S+T+ARTS Regional Centers | Repairing the Present

Re-imagining City Nature | Challenge nº10

How might we learn to live with nature in the city of Hague?

Consortium Partner: In4Art

EU Green Deal:GD6 Preserving and protecting biodiversity

Problem Statement

The Dutch have always considered nature to be something that needs planning and design. It has brought much, but it is time to change to preserve and protect biodiversity and restore our relationship with nature. How can we re-examine the dominant paradigm around the making ability of nature in cities?

Keywords

Agency, Ownership, Adaptability, Biomimicry, Symbiosis, Senses, Biodiversity

Challenge Context

The city of The Hague is located at the centre of the Dutch metropolitan Randstad coast area, one of the most densely populated regions in Europe. Historically, The Hague and the wider region have always been threatened by the sea and challenged by the land. It has led to a dominant paradigm, in which we have come to see nature as a makeable construct. Now that the city is developing its environmental vision for 2040, there is an opportunity to change course by asking fundamental questions about matters of openness, interconnectedness, agency, diversity, and the identity of nature within cities.

This Repairing the Present Fellowship invites artists to rethink the way in which we can learn to live with those sides of nature which are beyond our sensory limits by using digital technology to understand the complexity of the ecological consequences of our choices. It asks how passion and compassion for nature in the city can be enhanced.

The goal is to develop future proof concepts, brought to fruition as prototypes that can act as tools that enable new worldviews and open doors to alternative ways of co-existing within the city of The Hague.

Fellowship Characteristics: network, opportunities, and expectations

The fellowship partners will be: 1/ Dutch engineering firm Witteveen+Bos, responsible for the environmental impact studies that support the 2040 environmental vision for The Hague, 2/ Europe’s leading technology incubator YES!Delft and 3/ S+T+ARTS Regional Centre In4Art. The artist will be granted access to the partners’ venues, expertise and technologies upon need and request. The LEG consists of 14 high-level experts from industry, science, public bodies, and the arts and will form the network the artist has access to. We search for proposals that address real-time digital technology, including but not limited to the use of immersive technologies, geofencing, gamification, sovereign identity and any other IoT or AI technologies.

The artist is expected to travel to the region to attend workshops, activities, or events or to conduct field research at least 4 times during the fellowship period. The artist is expected to deliver a presentable outcome of the fellowship in the form of a prototype which will be included in the final exhibition at MAXXI Rome and the innovation spill-over exhibition at ZKM Karlsruhe. Moreover, the artist is expected to produce and deliver a collectable outcome of the fellowship with an edition of at least 2 by the end of 2022 which will be included in the In4Art collection and possibly the Witteveen+Bos art collection.