BIO
Heather Barnett’sart practice engages with natural phenomena and complex systems. Working with live organisms, imaging technologies and playful pedagogies, her work explores how we observe, influence and understand the world around us. Recent work centres around nonhuman intelligence, collective behaviour and distributed knowledge systems, includingThe Physarum Experiments, an ongoing ‘collaboration’ with an intelligent slime mould;Animal Collectivescollaborative research with SHOAL Group at Swansea University; and a series of publicly sited collective interdisciplinary bio/social experiments, includingCrowd ControlandNodes and Networks.
www.heatherbarnett.co.uk@HeatherABarnett
Debra Solomonis a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam in the Urban Planning programme group. In her professional life as an artist working in the public space, she has carried out action research within several urban agriculture projects, developing expertise on the subjects of urban food forestry and urban soil-building. Her vision of urban public space as an ecologically coherent landscape posits a productive, radically greened and socio-natural city. As an action researcher, Solomon has collaborated since 2009 with local communities to produce food-bearing ecosystems in park-like food forests at public space locations in Amsterdam and The Hague. In 2010 she founded Urbaniahoeve Design Lab for Urban Agriculture, which in Dutch means “the city as our farmyard” and which developed examples of community-founded ecological (food-system) infrastructure. Using past and current projects as case studies, Solomon is pursuing a PhD on multispecies urbanism with professor Caroline Nevejan and professor Maria Kaika at the Amsterdam Institute of Social Science Research at the University of Amsterdam.
