Martina Huynh

"Can the frenzy for financial profit be turned into an obsession for environmental concerns?" With The Environmentalist Stock Exchange, Cream on Chrome shows a trading simulation where visitors metaphorically “invest” in species and ecosystem services. Each of these actions feeds into the simulation, causing the chosen species to thrive. The installation uses the language of stock markets to initiate a conversation about value systems.

The Media Gym is a pop-up installation facilitating conversation around the environmental footprint of digital media through the metaphor of the gym. Complemented with a special workout, it enables participants to literally feel the weight and energy consumption of their digital habits in a playful manner. Project done as artists-in-residence with Hogeschool van Amsterdam’s readership Creative Media for Social Change and with the support of the Faculty of Digital Media and Creative Industries.

Proxies on Trial is an interactive court performance where Globalisation is accused of consuming the future. Through questions appearing on their phones, the audience joins in as the Grand Jury, who will ultimately weigh the debts of Globalization and ponder over its responsibilities. What will Globalization say to defend itself?

Living Infrastructure proposes to merge our electricity and internet infrastructure underground with existing mycorrhizal networks to form a new symbiosis - to turn our inanimate cable infrastructure into a technically-augmented living organism that can grow, evolve and maintain itself. Instead of keeping ourselves busy with old modernist utopias like the 'smart city', can we envision different modalities of living together with our surrounding ecologies?

This interactive pop-up café invites visitors to experience two different basic income economies, whereby coffee is used to visualise the cash flow. One system provides a basis that is sufficient to meet all basic needs, the other provides a helping hand and assumes there is extra income to achieve a full (basic) income. The coffee metaphor is used as an accessible context to provide insight into a complex concept and to enter into conversations about money and politics.

Complex systems such as share trading arise from invisible (partly non-human) collective authorship, but act as autonomous entities. The notion of individual responsibility thus fades into the background. Have concepts like 'control' and 'responsibility' become obsolete as a result? 'Proxies on Trial' consists of a workshop and a performance in which objects are presented as suspects in a lawsuit that challenges abstract issues such as climate change and globalisation.