"Aroussiak Gabrielian says she was inspired to create what is believed to be the world's first wearable farm after seeing what her body could provide for her newborn.
The project, Posthuman Habitats, is a vest or cloak that grows plants and crops using fertilizer from insects and human waste. The vests are currently on display in Beijing as part of an exhibition called Human (un)limited.
They are designed to provide sustenance for the wearer in a future world where climate change has degraded the soil and people are forced to flee floods and other climate impacts.
We're talking about herbs. We're talking about cabbage, radish, sorrel, lettuces. We've experimented with strawberries and even peanuts and mushrooms. I think we grew about 22 different crops on each cloak...
But the idea is that if you were to wear these, and this was the way that you would grow your food, eventually maybe this would become a habitat for even bigger creatures ... especially the pollinators...
The idea is that your urine would be captured via catheter filtered through a process called forward osmosis — which is developed by NASA technology that currently exists that is used in space, and delivered to the crops as irrigation.
So this would be kind of …. an easy irrigation and water system to tap into."
More information at CBC Radio. When asked "have you had people interested now in actually doing this?" her reply was "The work wasn't really produced to offer a solution."
This has to be right up there with some of the things that pass for art nowadays. First, if I wished to wear a garden, I couldn't produce enough to feed me more than a day or two. Besides, I might want to raise corn, but I'm thinking that eight foot stalks protruding from my body in all directions is probably going to require me to buy an extra airplane seat.
ReplyDeleteIt was really produced to offer a solution? You don't say!