Microbiospherians

Abstract

Researchers and practitioners in the trading zone of art and science have been experimenting with human-made ecosystems involving a variety of biological, chemical, technical and aesthetic aspects. While microorganisms are always a part of such systems, most often they don't attract human attention. And if they are integrated into art and design projects, they are commonly put behind glass for safety or stability of the small ecosystems. However, in Biosphere 2, a large artificial glasshouse ecosystem built in the desert of Arizona, humans and microbes performed together with technical actors within the same environment. In this paper, we focus on Biosphere 2's ‘Mission One’ (1991–93), an ecological experiment in which eight humans, also called biospherians, together with other plant and animal species, were completely isolated in a large glasshouse from the biosphere of the Earth. Notwithstanding the lack of detailed information on specific microorganisms and their activity, we aim to analyse the environmental phenomena and human experiences in which microorganisms played an important role. Biosphere 2 provides the ideal context for such endeavour since its accelerated metabolic cycles made phenomena appear quickly and showed, just as fast, which interventions generated which effects. As a method of analysis we make use of the notion of ‘leverage points’ as places for inducing change in systems (Meadows 1999). We outline a range of physical, structural, informational and rule-based changes in systems ordered by efficacy. We discuss different attempts of leveraging Biosphere 2's ecosystem and identify leveraging options on different system levels, revealing the undeniable power of microbes, or microbiospherians, to steer ecosystem processes. Based on interviews we conducted with biospherian Mark Nelson, we discuss the challenges of leveraging from within Biosphere 2's ecosystem and how it led to a strong perception of metabolic connectedness among the human participants. Finally, we propose leveraging from within as an artistic strategy for intervening within ecosystems, and reflect on how microbiospherians challenge the order of leverage points.

Notes

1 The project name ‘Biosphere 2’ alludes to the evolution of our planet’s ‘Biosphere 1’. The term was first used by geologist Eduard Suess (1875) to describe the envelope of life forms on Earth and later by geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky ([1926] 1986) to refer to the thin layer in which life processes take place. The biosphere presumably stretches from the outer layer of Earth’s crust to a few kilometres into the atmosphere and is considered an almost closed system.

2 The report was ground-breaking because it pointed out the troubles humankind will suffer from under the predicted economic and population growth in combination with finite supplies of resources.

3 Environmental Microbiology or Microbial Ecology as an established research direction is relatively young. Due to the state of knowledge at the beginning of the 1990s, designers and scientists had to operate with larger black boxes than today, with the availability of more advanced molecular techniques, metagenomics and bioinformatics (Escobar-Zepeda et al 2015).

4 Nevertheless, the team of the Institute of Ecotechnics was well aware of the role of microorganisms in Biosphere 2’s ecological processes and acknowledged that they represented the largest biomass in the whole project.

5 ‘Mission Control’ continuously surveilled the project from outside and was responsible for the crew’s well-being. Their decisions were based on the biospherians’ experiences from inside, information provided by the Nerve apparatus and advice from external scientific advisors.

6 Astronauts, from the modules of spaceships or space stations, intensely grasp the vastness, richness and wonders of planet Earth as a huge, but extremely fragile living environment (White 1987).

7 Indeed, Columbia University eliminated humans from the ecosystem when they took over the project in 1996 (Nelson 2018: position 3,679).

8 The global impact of sub-microscopic entities proves to be even bigger than expected during the final revisions of this article in the first weeks of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020 (although a virus is not considered a living entity like a microorganism).