The Mechabolic: Overview

The sculpture:

The Mechabolic project is a large-scale bio-imitative installation of hydrocarbon based fuel production, transformation and consumption. Our goal is to create a fantastical, bio-machine hybrid environment --a burlesque of the "synthetic metabolism" of machines-- recasting internal combustion engines and petroleum fuels as their parallel animal organs and plant generated carbohydrate foods.

As a physical sculpture, the Mechabolic will take the form of an exploded assembly of digestive and respiratory organs, laid out across the desert floor, and mashed up with their associated mechanical metabolic machines (i.e. internal combustion engines, refining gasifiers, anerobic digesters, liquefiers, process tanks, condensation towers, etc.). All features and functions will be rendered in the aesthetics of human anatomical illustration meets blown V-8 hot rod fetishism.

The Mechabolic will encase these hybrid bio-machine organs in a giant "dinosaur slug" trash scavenging creature- a creature which slithers across the desert in search of waste biomass trash to feed/fuel itself. All ingested trash will be converted to clean biomass foods/fuels using the simple technologies of gasification, anerobic digestion and Fischer Tropsch liquification. The Mechabolic will re-ingest the resulting foods/fuels to power its own locomotion as well as as a variety of high altitude fire effects.

Interactivity:

The Mechabolic invites participants to walk through the innards of an exploded metabolic animal and contribute their waste paper, wood, coffee grounds and food compost to the fuel making effort. Participants can watch all fuel/food processing through transparent process tanks and plumbing, as well as handle the feed and fuels at various points in the "refining" process. All in all, a fun house walk-through journey of machine digestion and respiration --from mouth to anus, oil well to gas tank, trash dumpster to carburetor plenum-- with all the interstitial fun and mysteries of organic chemistry implied therein.

The Mechabolic creature will also function as an odd sort of biological "gas station" in the middle of the desert, collecting, processing and dispensing biomass fuels to power "woodgas" converted art cars. The proposed project includes a series of monthly workshops this spring and summer to convert vehicle engines and generators to "woodgas" operation. These "Power Exchange" workshops will teach the building of simplified downdraft gasifiers, as recently demonstrated at the Shipyard, which produce a synthetic "natural gas-like" fuel from any solid waste biomass- a gaseous fuel that will run in any gas or diesel engine.

As such, the Mechabolic intends to become a future vision of the ubiquitous "pump n' munch" road side gas station/diner. But in this iteration, a fuel/food stop where artcars congregate to fill up on coffee grounds, chipped wood and pelletized trash, while people stroll through fuel making biological organs, and lounge in a rather unlikely V-8 powered, fire spewing, carbon sequestering, lung shaped terrarium- filled with orchids, ferns, terra preta bio-char, and you.

The Mechabolic Hypothesis:

Our intention with the Mechabolic is recast combustion machines and their related petroleum fuels --the foundations of our industrial energy economy-- as somewhat of a veiled project of artificial life. Where usually a dry technical problem is seen, we want to suggest that what is really at issue here is the the "third leg" of the grand human engineering project of replicating ourselves.

Artificial life is usually reckoned as a problem with two basic challenges- one physical and one cognitive. Mechanical engineering has broadly been the replication and expansion of the capabilities of the physical body. Computer science and AI the replication and expansion of our perceptual and cognitive abilities. What usually goes unmentioned is the similarly bio-imitative energy systems we synthesize to power our synthetic creatures. This metabolic artificial life project is seldom called out as such, but it is the core endeavor in the history of heat engine development, as well as the many fuels that have been refined and fought over to power them.

The biological metabolism of life is symbiotic relationship between sun, plants, animals, and atmosphere, with all combined together in a virtuous circle of photosynthesis and oxidative respiration. Curiously, 90% of the human produced energy on the planet follows from a similar bio-imitative project of metabolic artificial life, using synthetically refined "solar energy" hydrocarbons and various forms of heat engines to respirate them. Our current problem follows largely from feeding our mechanical animals with foods/fuels derived from the prehistoric solar energy (petroleum products), and not their contemporary sun derived parallels (terrestrial biomass).

The evolution of our artificial life machines, and particularly synthetic metabolic systems, has now progressed to a point where they are no longer trivial participants in the larger biosphere and atmosphere. Though Gaia has really been a cyborg entity since the beginnings of wide spread human agriculture, the fundamental cyborg nature of Gaia can no longer be ignored. We are not likely to go backwards to a light food/fuel footprint. Rather, we are likely to go forward with more thoughtful forms of synthetic metabolism- ones which more reasonably collaborate with and positively contribute to a progressively cyborg earth/atmosphere system.

This bio-imitative nature of our industrial metabolic machines, as well their intimate participation in the macro-carbon cycle of biological life, we are terming the "Mechabolic Hypothesis". We hope that recasting the energy economy in the terms of biological metabolism will highlight its systemic nature, as well as the great flexibility available in nearly all parts of the system.