MEMOIRS OF HEDERA
Memoirs of Hedera is a plant powered game that takes care of itself by informing the user of its needs for attention. It imagines a world where taking care of our electricity source (plants) becomes a small amount of enetertainment requiring human intervention. This game can only be played once every three days, can you keep it going?
The game is a simon says memory game. Every two to three days the microbial fuel
cells charge a capacitor which then releases enough power to run episode like sequences for the viewer to then remeber and replicate. The higher the number of leds that light up in a sequence determines your highscore.
If the batteries aka the plants are not taken care of they can die which leave the game unfuctional and wipes your game memory. Hence this encourages you to take care of it as you would take care of a house plant.
The Research
The project started with my interest in being able to extract energy from micro-organisms in nature. I experimented with creating microbial fuel cells using different mediums like soil, moss, mushrooms and algae water mixture.
My experiments led to me choosing to work with soil as it is most flexible and provided room for improvement in voltage output.
My next step included optimizing my output to be more than 0.5 volts. I focused on different factors related to the microbial fuel cells that can be changed such as including a zinc plate as anode instead of a zinc nail. Other experiments included adding more water and composting materials. This allowed the bacteria culture that is responsible for creating electricity to increase at faster rates. In the end a small battery cell could give us 1 volts and 1 milliamps.
After experimenting for weeks and weeks, the end result was so little and so surprising. The electricity output was only enough to charge one small led. Hence, instead of focusing on making a product using the energy from these cells I decided to focus more on displaying this contrast between battery size and output.
At first, I was wanting to create an overwhelming installation where the viewer would be surrounded by these battery cells, but the idea was far too abstract to expect the viewer to understand what was happening.
So I decieded to bring it back to a more everyday function, that being our everyday entertainment.
In this speculative reality, our everyday entertainment would be powered by biocell batteries. Since they are unable to provide to much power we would have to design games around this and use electrical components that use the least amount of electricity.
Hence I worked on creating a game using nothing more that just 4 leds and a microchip to minimize energy usage.
