OPPORTUNITIES

There are opportunities for agrotech companies specializing in the development of agricultural technologies that are compostable or biodegradable, minimizing waste and environmental impact; technological firms that focus on the creation of hardware that is designed to have a minimal environmental footprint and can be integrated back into the earth without harm; waste management enterprises focusing on the transformation of electronic and plastic waste into useful materials for agricultural or technological purposes; companies specialized in green technologies aiming at powering agricultural technologies without contributing to pollution or waste; tech firms creating smart packaging solutions that integrate with digital systems to monitor freshness, reduce waste, and improve the supply chain’s efficiency and transparency.

KEYWORDS

VIDEO

Trend 1

Global warming

The climate undergoes radical changes, a hinge zone in time-space, in which our interior and exterior landscapes, local biota, and agricultural crops reconfigure and adapt to new realities: extreme temperatures, drought, flooding, wildfires.

Trend 3

Terra Mobilis

The moving earth and movement on earth are norms rather than exceptions. The mobility of environments, continental drifts, waste, and all living beings are a sure prerogative, which liquifies all dreams of enclosures. Wild seeds will blow with the wind.

Trend 5

Kinship

Despite the naming of our current geological epoch, the human is getting dispossessed as the center of it all. Not only giving space for more-than-human agencies but maybe reforming or reviving relations of love/caring between different species and matters.

Trend 2

Agriculture and Extinction

Agricultural industrialization, alongside its many innovations, carries multiple thick materializations of the past. Land dispossessions, privatization, eutrophication, and plantations are meeting the dizzy pollinating bee. Food systems cannot be disentangled from the attack on life itself. The 6th mass extinction – yes, we are experiencing it, and it has a sound and a smell, strangely familiar.

Trend 4

Hybrid Natures

A nature that spans from microplastics to pollinating machines, posing questions of what happens when we place technologies in the nearest intimacy with the life of others (non-humans as well as humans) and how we figure through the convergences of techno-euphoria.

Bio computing and sensing

Technology begins to assemble life itself. Beings, such as plants, fungi (mycelium networks), bacteria, or slime-mold are intelligent, sensible, and transport electronic information: with these species we begin to imagine another form of computing. Will unconventional computing alternate anthropocentric digitalism and provide an alternative to the rock-based hardware of today? What kind of sensibility will computing beings perform? How might this form of sensing provide new imaginaries and roles for the non-human in our food-cultures?

Materials

Organic materials offer decomposable potentials for a wide range of sectors. Fungi’s mycelium networks, for instance, functions as a binder that digests organic components such as agricultural waste, to create a solid structure that can be applied in a variety of sectors: architecture, textiles, interiors, soft robotics and more. Suggestions are made that fungal structures grow, build and repair themselves, additionally contain potentials to become computable sensors.

Culture

A cultural dominant thinking prevails, asserting that no being, object, or matter can meaningfully be separated—they coexist within and outside each other. There is an acknowledgment that the bird, the cow, or the soil possesses qualities and potential both as artists and environmental engineers. The reinstatement of ideas echoes through every aspect of existence; all objects, technologies, places, beings, and environments are alive and expressive, and intricately bound up with one another through time. Meals align with seasonal cycles and life cycles of other beings, singing is a resonance in the landscape of bio-machine humming, pigeon towers, the wind in the fields and human celebrations.

Non-human architectures

The agricultural landscapes look like cities for multispecies living, here and there a small town for swallows and pigeons, a little village of beehives or a city of caves for the compost making crustaceans. The fields are designed to host a diversity of species, some of them giving space for one another, like the beans that use corn as a climbing rod in the Mexican milpa. Once in a while we meet a little self repairing structure built with senseable mycelium architectures, beneath the structure grazing animals find shadow.

Biodiversity and Traditional Ecological Knowledges (TEK)

While Indigenous communities inhabit only a quarter of the world’s surface, they conserve around 80 percent of the world’s remaining biodiversity, and have been caretakers of the environment through generations. TEK expandes the mythology of modern technology, using soft, symbiotic living systems to harness the energy in the environment and using biodiversity as a building block for technology. TEK is furthermore connected to the spiritual and social fabric, passing on ecocultural knowledge through generations with ideas on kinship with nature, reciprocity and gratitude to ecosystems and its many living beings.

Variability and Invasive Friendships