Sunjoo Lee presents a new iteration of Electric Garden, her ongoing artistic research on symbiotic relations between natural and digital systems. The work is an ecosystem where electrogenic bacteria living in the mud generate a small amount of electricity that powers a digital artwork. The plants and insects also play a vital role in sustaining the ecosystem. The installation also hosts clay vessels developed during a workshop where participants were invited to create mud vessels that foster cohabitation among living beings of different sizes and needs. Electric Garden challenges us to rethink how we produce and consume electricity attuning to the slow and dynamic rhythms of the more-than-human life that inhabits our grounds.
Sunjoo Lee is an interdisciplinary artist working across art, technology, and ecology, based in the Netherlands and South Korea. Her practice reimagines the use of electronics and digital tools beyond human-centred purposes, exploring more-than-human philosophy, emergence, biomimicry, symbiosis, and permacomputing.
She collaborates with biologists, ecologists, and engineers to conduct artistic research and create multimedia installations that promote hybridity between the biosphere and technosphere. Her current research Electric Garden is a living network of microbial fuel cells that “ferment” electricity, framing energy production as an emergent relationship between soil, microbes, plants, and machines.
Her work has been shown at venues including Ars Electronica Festival in Austria, and Kunstvereniging Diepenheim in the Netherlands. She is co-founder of the research collective Getbol Lab and currently an artist in residence at Creative Coding Utrecht.
Credits:
concept & research lead: Sunjoo Lee
electronics: Sunjoo Lee, Niels Gräber
engineering advice: Pim Swinkels
Supported by Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie
