Kasia Molga is a designer, artist, creative technologist and environmentalist in heart. She calls herself “design fusionist”. She reimagines our relationship with nature, while questioning our technologically mediated perception of the environment—and the technology itself. During her STARTS Residency she worked with the GROW Observatory. This H2020 project engages thousands of growers, scientists and others passionate about the land. Their objective is to discover together, using simple tools how to better manage soil and grow food, while contributing to vital scientific environmental monitoring. Kasia Molga working closely with Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner, a sound artist, aspired to help to create a meaningful data manifestation for Growers themselves, to generate output for their observation and based on that she created an audio/visual art piece which can represent soil and growers work to people who are not too close to the land. She created an artwork where the quality of the video and audio depends on the condition of the soil around the area. If the soil is dry or depleted one might get really pixilated images and cracking sounds. However, if the quality of soil is really good and everything grows smoothly the images and sounds are going to be smooth and beautiful.

In order to do so she explored data from various points of view (those of scientists, those of growers and those of the audience from outside). She travelled around Europe to meet the growers and scientists, collecting data, using their flower power sensors. In the meantime she studied various data sets – how they interact with each other and what story they could tell. In the word of Kasia Molga: “We do not want our piece to be just a pretty thing on the screen or the white wall gallery space, but we really are looking to create something with the function—be it well provided information aside the intriguing visualization or sonification or giving a “visible” presence to individual growers and their efforts.”

She also created another artwork (de)COMPOSITIONS working with earthworms. In a specially constructed container - a monolith - there are different types of soil, moist and fertile and also depleted and dry. The tiger earthworms, which occupy the "topsoil" layer of soils, work tirelessly to mix both these types of soil - reviving and fertilizing while at the same time recycling the remains of organic matter. Moisture sensors, placed across soils in the container(s), are continuously monitoring the soil conditions and their transition (thanks to the work of the earthworms) whilst bespoke piezo sensors surveil for activity and number of worms. These sensors influence the sound surrounding the container, which is distributed spatially across at least 4 speakers and slowly changes in time and space.

Read the final report Discover more on the blog