Suitcase Science.

In Suitcase Science nature in itself is the new technology. Living systems are inhabited by organisms with complex forms of communication and information processing. Suitcase Science is an attempt to package these systems and tap into them in order to form new alliances between nature and technology.

Suitcase Science represents a turn from the Modernism's use of technology to control nature to a postmodern use of nature to enliven technology. By approaching living systems as technology Suitcase Science challenges traditional views of nature and suggests that new relationships to nature can be formed.

More concretely the Suitcase Science project investigates how living systems can be sustained in portable controlled ecological life support systems (CELSS) and how system parameters like environmental conditions, volatile organic compounds and electrophysiological activity can be intercepted and interpreted.

Suitcase Science is a project sprung out of the recently started Strange Eden Lab at the Interactive Institutes Art and Technology Program. Technological and material innovation has been at the forefront of the art and design discourse over the last decade. The Strange Eden Lab aims to couple technical and material innovations with new understandings of nature in order to explore various forms of symbiosis between art, technology and nature.

M. Bussien and E. Sjodin.