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Glowria – A Kibu Talent Program project

Category

teaching

Date

May 29, 2014

Client

Kitchen Budapest

Link

Website

Glowria - a biolight experiment

A team of bio-artists, biologists and engineers joined forces to create useful and machine-like functionality of modified living organisms, to blur the distinction between artificial and natural. Their aim was to further develop the bio-light concept based on the use of gene-modified bacteria in order to create a sustainable light source. They envision sustainable lifeforms, plants, bacteria, etc. acting as information sources and functional parts of the human environment, be that indoors or outdoors.

The project was initiated as a continuation of the work started at “bio.display”, aiming at creating a dynamic display made of fluorescent bacteria, started by Ákos Maróy under an Artist in Residence program at The Arts & Genomics Center in Leiden, the Netherlands. The project was further developed in the Talent Program.

The bio.display functions as a personal monitor for your carbon footprint. The display is composed of a living, light-emitting bacteria culture, that reacts to your carbon footprint level. The bigger your footprint is, the more bacteria shall glow. The purpose of using bacteria in relation to climate change comes from recent research results saying that we will be able to use CO2 consuming bacteria in smart building materials.

These future applications are still under development, but they project a vision that they would like to address with the project: that is engineering biological systems as we now engineer technological systems, for human use, in the most sustainable form possible. Glowria’s display is an accessory for a future home, a monitor for a household’s or for an individual’s CO2 emitting activities, offsetted by glowing, smart bacteria. It calls the attention to our depleting life-style, but moreover, it offers a solution as well.

Glowria Team

  • Péter Kalmár
  • Tamás Koltai
  • Juli Laczkó
  • Guilherme Leick
  • Judit Pelikán
  • Balázs Tóth

Talent Mentors

  • Judit Boros
  • Attila Nemes

Supervisor

  •  Ákos Maróy