biohack // waag future labs

For an exciting three months I will be based Amsterdam in the Netherlands to undertake a short course called the Biohack Academy at the Waag Future Labsa. Ironically The Waag Future Labs are in one of the oldest buildings in Amsterdam. Before arrival I had assumed that Waag was an acronym but turns out it refers to weighing things because this used to be the location of the fairest scales in all of Amsterdam. This old building at various times has housed everything from masonry guilds to human anatomical dissections for public showcase (we can pretend the Rembrant was painted here). And now it houses Waag. An organisation rooted in at an old place but with a steadfast gaze towards creating a better future. "Oriented towards having a positive, lasting effect on our societies."

“Oriented towards having a positive, lasting effect on our societies”

— Waag

To contribute to the development of a sustainable and just society "Waag works in a trans-disciplinary team of designers, artists and scientists, utilising public research methods in the realms of technology and society. This is how Waag empowers as many people as possible to design an open, honest and inclusive future.”

Personally one motivator for this trip was to see, in peron, a transdisciplinary organisation like Waag functions and to think about how this model could be translated into the Australian context. Speaking of Oz, I also find it ironic that I have flown across the world from the Asia Pacific to discover that Waag is situated in Amsterdam's China town equivalent and to live opposite Java Island. Of course the unfortunate Dutch colonial history is to thank for that! Follow along here.

ideas // magnetic labyrinths

Termites are considered opponents to the anthropogenic built environment yet are accomplished architects and engineers of their own dwellings.

First pass information:

• Amitermes are the highly eusocial architects of ‘magnetic’ termite mounds of the Northern Territory, Australia, built as and named for their north-south oriented sails.

• Mound geometry built in response to and as modifiers of environmental abiotic stimuli including thermal oscillations, humidity, and potentially magnetic fields. Micro climatic engineering as a response to macro climatic influence.

• Biotic factors including pheromone production and deposition and respiration interplay with abiotic factors to generate collective, self-organised, mound building behaviours and influence mound formation.

• Stigmergy; global scale collective patterns emergent from locally driven individual behaviours. (note: appears to be multiple definitions)

• Incompletely understood mechanisms include pheromone templating through global advection and localised deposition, gradients of metabolic gases and biotremology.

• Sunlight as a source of radial asymmetry and cyclic asymmetric growth across time scales of days and years. Measure degree of north-south orientation at various latitudes in Amitermes mounds.

• Mound building behaviour disrupted by burial of magnets in opposition to earths magnetic field; suggesting some influence of compass mechanisms or nanoparticles may function in insect orientation.

• Mounds are pushed upwards due to subterranean foraging and storage of cut grass in outer chambers. Made of displaced sand adhered with saliva, and termite excreta.

• Mound lifecycle 100yrs. The life of the queen.

Exterior surface of termite mound NT, Australia, 2021. Pip Beale

Questions:

Can abiotic factors including temperature, light and magnetic fields be altered to influence mound building behaviour of Amitermes termites and generate structures with different forms?

Can biotic factors such as pheromone templating, vibrational communication, or metabolic gas gradients be augmented to generate divergent mound forms through influence on collective behaviour of termites?

Does the chemical composition of substrates influence mound formation and interaction with abiotic factors. Red sand of central desert contains high levels of iron, does this interfere with magnetoreception?

Select References

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3977-4_13

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1818759116

https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00317628

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1423242112

https://doi.org/10.1006/jtbi.2000.2010

https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.143347

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csbj.2020.08.012

illumination // visions

The earth spins on its axis and shows a new face to the sun’s light. Indiscriminately, the sun sending its electromagnetic radiation into the universe, illuminates this face with all its wrinkles to see which nocturnal beings have signed their name. To read the etchings of this past night on this new day. Which litter born, which leaf consumed. Which cactus flower, the day before a bud of soapy promise, now complete in its midnight liaison. A moth passes love notes to its neighbour.

a moth passes love notes to its neighbour

Coral reef fish sing a prismatic dawn chorus in spectral radiance. Giant clams rimmed with unblinking eyes yawn towards the light so their algal guests might bask. Below, leagues of tumbling waves and coursing flows wipe clean the reds so that little fish no longer see them. In this dark place predators make their own crimson search lights in draconian invisibilia. To their prey these deep-sea dragons are the stuff of myth. Unseen and unreal until the moment of death in dark embrace. 

Like those silvery small fry, our apparitions of the world are formed from what reflections and subtractions of light our eyes can sense. To us the ultraviolet tessellated conversation between insect and flower is silence. To them a clamorous beckoning call. Baby birds fill their mouths with infrared and we remain oblivious. They may grow to see the earth’s magnetic field, while the swift satellite eyes of mantis shrimp rove arrays in less time than a blink.

 baby birds fill their mouths with infrared

Meanwhile the subterranean happenings of fossorial life remain uninterrupted by this new brightness. Circadian rhythms of blind creatures follow their own score. Their eyes regressed to sensorial beginnings or their noses tactile eyes. They have escaped the rigid cycles of planets by burying themselves deep within one.

Seeing is to grasp at hints from the world and paint visions in our mind.

The hallucinations we assent to.

mitochondria // symbiosis

Each cell of our body is home to what once was another organism.

A bacterium, perhaps, who wrapped itself in our tissues and said I can do things for you, if you do this for me. Our fabric was soaked in this agreement and now we harness quantum processes in every cell to turn food into the chemical fuel of our bodies.

Passed mother to child, mother to child, these cells within cells are transcribed and rebuilt in each generation of cell in each generation of us from their own blueprint. Membrane within membrane within membrane with maternal memory for eternity.

Seated along cristae, each protein holds a bowl of potent molecular broth, takes a small sip, and passes it to their neighbour. Sharing in calm combustion. This passing pacifies electrons, as waves they pass through energetic hills, and ushers protons into a different space so that their movement along gradients can be harnessed and we can exist as we do.

sharing in calm combustion

It is often said that mitochondria have lost their ability to live freely but without them we wouldn’t live at all, so then who are we without this covenant?

Not only is every cell of our being a home but every surface a metropolis of cosmopolitan microorganisms. I think, I am my thoughts, but with more connections from my gut to my brain than my brain to the rest of my body, which thoughts are mine and which are responses to the cues of my tenants? Does it matter?

Perhaps our main mistake is drawing such rigid boundaries around ourselves, around our matter. We breathe the exhales of trees and they take ours and use that stale air to make towering trunks, plaster themselves in bark, bloom with flowers and bud fruits which we swallow, and use to thicken our skin, to bend at the waist, to plant another harvest.

Where is the boundary when each of our cells holds the DNA of another and when each of our personalities holds the whisper of a million? When the placenta which allows mothers to nourish babies in the womb and bring new human life into being is a skill taught to us by a virus?

Constant evolutionary unfolding may have taken us through millennia of iterations, but can we accept organisms enfolding into each other is also a part of the process?

Slicing through time each finger of the bio blob may appear as a separate entity but these fingers sign out the language of life while connected at the wrist. A clandestine entwining of two pinkies may fuse to forge new trajectories.

Eyes closed and fingers crossed is how we make a wish.

dynamism // mortality

What do jellyfish do with their time?

Rhythmic expansion and contraction of the bell of their body. In part by these indolent propulsive forces and in part by the tug and push of the currents, they drift through the oceans of their existence entangling prey in trailing tentacles.

They live there.

Dynamic and alive.

They, like us, exchange essential gases with their environment. They form cells, burn energy, replace lost parts. The soft jelly of the bell as security for when the waters in which they find themselves can no longer provide what they need.

The jelly stores oxygen.

Diffused there from the water when abundant, and ready to diffuse back when scarce, traversing through the living cells of the jelly fish in which the jelly is enveloped and where the gas will be consumed and embraced by the dynamic process we call life.

This exchange of gases.

Is this what defines being alive?

Deep inhale to provide our cells with the atoms of combustion that they need to change food into fuel and to drive our bodily machinery onward.

Obtained direct from the substrates, air or the water, in some creatures. Some with branching tunnels through their body to bring it close to where it is needed, right to the cell. Or it may pass through specialized surfaces in specialized structures in others. Gills or lungs. Bringing this gas close to transportation networks that channel it around for use, and out again at these same sites once consumed and transformed.

Exhaled. Atoms once free become free again.

“Exhaled. Atoms once free become free again.”

What happens when this process of capture, consumption, emancipation stops?

If it is the dynamism within a body that defines its life, is this, death?

The tiniest of creatures can challenge this thought.

Perhaps they should be called time travelers but they are more often known as water bears, or tardigrades. Microscopic, metabolizing, moving life.

If the water is sucked from a water bear, there is no sign of life, no consumption of oxygen. But if the water is returned, this desiccation reversed, then the tardigrade reanimates, once again alive and consuming.

So, it retains its potential for consumption and it has resisted decay in a state we would consider death in ourselves, but perhaps we should call a pause.

Then is it the equilibrium between capture and consumption of atoms and their liberation, that is the fragile state we call alive.

Imperfect equilibrium because try as we might in life we do decay.

We call it ageing to signify our understanding of its relationship to our linear concept of time. It is our inability to retain the dynamic associations between atoms as a consistent system.

A dance where some of the dancers, replaced with fresh understudies, begin to forget the steps.

But growth too is a departure from a consistent dance. As is development.

New dancers can be invited to the party.

There is a species of jellyfish that along with pulsing through the ocean has figured out how to escape death.

It does this not by stopping time. Not by preventing decay but by instead reversing growth.

It’s machinery marches backwards.

When external stressors are too much, rather than die, it simply returns to its juvenile form in an eternal oscillation between bell and polyp.

It starts life again.

Immortality by reversal.

Life in animal bodies is a process rather than a state. It is the current rather than the water.

The direction of this current in a particular moment may matter less than we think.