 Thank you and good afternoon everyone. Welcome to the P is Powerful discussion. As you know we are facing an energy crisis and today we're going to have a conversation with Julie Freeman, the director of translating nature and Janis Eropolis, professor of engineering at Southampton University and myself I'm Rachel Armstrong, the professor of regenerative architecture at Catholic University of Lloven in Belgium and we're here to talk about a new thermoeconomics that the way that we use energy right now is not just destroying the planet but actually has created an innovation condition that really is almost like an arms race where essentially solutions are found simply by throwing more energy at them and the sources of energy that we have been using since the industrial revolution include fossil fuels which you know come from trapped energy of living things that have been fossilized within the ground through an incomplete decomposition process that happened around about a quarter of a billion years ago and the creatures that unlock that energy in the living world are microbes and so we're going to introduce a set of characters for you that help us think towards a new thermoeconomics and the reason that's important is because if we are not just going to reduce our present impacts but actually find a strategy and an approach that changes the way that we think about work with and use energy this is really what's going to be able to create a revolution in technical innovation in the way that we live and most importantly on our relationship with the planet so you'll see a set of slides behind us and all of these are coming from the work that we have collectively done together to explore what a platform might be that can help us find or start the conversations towards a new thermoeconomics and we'll go into details of those as the conversation unfolds. I also want to draw your attention to the installation Alice in the null sector and I don't know how many of you have seen that but it's a rather fascinating orb with no buttons that you can press and during the conversation you'll find out how you might interact with it in a future context please don't interact with it in that way during this festival so the round plastic machine looking flashing thing in the null sector is a prototype and a version a rendering of the technical platform that we're working towards so here she is this is Alice and Alice has a bit of a history. Alice means active living infrastructure controlled environment which really refers to a whole set of actors working together to generate electrical energy and that electrical energy as we will find is a low power energy but what's interesting about it is that it is more than just the provision of energy it also produces data and very importantly the transfer of electrons in the process of metabolism is creating chemical change and so this is a platform that starts to work towards a circular economy based on the metabolism of living things and critically it is a platform that exists within the carrying capacity of any site in which it is introduced so Alice comes from a progenitor project a project that was called the living architecture project and that started in 2016 and ran until 2019 and was a collaboration between five different groups from University of Newcastle, University of West of England at the time, Liquifer Systems Group, Explorer of Biotech, University of Trento and the Spanish National Research Council all working together to ask a question which was how can we sequence metabolism the metabolism that were locked in dead organisms in the fossil fuels that we use every day can we actually use the creativity of living metabolism and sequence them as if they were chemical apps so that we could produce energy and perform work that we imagined at the level of a household so this was the idea of having a living household and replacing your boiler let's say and and all the single stream utilities that exist in a house so water, air, electricity, gas all of these are piped into a home as a as a purified resource the living architecture project proposed that it could handle all of these kinds of infrastructure simultaneously based on the household waste and from this project which was successfully demonstrated as a proof of principle in 2019 we got together this incredible team of researchers so from translating nature University of Southampton and now the University of Catholic University of Lerwyn to look at how we can take this idea of metabolic sequencing to produce living qualities of energy those that were characteristic of Galvani and his twitchy frog legs experiments which exist within biology and how can we actually take these into a technical environment that could be used in all kinds of different contexts so Alice came out of this this question focused on the microbial fuel cell as the prime metabolic unit that is driving the energy production and the chemical transformation of the system and and then also took the electrons produced as data chemical transformation power and showed them to us using digital techniques and technologies that really helped us get an understanding of the potential of the platform so Alice is a demonstrator it's a prototype but it's also a visualisation system to help us think better into this space so we hope that this is the beginning of finding these new systems for a revolutionary thermoeconomics which is compatible with the energy use on the on the planet and so I want to first of all introduce Janice Iropolis and I would Janice I just really want you to have a chat about the microbial fuel cell which is something that you've taken and really pioneered to a new level of functionality