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15/12/2020 Xinrui Li / Ariel

Chelsea college of arts

Based on the overall concept of previous projects, my research focuses on the post-digital era, the relationship between people and information, looking at emergence theory and the form of group that will be formed, which I believe involves a kind of concept of self-growth. We know that microalgae are micro-organisms with very simple cells that are photosynthetically autotrophic and need no more external nutrients than sunlight, water and carbon dioxide to survive and reproduce and that they are now being developed in many fields as an alternative source of energy.

In modern times, with the expansion of human activity, the global ecosystem is gradually being influenced and transformed by human, away from its purely natural state. Technological changes such as the emergence of synthetic biology and artificial intelligence have furthermore made it difficult to distinguish between ‘natural’ and ‘man-made’ in the current context.

The concept for this project is to merge the collective intelligence of humans and non-humans to deal with the ecological interaction between matter and living things. In the design, the traditional binary oppositions between natural and artificial, materialised and digital, human and non-human are dismantled and blurred, and the presentation of a new aesthetic and value-based attitude towards post-nature concepts in the digital context of the Anthropocene is explored in the context of ambiguity. This also constitutes my final brief for the entire unit1.

In the bathroom I have used some of the properties and techniques of Chlorella. As it is a photosynthetic autotroph, we can use the water in the bathroom and the carbon dioxide exhaled from people’s activities, as well as sunlight, as survival nutrients for the Chlorella.

I have also set up a water recycling system, which means that simple gravitational potential energy is used to reuse the waste-water after washing and bathing to flush the toilet, which is energy-free.

In terms of power supply, I refer to research at Uppsala University and Stanford University on the power supply of algae. When plants photosynthesise, chlorophyll breaks down not only water into hydrogen and oxygen, but also hydrogen into charged hydrogen ions and negatively charged electrons. At this point, an electric current is generated in the plant, which is then consumed for nothing. If this process of generating an electric current is controlled artificially, it is possible to accumulate electricity in the plant and provide people with the electricity they need for domestic and industrial use.

By setting up electrodes and associated devices at the nanoscale, algae cells can generate an electric current to power hot water and lighting in the bathroom.

So as you can see from the above, the bathroom is an energy-free system that requires people, algae and the bathroom itself to work together to achieve.

References

Huang, Q., Jiang, F., Wang, L. and Yang, C. (2017), “Design of Photobioreactors for Mass Cultivation of Photosynthetic Organisms”, Engineering, Elsevier BV, Vol. 3 No. 3, pp. 318–329.

Fath, B.D. (2018), Encyclopedia of Ecology, Elsevier, available at: (accessed 16 December 2020).

“Deriving solar power from jellyfish, algae, and bacteria”. (2010), Physics Today, AIP Publishing, available at:https://doi.org/10.1063/pt.5.024651.

“Energy 101: Algae-to-Fuel”. (n.d.). Energy.Gov, available at: https://www.energy.gov/eere/videos/energy-101-algae-fuel (accessed 16 December 2020).