Welcome to Spika—a six-meter installation: both fortress and ecosystem. Sheltering deep-tech-enhanced biodiversity, it showcases a future where technology collaborates with nature to produce food and restore ecological balance.
Spika is also a portal to rethink energy, materials, and microbial life. These themes can be explored in a digital labyrinth: from hydroponic plants thriving with microbial partners, and microbe-powered LEDs, to rootless plants drawn to its biodiversity promoting surfaces.
Spika asks urgent questions: How can we improve human health through healthy microbiomes? How can we address food crises with nature’s intelligence? What if we design for pollinators’ rights? And what must we change—in diets, cities, or policies—to protect our food systems and habitats before it’s too late?
Welcome to Spika—a six-meter installation: both fortress and ecosystem. Sheltering deep-tech-enhanced biodiversity, it showcases a future where technology collaborates with nature to produce food and restore ecological balance.
Spika is also a portal to rethink energy, materials, and microbial life. These themes can be explored in a digital labyrinth: from hydroponic plants thriving with microbial partners, and microbe-powered LEDs, to rootless plants drawn to its biodiversity promoting surfaces.
Spika asks urgent questions: How can we improve human health through healthy microbiomes? How can we address food crises with nature’s intelligence? What if we design for pollinators’ rights? And what must we change—in diets, cities, or policies—to protect our food systems and habitats before it’s too late?
Spika is living—its inner ‘life-force’ is captured in real-time bioelectrical spikes generated by microbes at the base of its ecosystem.
Spika is living—its inner ‘life-force’ is captured in real-time bioelectrical spikes generated by microbes at the base of its ecosystem.
Spika is more than an installation—it is a living labyrinth and web of relationships where humans, microbes, plants, and technologies meet.
Expect boundaries to blur as you explore a range of themes within this labyrinth to encounter: sensors that help us decode strange languages, pollinators as both allies and agitators; cleaners as unsung mediators between what is accepted or rejected, and slime as a necessary connector between all bodies.
Spika’s individual themes invite you to reflect on what an ecosystem is made of—and consider what kind of diplomacy is needed for an ecological era of design and engineering, where every connection has positive and negative implications.
Click on elements to explore SPIKA
Our planet’s carbon-nitrogen imbalances are signs of a deeper disruption—one that harms ecosystems and human health. To restore balance, we must learn nature’s language: the chemistry of soil, the electricity of microbes, the unseen connections that sustain life. True innovation works with these systems, not just for human benefit, but for the entire web of life.
Our future is not given, it is negotiated. Change demands participation. Nature isn’t a resource—it’s a partner in creativity. Real transformation starts from the ground up, with choices that challenge the status quo, not conform to it.
Join us.
Reimagine cities where biodiversity thrives, where wilderness is respected, and where every action—yours included—helps rewrite the terms of our coexistence.
Join us.
Reimagine cities where biodiversity thrives, where wilderness is respected, and where every action—yours included—helps rewrite the terms of our coexistence.
1. Hydroponics, Microbial Community, and Mi-Hy
Spika’s hydroponics are not isolated systems but negotiations—a symbiotic triad of plants, microbes, and technology. The installation technology is based on a funded project called Microbial Hydroponics (Mi-Hy) that is developing a ‘prosthetic rhizosphere’ a gardened community of microbes that stand in for the natural microbial communities that exist in plants grown in soil, which make them tasty. In hydroponically grown plants these communities are missing.
Working with these same microbial communities the Mi-Hy framework can also transform wastewater into cleaned water with nutrients in solution (called catholyte) that is produced by the microbes in ‘living’ batteries called microbial fuel cells (MFCs). Here the metabolisms of electroactive microbes like Geobacter metabolize organic waste into electricity, nutrients and also other important plant factors that stimulate the production of biochemicals that make plants tasty. Mi-Hy’s circularity challenges industrial agriculture’s linear extraction process with an alternative: here, microbes can fix nitrogen that is easy for plants to use, while root exudates recruit microbial consortia that stabilize the acidity of the solution and defend against pathogens. Spika promotes encourages diverse comunities to colonise different parts of its structure—to become a living library for resilient urban farming. Spika’s innovation lies in its complex orchestration of many mutualistic relationships, in a soil-less environment where microbial metabolism is the driver of plant growth and biodiversity.
2. Microbial Fuel Cells
Spika’s microbial fuel cells (MFCs) work via collaboration, not extraction—where electroactive microbes such as Geobacter and Shewanella form biofilms that trade electrons within a circular economy of exchange. Their e-pili nanowires attach the electroactive biofilms to an electrode, where they metabolise organic wastes such as grey water, black water or urine into natural biofertiliser and bioelectricity.
