HacTe’s Post

🌍 The SOLAR SHARE: An Edible Solar Currency The Photon Harvesting in Plants and Biomolecules group at ICFO collaborates with artists through the EU’s "S+T+ARTS in the City" initiative. The Photon Harvesting in Plants and Biomolecules (PHPB) group led by ICFO Prof Nicoletta Liguori utilizes experimental and computational tools to explore the regulatory mechanisms governing sunlight harvesting in photosynthetic organisms. In what they see as an urgent priority for the environment, the group is working to engineer photosynthesis for a more sustainable future, a challenge that led them to participate in the EU’s S+T+ARTS in the CITY initiative, which brings artists into research centers through a residency program enhancing art-driven innovation. The residencies take place over 9 months, allowing time for the artists, the host institutes and local expert groups, in our case HacTe to converge and connect, followed by reflection and the development of the artwork. Artists from DISNOVATION.org took up the challenge, creating “THE SOLAR SHARE: An Edible Solar Currency”. This project challenges prevailing economic models with insights from sunlight-harvesting organisms, crucial to the metabolism of life on Earth. Staged as a one-square-meter microalgae bioreactor, the artwork foregrounds human energy dependence on photosynthesis and proposes harvested edible microalgae as a radical economic unit: The Solar Share. This unit is the biomass produced on one square meter of the Earth’s surface that day. This edible algae unit is a photosynthetic proof of work that can be consumed, exchanged, or stored as a currency. The Solar Share is an invitation to experience firsthand a transformative economic model that reintegrates human metabolism and energy needs with the actual new energy entering the Earth system as photosynthesis. The Solar Share provocatively recenters Earth’s metabolism in economics, redefining sustainability within planetary limits. 👉 https://lnkd.in/d8QbxXWx