which has made these kinds of prototypes possible thank you Rachel a wonderful introduction to the technology and the work that has has been done thus far and I'm going to talk more about the technical side of things of the microbial fuel cell so the Alice artifact that you will see at the now sector consists of 15 individual microbial fuel cells that's one particular architecture of microbial fuel cells the the state of the art where we've got the technology now is roughly a milliwatt for every five milliliters of wastewater that we're producing every every day so if you imagine if we managed to get this energy density down to or up to a milliwatt per milliliter then we can start thinking how we can scale up the technology so what we see with the Alice construction is this principle of multiple units connected together electrically but also hydraulically so that we can treat the waste as as Rachel mentioned we can we can treat the waste that's how the microbes work they take the organic biomass from waste and turn it into electricity directly we get those microbes put them on an electrode surface and then we take electrons out of their metabolism so the more efficient the the system is the more power we can get out we're aiming for that one milliwatt for every milliliter of waste water that we generate and then we can we can think about back gardens having buried systems we can think about toilets with microbial fuels systems behind the service space we can think about power generating wastewater treatment plans we can think about gadgets that allow us to pee in them and produce electricity either to charge our phone on the go or to power a GPS locator if we were stranded in the middle of nowhere so it's it's it's been a journey it's it's a technology we've been developing for 20 years and the the level of performance has advanced over the years we're very happy to see the system where it is now and very much looking to make further improvements and the only way to do that is by putting it in context that we can get people working with the technology understanding it and helping us progress in advance so brilliant thank you Janice but what's so special about pee because we've positioned urine as the next revolution in power generation in this particular talk so what's special about it well peace everywhere so we it's it is ubiquitous it is one of the reasons why we've we've thought about urine directly but of course the technology can work with municipal industrial wastewater but but urine is is is available wherever we have life it can be human urine can be animal urine we can have a farm wastewater feeding into the microbial fuel cells but there is the the fact that we're able to take a human excreta directly into this device and turn it into electricity there's there's something compelling about that there's a there's a lot of carbon in urine there is nitrogen of course there's potassium there's phosphorus magnesium these are elements that microbes like the ones you see on the slide like they they need those elements for their own growth and maintenance urine has all of that it also comes out at a nice warm temperature body temperature and nice ph so it's it's quite a quite a nice cocktail as a fuel for the for the microbes fantastic and those microbes they really make the most of that urine and turn it into as we said just earlier chemical transformation power electrical power but also data and this is where I'd like to introduce Julie Freeman who's a data artist because she's been able to help us tell part of the story of this new thermoeconomic platform by her incredible use of data art so Julie do you want to take us through as to how you approach the challenge that we gave you can yeah thanks Rachel so I do yeah I use a lot of data as an art material one of the things that fascinated me about this project it's not it's the idea of a little bit the idea of recycling ourselves because it feels like it's something that we don't do and it feels like that's one of the reasons that that this technology is seen to be maybe a bit like people don't want to touch it or it's a bit dirty there's something about urine that people are kind of a bit squeamish about so one of the the the big challenges is to to create work that is engaging and beautiful and suddenly has has has something that is attractive about it even though the fundamental ingredient it's something that we don't really want to be touching and engaging with all the time so the the data that's harnessed from the system is what we use to create the data animation that goes with the the physical structure the sort of sculpture of Alice and the animation looks at the different change in power from each of the microbial fuel cells it looks pH value looks at the flow rate of the of the feed stock that's going in and all of those different values are picked up and then sent to a server and the way that they're collected is through a small onboard computer that's in the in Alice itself and all of that is powered by the urine in in the system so it's like a self-powered artwork and when you're making make a lot of sort of digital artwork one of the things that I think as digital artists we need to consider is the power we're using so we're kind of part of this problem of making things that is consuming energy as well so to create a piece of work that is sort of power in itself is a is a statement a sort of standalone statement anyway but if you want to see there's an animation that goes with it if you want to see the sort of level of power that's being generated you can go online to alish alas-interface.eu and there's an there's a there's a data visualisation that sits over the artwork and you