This isn’t energy production—it’s energy conversation. The LEDs powered within Mi-Hy’s structure are a live translation of microbial dialogue, demonstrating how resources flow when waste is rethought and turned into new value. Unlike industrial systems that demand increasing amounts of power, the bioelectricity produced by MFCs work at a natural level and pace that builds relationships between ecosystems, forms resilient networks and generates power that operates within planetary limits.
3. Bioreceptive Panels
Spika’s bioreceptive panels are landing pads for seeds, spores and microbes that exist naturally in the local environment—textured surfaces form supportive surfaces that enables these airborne particles to germinate and thrive. The colonised panels are not passive substrates but actively recruit species that contribute to a healthy ecosystem: their micro-topographies metabolize urban pollutants. Like coral reefs, such diverse, rootless colonies accrete life over time—mosses stabilizing heavy metals, and algae fixing carbon dioxide into biomass, producing oxgyen in the process. Bioreceptive panels reject the sterility of “green walls,” instead embracing ecological succession: an evolving vertical landscape where pioneer species pave the way for complex communities. Their message? Architecture should invite nature’s creativity to add living detail to designed surfaces, not scrub it away.
4. Sensors
Spika’s sensors enable us to observe and decode the myriad exchanges that take place in an ecossytems. Electronic sensors detect changes in their environment that are produced by metabolising microbial consortia, convert them into electrical data that is decoded by a software to provide an overview of the activity within the sensor location. While some of Spika’s sensors are electronic, some like the biofilms can read and translate data in the environment directly, operating on nature’s terms—reading chemical gradients, redox potentials, and quorum-sensing molecules. Spika’s system’s intelligence lies in its capacity to combine electronic and microbial signals, refusing to simplify the complexity of the ecosystem and generating outputs that demanding human attention, and dialogue rather than top-down control.
5. Parasite
The parasite is Spika’s shadow architect—a slime mold-like entity that reconfigures materials and meaning. It evades capture, metabolising sampling tools and repurposing their metals into new building blocks for expanding Spika’s network intelligence. In the future-facing narrative, the parasite becomes a surgical editor: dismantling smartphones to harvest indium for root networks, weaving fungal threads through EV chassis to cradle herbs. Its ethos is metabolic alchemy—waste → resource → life. Unlike human engineers, the parasite works without blueprints, its “designs” emerging from chemotaxis and microbial exchange. The cleaners’ journals hint at its agenda: “The orbs aren’t growing. They’re unclenching.” A reminder that decay and creation are one process.
6. Pollinators
Spika’s pollinators are sovereign actors, which are ultimately granted legal personhood—bees claim bank vaults, wasp nests adorn cathedrals as “sovereign territories.” The city adapts to their needs: pollen corridors replace highways, masks filter allergens but permit pollination enabling humans and insects to comfortably coexist, where insects are catalysts for reengineering human infrastructure. The Floracoalition’s compromise—allergy management via electrostatic veils—reflects a hard truth: coexistence demands compromise. The future for a fertile, biodiverse Milan is not a blueprint, or a service but an ongoing negotiated treaty between human citizens and the creatures on which they depend.
7. Slime
Slime is Spika’s proto-language. In the future-facing narrative it glows intermittently, “harvesting” sunlight. As it matures it forms bridges between thorns, and can edit human made structures, and even human bodies themselves, like those of the cleaners—erasing scars, rewriting memories. Its ultimate role is to help the parasite achieve its aims by dissolving tech into bio-raw materials (e.g., smartphone screens → wildflower soil). This is not mucus but living logic—a mycelial-like network that computes via pH shifts and ion exchanges. The cleaners’ decision to stop mopping the slime marks a paradigm shift – where dirt transforms from enemy to ally. No longer something to eliminate, it becomes the building blocks for an alternative future beyond industrial extraction.
8. Cleaners
Cleaners are Spika’s unsung negotiators. Installment 1 shows them feeding the crack—crumbs as sacraments. Their journals (Installment 4) reveal a liturgy of observation: “What is cleaning if not deciding what stays?” By Installment 16, their tools evolve: limestone-secreting microbes, carbonized document mops. They mediate between human order and Spika’s chaos, their labour a quiet insurgency. Maria’s translucent arm (Final Entry) symbolizes their transformation: no longer erasing traces, but metabolizing them. In the future that follows cleaning is curation, the locus of decision making that decides what stays and what goes—a daily editing process that enables worlds to endure.