshop (James Clar, Scott Fitzgerald), held in Hangar, Barcelona, at the end of 2008. Over the past two years the group has expanded with contributions from other friends and fields—such as electronic engineering, environmental ecology, fashion design, avant-garde cuisine, visual arts, anthropology and biochemistry—to be engaged in various projects often related to an event.