can check in there and you can look at which data is is being generated at any one time and you've got different perspectives such as stains like for microbes and other parameters that are interesting to play around with and some great music and there's a yeah there's a soundscape that goes with it as well which is actually playing in null sector but you can't hear it because of all the all the bass that's coming out of their sound system. So I just want to say that while alas is playful it's visually attractive and there's some great ideas that are being explored in the installation I mean you installed alas at the Victoria and Albert Museum in September which got a lot a lot of attention. Yeah I mean one part of the reason to make artwork about science like this is to get people engaged with it to get people talking about it to spark a conversation nearly every single person I spoke to at the V&A ended up saying wow I had no idea this was possible and that's part of that is you know if we've even getting people to talk about it and then they're sharing that message it's a way to make this kind of innovation and this technology become part of the infrastructures that we use in the future and really important that it's part of a general conversation and I think the the thing that we do want to emphasise is that although alas in itself is a an experimental prototype and demonstrator and a way of thinking through power being produced by microbes data and chemical transformation these technologies are also real and Yanis has been installing that's great Q in installing these microbial fuel cells in real world context do you want to tell us a bit about that Yanis? Sure thank you Rachel so the first example that you see here is the installation of Glastonbury music festival which we have been doing consecutively from 2015 and we've kind of scaled up the the system 2015 was a urinal for about 10 people 2016 2017 2019 was a urinal for 45 people so much more urine flowing through much more electricity being generated 2019 was the first example of the microbial fuel is connected to the lights inside the urinal directly no batteries required for energy storage so I was quite a breakthrough to do that during festival and the images you see now are from one of the field trials overseas this is a girls boarding school in rural Uganda where we installed a microbial fuel system to light up the the toilet one of the two toilet blocks at the boarding school which was previously unlit and so the the lights inside the cubicles would come on PIR every time somebody would walk in and then turn automatically off the light outside the toilet block was in an LDR so it was lit through the night or at sunset and then sunrise going off and so these are real examples evaluation examples that we need to facilitate to understand the limitations of the technology in those real environments and so we can we can then develop a better product which can be available for for general use and one one question we we often get Rachel if I may is how long these systems run for are the microbes kind of on their own life cycle do they do they need to be replaced so the example we can all relate with is our gut microflora we have our own microbes in our gut for for digestion and unless there's something seriously wrong we we never go in and replace them it's the same with with microbial fuel it says we we encourage microbes to grow and attach themselves on the electrode surface and for as long as we keep feeding them with fuel and in this case urine and the microbes will continue growing and they'll continue generating electricity so it can be very long term and I'm just going to say you one of the um you talked about the uses humanitarian uses of this kind of technology so not just um in so uh refugee camps whereas not just power the it's not distilling with the wastewater to give power but it's also sanitising the system as well correct one of the one of the sectors we have been thinking about is indeed refugee camps uh and emergency response and humanitarian kind of eight agencies because this is a big problem one of the one of the key challenges in refugee camps is what's what goes on at night so having having refugee camps better lit is a is a good safety net that emergency and kind of humanitarian aid agencies are thinking about and so this is a this is a system which treats the waste which is of secondary kind of concern but but of primary concern it provides that kind of light in which makes refugee camps safer I think it's important to stress that just because the field trials are taking place in places that are off grid and sites where the use of urine is acceptable because it's something that's available that these technologies actually also have implications for the way that we live too so if we think of p as power we need to think through what this platform is and what that would mean for us in the developed world if we were to incorporate a principle of recycling our bodily wastes as the basis of a household metabolic economic system and I think what's quite interesting about this technology is that it has a living technology which is the microbes and that microbes have been here way longer than we have and they are around 3.5 billion years old and bacteria in particular have made metabolism their specialty so if you give them enough of a challenge that microbes can certainly adapt to and invent in metabolic ways so in the last 10 years or so we've developed technologies that allow us to see microbes in ways that previously we couldn't see them before with 16s RNA probes and systems that can not only see individual bacteria which was what was happening in the 17th century with