User:LEa/workshops/FermentingTheEarth

Fermenting The Earth, Wiring The Mud

with Sunjoo & Anna

The Electric Garden is an ongoing artistic research project by Sunjoo Lee. Cells made from mud and plants can produce a small electric current with the help of bacteria living in there. This energy is stored in a capacitor and released once it reaches a certain threshold. During the workshop 'Fermenting the Earth, Wiring the Mud' at iMAL, we made our own mud cells and discussed potential use cases. Youjung and me worked on the Mud-cell Poem.

2025-09-19: Workshop Day 1

Microbial fuel cells (MFC) / mud cells:

- fuel cell system powered by bacteria (or other microorganisms)

- convert chemical energy to electrical energy

- produce very little, precious electric current

- energy can accumulate over time (and multiple cells) and discharge at once

Useful species of bacteria:

- Clostridium butyricum: common fermenting bacteria found in cheese, soil and the human gut

- Shewanella oneidensis: versatile bacteria

- Aeromonas hydrophilia: aquatic bacteria, can metabolise many fuels

- Geobacter metallireducens: breaks down toxic chemicals, therefore useful in bioremediation

- Geobacter sulfurreducens: breaks down toxic chemicals, therefore useful in bioremediation

Art Projects

- Gilberto Esperanza: Nomad Plants

- Mark Tildan: B.E.A.M. Robots (Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics, Mechanics)

2025-09-20: Workshop Day 2

Electricity

- The Miller Solar Engine: yet another way to use a 1381 voltage defector

- LoRa: radio wave communication technique; LoRaWAN (long range wide area network): wireless, low-power communication protocol

- Mud cells > Capacitor > Switch > Arduino (mud generates electricity, mud sends data such as temperature, time frames)

Discussion

What can be done with the tiny amount of electricity and the data from the mud?

- Generate a poem that grows over time: can either be online (on a website [on demand], sent via a mailing list) or local / "off the grid" (on an e-ink display, written into the sand with a plotter, on a USB stick...)

- Extract sounds from the mud and play them with the help of the electricity

- Think about collaboration and collectivity!

Output

by Youjung, Mikky, Raimundo, and me

Mud-cell Poem

2025-09-20: Workshop Day 3

Presentation of the results

2025-10-10: Meeting at Creative Coding Utrecht

Sharing

- Nick Montfort

• The House Of Dust originally by Alison Knowles
• Taroko Gorge: Python program developed at Taroko Gorge National Park in Taiwan, aimed at evocative description
• Through the Park: uses limited words modifying the discourse without making adjustments to the syntax. Doesn't use pronouns. The system is meant to tell *Little Red Riding Hood*.

- Zeroichi Arakawa

• Executed Poetry: an e-ink displays the poem (also the count, processing time and micro controller's unique public key and signature); explores philosophical themes such as existence, eternity, and nothingness with the primitive features of python

- Mastodon Bots:

• Olia Lialina: Kotjaktko the cat running around
• David Lawrence Miller via converged.yt: birdcolorbot
• David Lawrence Miller via converged.yt: transect575 (Haikus generated from recordings of whale sightings off the North East coast of the US)

• How would we publish our generated texts / poems? E-Mail and website were suggested, a mastodon bot could be an "in-between"; also: RSS!

- Fermentation (see: Let's Make It Last)

• How would language change if it got fermented? What if words could chemically change?

- Benjamin Earl

• H&D: Coding in Situ
• Naive Yearly: Coding in Situ
• Coding in situ, a conversation with Kirsten Spruit and Benjamin Earl / 09.04.2022

- Federico Campagna: Technic and Magic - The Reconstruction Of Reality

• grammar: like a code (semantic algorithm)
• poetry breaks this code ("magic")

• > What makes sense in language? What doesn't? What is wasteful / not useful? How can we disrupt or break our conception of language? Language forms our understanding of an object or concept, playing with the language can shift our conception.

- Yuchen Li & Aldo Esparza Ramos: Seed Of Memory - Ancestral Recipes

• > "Hand" in Nahuatl is a verb! Language and our understanding of the world shape each other.

- Sunjoo's mom, eating cake, looking at the crumbles

• > "Actually, this is how our brains work. Every time you think of something, the crumbles come back to form the memory."

- Cellular respiration
- Biosemiotics: life as a set of signs, (some) organisms could be regarded as machines: they react to a signal (e.g. chemical > Chemotaxis) and react in certain way

- Jakob von Uexküll

• stepping away from a anthroprocentric worldview
• perception of the world that is not ours (humans)
• Should we start from an anthroprocentric view? Using pronouns or feelings or something else? Change point of view from human to animal / bacteria / insects / plants / viruses (to write poetry)?

- Valentino Braitenberg: Braitenberg vehicles (Cybernetics)
- Alexander Galloway: The Interface Effect
- James Joyce: Finnegans Wake
- Timothy Morton: "The whole is less than the sum of its parts."

- Measuring Leaves, Gathering Trees> 1m2 to quantify nature
- Robert Frost: Gathering Leaves
- Ursula Le Guin: The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics

• studying the languages of non-humans
• mindset to keep while working with nature as a subject: try to see non-human perspectives (perspective of a stone / a pigeon)
• a passive "Art of the Plants"

Writing

Directional Poetry

There once was a mouse in hutboom
Faster than your imaginatioon
Can think of up there
This poem goes where?
Let's start all over quite soon  

There was a mouse in the hut
After breakfast it always scurried up
To eat the small scraps
That humans had left
And then go to sleep in the mud  

Who jumps down the hole tonight?
Up and running would be alright
The mouse goes click click
Then it stops mid lick
To complete the circle of squares 

Conlanguage Poetry

SEE tp tp tp
FEEL brp brp brp
SEE TP TP TP
FEEL BRP BRP BRP
MAKE
HO N O NH TWO
HO NO NH TWO O OH
a little bit of H THREE C N PLUS C H THREE O OH C H THREE
TP TP TP BRP BRP BRP
TP TP BRP
BRP
MHHHHM

ngngng mmmho mk
mk ho
hengng ngmm ng
ng mm
krkhen mhong fr
fr hong 

Non-human Poetry

Bacteria multiplying and dying

ANN KATY DAN
ANN KATY KATY DAN DAN
ANN ANN KATY DAN DAN DAN DAN
ANN ANN ANN ANN DAN DAN DAN
ANN ANN ANN ANN ANN ANN ANN ANN DAN DAN
ANN ANN ANN
...

Plans for Next Time

think about...

input ( / dataset / offering)

- texts with a shared quality / topic (e.g. poetry about trees)

- texts from the same / similar source (e.g. all poems made today)

output

- make it make sense semantically (e.g. "noun that verbs")

- use repetition to make it more poetic (e.g. House of Dust: "A house of ... / inhabited by ...")

- destroy part of the rhythm or structure of the poem (make it decompose / die)

2025-10-25: Meeting at Creative Coding Utrecht

Sharing

- Gertrude Stein: Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose (1913)

- Geopoetics

- P5.js

- Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez: Let’s Become Fungal

> “There is no regeneration if there is no degeneration”

- Perception of time (based on the culture we grow up in)

• time is not linear everywhere (cyclical time)

• geological time

• bacterial time

- Anya Peterson Royce: Becoming an Ancestor - The Isthmus Zapotec Way of Death

> “You are born fresh and you dry out”

- James Bridle: New Dark Age

- James Bridle: Ways of Being

- Sunjoo: “trying to build a mythology”

- Zoöp Nieuwe Instituut

> “speaker of the living” = representative of the creatures living around the institute

- Jacquelyn Mills: Geographies of Solitude (Documentary)

- Petr Lom: I Am the River, the River Is Me (Documentary about a Māori river given its own legal identity)

- Ground Exhibition CCU

- Strudel is a music live coding environment for the browser, porting the TidalCycles pattern language to JavaScript.

Coding

gitlab project (private)