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The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica.
Wastelands
Tagny Duff
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*Wastelands* is a playful, yet serious biological art project that explores speculative fiction scenarios and current bioengineering practices applying methanogenic bacteria, archaea, and bacteriophage to regulate methane production through anaerobic degradation. This biological art project speculates on a future 500 hundred years from now, when humans are using the biotechnology to create biogas, fueling the world with only our waste—excrement, methanogens, and viruses—the key ingredients for the production of methane biogas. Methane is one of the largest causes of climate change but used on a small scale, methane can be applied as a sustainable and ‘clean’ biogas.
The project explores how methane fermentation offers an effective means of pollution reduction, superior to that achieved via conventional aerobic processes. Although practiced for decades, interest in anaerobic fermentation has only recently focused on its use in the economic recovery of fuel gas from industrial and agricultural surpluses. This creation of “green” renewable biogas via anaerobic fermentation processes is quickly becoming the focus of biotech innovation. If it can be “scaled up” the technology will potentially reduce fuel emissions derived from the agriculture industry. However, this technological drive does not challenge or change the deeper issues around the industrialization of animal agriculture, but rather it re-enforces the same vision of utilitarianism where large-scale efficient monoculture production is manifested through the labor of living beings. What if this “green” tech considered alternative relations between human-animal-microbial interactions that are not based on utilitarian and capital driven results? What if this new/old tech was scaled down and diversified to slow the pace of tech development?
Links: https://tagnyduff.blog
The project explores how methane fermentation offers an effective means of pollution reduction, superior to that achieved via conventional aerobic processes. Although practiced for decades, interest in anaerobic fermentation has only recently focused on its use in the economic recovery of fuel gas from industrial and agricultural surpluses. This creation of “green” renewable biogas via anaerobic fermentation processes is quickly becoming the focus of biotech innovation. If it can be “scaled up” the technology will potentially reduce fuel emissions derived from the agriculture industry. However, this technological drive does not challenge or change the deeper issues around the industrialization of animal agriculture, but rather it re-enforces the same vision of utilitarianism where large-scale efficient monoculture production is manifested through the labor of living beings. What if this “green” tech considered alternative relations between human-animal-microbial interactions that are not based on utilitarian and capital driven results? What if this new/old tech was scaled down and diversified to slow the pace of tech development?
Links: https://tagnyduff.blog
Artist, project concept, design, photography, sculpture, and biotechnological engineering: Tagny Duff
*Time Traveler* and *Cosmos* bioplastic sculptures, collaboration by Tagny Duff with WhiteFeather Hunter, co-designer and sole sculptor.
Researched and co-produced in collaboration with Bridge Artist Residency Program, Dr. Dana Kirk and ADREC at Michigan State University, Sylvain Moineau Labs at University de Laval and Speculative Life Labs at Concordia University. Tagny Duff also acknowledges the work and intellectual property of WhiteFeather Hunter and Courtney Books in independently conducting the research, development, and protocol for the bioplastic material, which remains the sole intellectual property of WhiteFeather Hunter and Courtney Books.
*Time Traveler* and *Cosmos* bioplastic sculptures, collaboration by Tagny Duff with WhiteFeather Hunter, co-designer and sole sculptor.
Researched and co-produced in collaboration with Bridge Artist Residency Program, Dr. Dana Kirk and ADREC at Michigan State University, Sylvain Moineau Labs at University de Laval and Speculative Life Labs at Concordia University. Tagny Duff also acknowledges the work and intellectual property of WhiteFeather Hunter and Courtney Books in independently conducting the research, development, and protocol for the bioplastic material, which remains the sole intellectual property of WhiteFeather Hunter and Courtney Books.
Tagny Duff (CA) is an interdisciplinary media artist, scholar, and educator working across media art and microbiology with a keen interest in viruses, microbial interaction and scientific practices from a cultural point of view. Duff’s earlier biological art works *Living Viral Tattoos* (2006- ongoing) and *Cryobook Archives* (2010-ongoing) explore the scientific manipulation and potential of human-microbial relations with retroviruses. Duff has exhibited biological art works nationally and internationally in venues, most recently in the Broad Art Museum where she showcased the *Wastelands* installation (2018-2019) produced during the Bridge Artist Residency Program at Michigan State University.