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Tung Han Wu  / Contact



Introduction

To summarize the concept of made by Frederick Jameson: it’s much easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. 
Although the economy is omnipresent in our daily lives, its is often regarded a boring, uninteresting and too complicated. People are not aware of the economic realities happen to them, and being dominated by the formality of it.

Ecotopia 

Ecotopia presents a fictional economic reality. Ecotopia sets the time in a pragmatic future with two main world rules that are different from the world we occupy.
In this world, a truly sustainable economy is functioning within the limits of our natural capital.

Ecotopia disciplined the usage of natural resources at average
bio-capacity. Therefore, there is a fixed amount of bio-capacity everyone has according to the planet each year, a parallel bio-credit system limiting resource usage for each individual.


 


Copyright © 2020
Tung Han Wu

Microbial Economy 




Scenario 

This new economic discipline has significantly affected the world. The over 50% decrease in material demand has managed to devastate the FMCG business, turning many countries into a true post-industrial society. Environmental- progressives collectively utilize their bio-capacity credit to maximize their material wants. They are now turning to synthetic bio-material for local manufacturing. They embrace synthetic biology as the tool for improving their lifestyle, lowering their resource consumption by growing their own inputs of materials. The new bottom-up microbial economy is rising.


In this microbial economy, living engineering is possible. Engineered microbes can turn simple ingredients such as water and sugar into materials with various mechanical properties. In addition, microbial material presents a true cradle to cradle manufacturing norm with near a hundred percent recycling rate. The aim of presenting this scenario serves two purposes. First, to provoke people if this is the manufacturing norm, the future should like if we want a truly sustainable plant? Second, shift the discussion of wealth creation from depleting natural resources to overlooked lifeforms.




Grow your own wealth 

This Bio-installation not only showcases the material cycle of the new manufacturing norm but also create banknotes out of the BC material during the process. The apparatus play with the correlation between the creation of “Material “and “wealth” simultaneously in the present and fictional spaces. Within the current economic reality, what is our relationship with wealth and natural resources, when economic growth can be viewed as an increase in the number of material resources converted to economic activity?









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