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GMU:BioArt WS15/(non)living and the lemon battery (view source)
Revision as of 18:00, 8 December 2015
, 8 December 2015→Electricity generated by interaction between organic and non organic elements
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A media artist group from RIXC has recently been working on Biotricity (RIXC 2012), a series of workshops and an art installation where the activity of bacteria enclosed in water tanks was used as a biological battery for transforming electrical current into sound. This artwork generated interesting results from the behavior of bacteria, which in the nighttime showed less activity and during the daytime more activity. Since the activity of the bacteria were transformed into electrical signals, which, in turn, were converted into sound, the final product – a real-time sound piece – had a biological rhythm. | A media artist group from RIXC has recently been working on Biotricity (RIXC 2012), a series of workshops and an art installation where the activity of bacteria enclosed in water tanks was used as a biological battery for transforming electrical current into sound. This artwork generated interesting results from the behavior of bacteria, which in the nighttime showed less activity and during the daytime more activity. Since the activity of the bacteria were transformed into electrical signals, which, in turn, were converted into sound, the final product – a real-time sound piece – had a biological rhythm. | ||
The most simple interaction between organic and non organic elements could be described by lemon battery (Fig. 2.), which is similar to Voltaic Pile and has two electrodes of different metals – zinc and copper – placed within one small or several normal sized lemons. In lemon battery the copper serves as the positive electrode a piece of zinc as the negative electrode. Citric acid triggers the chemical reaction between negative and positive electrodes generating a small potential difference which in turn becomes an electrical energy (Edinformatics 2015). Electrical energy could also be produced by other plants, like for example potatoes. | |||
During the workshop on how to light up an LED using human bodies, I was discussing and demonstrating participants different techniques of getting voltage from organic elements1. All vegetables and fruits brought for the workshop were generating up to 1 V electricity through attached copper and zinc electrodes. A human body generated 2 V electric energy. During further experiments, while connecting chains of five fruits and vegetables would generate more than 4 V of electric energy and could light up an LED (Fig. 2b.). Similar experiment connecting seven people into the chain produced 2 V of electric energy, which was not enough to light up an LED. | |||
An LED could though be lit up with one human body. An example showing such an experiment is published by Youtube user with a nickname slider2732. Here the “battery” consists of human body, a couple of capacitors, resistor, a semi conductive stone like a ferrite or pyrite and a piece of aluminum.2 | |||
== Bioart: what is at stake / post-digital and post-media cultures == | == Bioart: what is at stake / post-digital and post-media cultures == | ||