Les Usines Louise is an experimental space
for collective invention: A studio and office down by the
river of Ain in France, a 16 acres patch of land somewhere in
the middle of Texas and this web space.
All of the above are under perpetual construction and creative
commons [cc
by].
Forest as a DAO is a contributory poetic gesture (#cc by
sa) that participates in a broader movement aimed at
establishing a reciprocal relationship with what we call
“natural resources” and an experiment linking blockchain
technologies and the management of shared resources or
commons.
In its current forms it is an online
community linked with natural places and electronic
sculptures. Anybody can add a natural place or a
sculpture, give a donation and vote for their “gardener”
responsible to take care of the resource. Presented at the
international biennial of Design in Saint-Etienne, we have
been working with designers on the links between the
design of the digital decentralized network and the
commitment of users.
The intervention tests the idea of a cooperative in which
trees and rivers are shareholders on an equal footing with
men. In this universe, the ecosystem is an industry,
photosynthesis has become a shared knowledge (a common
one) that mainly provides depolluting fungi with energy.
Humans derive their income from direct contributions they
can make to the ecosystem or pay a tax on the landscape
when they benefit more than they benefit from it...
At this stage, the primary focus is reciprocity and observation- to steer clear of the assumption that nature is there for humanity’s personal use and to develop a “symbiotic biomanufacturing proces”.
A model of a shelter whose structure is a birch branch
and the roof a mebrane of SCOBY (symbiotic culture of
bacteria and yeast); two bioproduced materials. This model
shows a "cultivated" architecture, a kind of
agro-architecture where houses would be grown. The
experiment included growing several leather like sheets of
"scoby" in the studio and testing structural
potential with real trees in the Texas forest.
These mental spaces are
bigger, they are intended to be used as a support for
human imagination, as a stepping stone to start looking at
things from a tree point of view maybe? As it turns out, plants have photosensitive pigments on
their surface and they can feel blue sky and move towards
light. So I kept the color blue for the prototypes.
.
Initially, I started making these sculptures I call “Mental Spaces” as a mean to create tools to think with your hand. The original ones where small bowl like shapes filled with an intense blue, meant to “hold” the ideas, allowing you to manipulate them.