testing ground for art & ecology
MAP
research
ongoing research programme

Machine Wilderness

About Machine Wilderness
Machine Wilderness is a platform organised by Zone2Source, together with Theun Karelse from FoAM, that brings together experts from many different disciplines and backgrounds to explore emerging hybrid ecologies where nature, technology and art intertwine. The emerging climate crisis and environmental damage show that our design processes underestimate the level of exposure of our landscapes to human activity. Our infrastructures, technologies and machines are not temporary visitors to our landscapes, they are permanent inhabitants.

Machine Wilderness is an arts and science programme that explores what design processes could look like if they take local landscapes as their starting point. How can our technologies relate to the subtleties and grace of natural populations, mineral flows, food chains and layers of communication? There is a focus on environmental robotics, or ‘entities’ as actors in shared habitats. What does their presence mean ecologically, culturally and sociologically, within a long-term view of interacting populations surfing collectively on the geological and meteorological currents that carry them. In Machine Wilderness, we set out to map the hybrid relationships between our technologies and landscapes through exhibitions, debates, workshops, residencies and expeditions.

Machine Wilderness was launched on the 2nd of November 2015 during a symposium at Artis Royal Zoo (see public programme, lectures and debates at www.machinewilderness.net).


Since the start of Machine Wilderness we organised the following programmes:

For more information, see the projectwebsite  www.machinewilderness.net
or read this interview with Regina Debatty in her blog We make Money not Art or this article in Engineering the Future
Machine Wilderness has been supported by Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie, Mondriaan Fonds, Stichting Doen, Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst, VSB Fonds