hook and then with pasta and cock but in the 21st century we can now see populations of microbes as ecosystems themselves and we know that those ecosystems are inside us as the human microbiome but they're also all around us in the microbiome of the built environment and in the urban microbiomes that are around our built spaces so if these technologies these metabolic technologies are around us everywhere and if they are in our bodies and then we have a relationship with these urine collecting and fecal collecting systems then we have a relationship with that technology and that technology is also an extension of us in some way and so that it might mean that there are different performances from household to household it might also mean that the microbes that we have inoculated into our homes that process different forms of waste need to be cared for by us and can have a relationship with us through the kinds of technologies and interfaces that Julie's been designing so that maybe and this is something that's in the online system that you can play with the microbial icons to actually feed the microbes in the laboratory with a with a with a nutrient or even slightly heat them with some lights and so that this relationship between human and microbiome can be interrogated through this platform because we know when our microbes are happy because they're making more electricity they're cleaning the water faster they're creating lots of different vitamins or detoxifying wastes so so there's something really interesting about a technology that's also living and this is yeah and this is and I think this also introduces ethical relations with our with the invention and the innovation into this space but I mean I I think it'd be really nice if we had I can imagine the EMF next EMF where we have some kind of gamification of you know donating your urine and seeing who is literally who is most powerful don't do that today yeah please don't piss on that but that you know having that in your home and as a family so getting to understand what your body is producing and what you can eat that changes the way that your body is producing waste is really a good way of learning about yourself about your family members about how how microbes can act and it's you know the more we understand about our planet at large on an organic level it's gotta be and I think in that way we become producers as well as consumers we always talk about energy consumption but you know can we actually participate in this process by the things that we do and need to do so maybe we can make it a date then in two years time to come back with a system which would allow us to see who's urine is the most powerful will it ring a bell yeah yeah so so you know essentially when we have a so we can think of the Alice system really as a kind of microbial cyborg you know potentially the first microbial cyborg it's soft innards maybe they're a brain maybe it's a gut maybe it's some kind of flesh if we think of the biofilm as an active entity that probably exists in its functional performance as a thing that we don't really have good words to describe yet but it's in relationship to technologies that we know and I can see that by changing maybe the materialities of the system so instead of having printed plastics that contain the microbial chambers with that are separated by ceramic plates that maybe we could have soft materials like aerogels or grown up bioprinting systems so that actually when we integrate all these different elements we're actually designing a new kind of organ for our home that does this multifunctionality of processing water generating electrical power and creating a whole range of metabolic transformations and I think that yeah the the last things I know that we're probably coming to the the end of the talk but I just want to say that I think that this is a real platform a platform that creates some insights into how we might be able to go forward differently and I think the things like setting a 12 volt limit on energy consumption not saying that we need 230 volts in every house maybe we can think of a 12 volt lifestyle forever 12 volt being the maximum of energy that that that we use it means that we may need to innovate in different ways for the kinds of things that we take for granted about how we do things in a household like washing our clothes or cooling things maybe we can use new materials for that and along with that 12 volt energy cap let's say that we can also understand that our bodies and our health can also be sensed by these systems because microbes are not just machines they are also sensors and that they can read environment much better than we can so there's a new opportunity here for really thinking about our bodies and environments and being able to bioremediate very strategically before we release anything beyond the household into the world and I think finally this really does give us some clues as to how a new thermo economics may be possible the economics being provided by a metabolism the way we live in the world the things that we need to exchange and that although we may be able to save some energy and put some energy by being able to create huge sums of energy and creating these huge inequalities that come with the way that we think economically and we perform technologically in the world that maybe this is a kinder softer more evenly distributed system than the ones that exist today so I think we'd like to invite you all to go to the the the null null yeah null sector have a look at Alice with through a microbial lens and see how you feel about its semi technical semi living status and whether this is something that you would like to care for in your home