The concept of the Anthropocene refers to a geological age where human activities have significantly impacted the planet. This project addresses the uncertainty between nature’s preservation and its exploitation by humanity. Inspired by reflections on the garden as a hybrid space between wild and cultivated nature, it seeks to reconceptualize the garden as a space where technology, art, and nature intertwine.
The fourth nature refers to a new kind of environment shaped by the flow of information and human technological interventions. It represents a hybrid space where the natural world and artificial systems intersect, creating landscapes that are neither entirely wild nor fully controlled. In this project, the fourth nature takes form as a distributed garden, connecting distant ecosystems through digital technologies and cybernetic organisms. This garden acts as a living experiment, investigating how humans can coexist with and care for these semi-natural environments in the context of the Anthropocene.
If the fourth nature is the environment, the cybryonts are the paradigmatic organisms that live in it. These hybrid entities function as semi-living ecosystems, integrating sensors, robotics, and mosses into a single organism. We plan to deploy them at two sites: one in Patagonia and the other in Lapland, where they will monitor the environmental conditions of native bipolar bryophytes.
During the month of june 2023, our team went to the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station. Affiliated with the University of Helsinki, the station allows researchers and students to stay there to study cultural and natural sciences in the northern region of Finland. The project acquired a residency of two weeks there, thanks to the finnish Bioart Society’s program Ars Bioarctica, which we used to observe and collect samples of bipolar bryophytes. We alternated between observations in situ to understand the mosses in interaction with their environment and laboratory observation. During this trip, we installed Cybryonts next to spots where we identified some of the bipolar mosses that interest us, with the help of a student in bryology and an expert in the field that we were lucky to encounter there.
Read our account of the residency here.
Places that we’ve visited or are going to visit:
- Montreal Botanical Garden, Quebec
- Kilpisjärvi, Finland
- Cape Horn (in spring 2025 !), Patagonia