Happy jerk or depressed bacteria? Biodesign is the future, according to William Myers

What idiot could come up with that, one of the attendees wondered: that you can make electrical circuits by combining the DNA of an algae with that of a hamster? Just one question that comes to mind when walking around the Biodesign exhibition, on show in Rotterdam from 27 September to 5 January (2014). And then the answer is actually simple: an idiot. Or rather: an artist.

The future could well be bright, explains William Myers, the American who last year wrote the book BioDesign: Nature + Science + Creativity published by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In that book, of which the exhibition in Rotterdam is a small excerpt, he showcases a huge range of projects in which nature is the main builder: bridges, cities, shoes, packaging materials and algorithms to predict behaviour. Humans have only a modest role in them.

The exhibition has some great examples of what is already possible with bacteria and fungi: concrete that can repair itself by having bacteria sleeping in it that only come to life when water and air arrive via a crack. And that they thus defecate loam during that brief waking period, sealing the cracks, after which the bacteria go back to sleep.

Or packaging material made from mushrooms instead of Styrofoam. Or a bridge made by modelling roots of rubber trees to span a river gorge. A bridge that only gets stronger with age, rather than weaker.

All these projects start from a radically different way of thinking about worn-out concepts like 'sustainable' and 'nature-friendly'. Most strikingly, these other thoughts come from artists and designers. People who also think it is just plain fun and exciting that a table top made of moss can generate enough electricity to light the lamp on it. Or people who think that snails that eat paper make poo from which you can clay tiles. And that the snails with the best usable poop are therefore also the snails that French people love to eat as appetisers.

Many of the experiments, ideas and visions shown by Myers have not yet been worked out into profitable models. For the artists and designers, that is never a prerequisite either: for them, it is all about imagining the impossible. This gives the exhibition at the New Institute in Rotterdam something very positive. The whole thing exudes an optimism that we have lost in the Netherlands for some time.

I asked William Myers about why that optimism is so strong: "Maybe I'm a naive American, that I mainly call attention to the possibilities, and not the drawbacks. But I take it for granted that we need to look ahead anyway, and embrace the new. The sooner we develop positive applications and ideas, the better. Furthermore, humans are capable of turning every new thing into something evil anyway. You don't vorok that, but you can get a head start in the positive direction."

And what's the point of combining the DNA of that algae with that of that hamster? The creators had quite some trouble making that clear. There was no use for it yet, actually. So now it is still art. But that doesn't mean that anyone will be able to use it in the future.