Weather engines / Dumbtronics with Marie Verdeil
Innovation often means more computing power, smaller chips and more raw materials! In line with Low-tech Magazine’s motto, Marie Verdeil is running a workshop on how we can design electronics based on regeneration.
The least sustainable components of most modern electronic circuits are the lithium battery and the microcontroller (the ‘brain’ of the device). The production of both components requires enormous quantities of raw materials; moreover, they are fragile, and a fault usually means that our device ends up as waste. Inspired by Low-tech Magazine’s sustainability motto – seeking inspiration in the past – Marie Verdeil (an artist and designer from Brussels) proposes taking another look at BEAM robotics: a branch of electronics from the 1990s for building ‘dumb’, analogue and simple circuits, viewed from a sustainability perspective. Just as windmills only turn when the wind blows, BEAM solar motors operate without batteries and their rhythm is dictated by the available energy and the weather. We’re going to build a simple analogue circuit and transform it into a moving sculpture powered by the sun or another energy-efficient source (potato battery, old AA battery, etc.). Would you like to find out more about this topic or Marie Verdeil’s work? On Thursday evening, ahead of Mutation, we’re organising a talk with Design Museum Gent where Marie will reveal all!
Translated from Dutch
