Natalie and Ollie present their project at the Arcola theatre I’m reaction to question set by moderator Kasia Molga about how our ideas of sustainability are shifting.

“How we make sense of the complex Eco systems depends on our convergence intelligence.”
– N. Jeremijenko

In sharp contrast Ollie presented one project “Ant Ballet”, Natalie presented over ten. Ollie had obviously spent a long time detailing and fine tuning his project to build a machine that would make ants do what he wanted. After one year of effort his project culminated in a few days of almost failed experimentation. Conceptually it was very interesting and spoke about ideas of deterministic systems however it was in phase one and seemed to less answer the questions that were posed by the moderator. Amazing level of research and level of research into ants and pheromones used by ants including synthesising ant pheromones at great cost.

Natalie on other hand gave a glossary of her projects, from Mussel Choir, to Butterfly Bridge and Tree Office . Natalie’s amount and depth of work was obviously more extensive and showed progress from her early projects right the way through to current projects. Her ideas seemed to answer the more the question as to how we could adapt to problems of sustainability at the same time the question still stands how can we implement these ideas and why are they not being implemented.

As Kasia posited it is not always clear what the answers and solutions are but it is through experimentation and exploration that we lay a path towards solutions.