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

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

Gilberto Esperanza: Nomad Plants

2025-09-20

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

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 (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 (1.0?)

2025-10-10

Sharing

Youjung:
- 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

Lea:
- 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?

Sunjoo:
- Benjamin Earl

- 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

Mikky:
- 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."

Niels:
- 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"

Output

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

...

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)

User:LEa/workshops/FermentingTheEarth

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