New Year Café des Sciences: IoT & Organic Waste

By Percy Chen, Junior Project Manager Art-Science

All of past Café des Sciences lecture event pages

Started exactly one year ago in January 2019, Café des Sciences is a format at swissnex China offering a monthly platform for scientists, start-ups, and artists with Swiss background to present their projects and connect with the local community. The lectures aim to provide a casual setting in which speakers can present their works and engage with the attendees in meaningful manners.

Twelve months later, the Café des Sciences series has garnered a solid track record — 12 events at 5 unique venues, 480 total attendees with 80 plus core community members, as well as 20 speakers on novel topics ranging from shadow banking, drone revolution, to VR, biosensors, and smart home technologies.

Therefore, on 9 January 2020, to formally wrap up a year worth of content and celebrate its success, the New Year Café des Sciences featured multiple past speakers for their project updates, a keynote presentation from Enwise CEO Stéphane Vernède, a live performance from Passepartout Duo, and a community award for those who have voluntarily shared their ideas, expertise, and time with this diverse and interactive group of people.

Past speakers presented in the New Year event include Ying Liu, Assistant Professor, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics and Alumna HEC Lausanne (Café des Sciences #1: Shadow Banking in China); Laurent Coulot, Co-founder and CEO of Insolight, a startup based at the EPFL Innovation Park in Lausanne, Switzerland (Café des Sciences #3: Looking Beyond the Horizon); Hao Hua, Associate Professor, Architecture at Southeast University, Doctor of Science ETH Zurich (Café des Sciences #7: From Architectural Anthropology to Digital Fabrication); Laura Couto Rosado, Swiss Artist and Designer, 2017 Residency at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Café des Sciences #8: Technical Spiral that We Inspire) and Xueying Mao, Biomedical Engineering Master ETH Zurich, Chief Representative of rqmicro AG China Office (Café des Sciences #10: Lives in Our Water). 

From left to right: Enwise CEO Stéphane Vernède; Percy Chen, Junior Project Manager at swissnex China; Cissy Sun, Head of Art-Science at swissnex China; Christopher Salvito from Passepartout ​Duo; and Felix Moesner, Science Consul & CEO at swissnex China

Ying Liu, Assistant Professor, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics and Alumna HEC Lausanne (Café des Sciences #1: Shadow Banking in China)

Laura Couto Rosado, Swiss Artist and Designer, 2017 Residency at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Café des Sciences #8: Technical Spiral that We Inspire)

After the updates from previous speakers, Stéphane Vernède, CEO at Enwise, shared the mechanism behind modular digester for organic waste: dry anaerobic digestion technology OSCAR and a real time IoT monitoring technology OTTO. His presentation really puts the issue of waste processing into perspective. For example, in 2018, China has produced 1,000,000,000 tons of organic waste, amounting to 1,500 Shanghai Tower put together in volume. In Shanghai alone, 9,500 tons of municipal organic waste are produced daily. Today we barely have the capacity to process the first 1,000 tons of waste. What is good, however, is on 1 July 2019, Shanghai has enforced waste sorting policy, taking its first step towards this serious matter.

“China’s war on trash is the world’s too.” concluded Stéphane after a long Q&A session where many people demonstrated strong interests in Enwise’s technology and waste processing issue in general.

Stéphane Vernède delivering the introduction

One of Stéphane’s slides showing the amount of organic waste China produces yearly.

Another slide on OSCAR and OTTO technologies

Christopher Salvito during his live performance

The next speaker is Christopher Salvito from Passepartout Duo, a music group comprised of himself and pianist ​Nicoletta Favari​. The​ musical events​ they create focus on reconsidering the modalities in which people listen to and connect with music and are cast from a wide range of aesthetics and disciplines. Their mission is to become ambassadors for contemporary music through performance, to cross cultural and aesthetic boundaries through interdisciplinary projects, and to be catalysts for the global mobility of art and artists.

Christopher went into details about their experience in North America and Europe: over a dozen artistic residency programs in USA, Canada, Italy, Spain, Lithuania, Finland, Iceland, and more nations. Their extensive travel gave them rich opportunities to collaborate with all different kinds of artists, such as dancers, visual artists, animators, as well as other musicians and composers. Recently, Passepartout Duo has done residency programs at Dimensions Art Centre in Chongqing, T3 Art District in Beijing, and currently they are among the artists in residence at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai.

As We Speak, the snare drum solo Christopher performed focuses on the relationship between recorded voice and music. A machine-like monotone female voice plays in the background, introducing itself as “Vicky”. At first, it speaks coherently, announcing its joy to be the chosen voice. Yet, very soon it realizes as the musical piece comes to an end, it too will cease to speak. It starts to glitch, producing repetitive noises, affirming itself, “I am alive”, and questioning itself right after, “Am I alive? Am I a live?” The 5-minute piece ends with prolonged reiterations of “Stop speaking”. The cold, monotone voice gives the statement a nebulous meaning. Is it questioning whether or not it will stop speaking? Is it lamenting the fact that it will stop speaking? Does it accept its fate towards the end? It is up to the audiences for interpretation.

Likewise, Christopher plays snare drum alongside the voice. Using drumsticks, jazz brush, snare string and his fingers, he compliments the voice with different timber and volume of sounds. The interaction between Christopher and the voice creates a constant feedback loop where one listens and reacts to the other, forming a true cybernetics system.

Christopher Salvito introducing his trips in Europe

Finally, the event finished with multiple community awards. As mentioned before, Café des Sciences lecture has gathered a solid core community. We wanted to award those who voluntarily contributed their time with us through constant participations. The award winners are Zhenyu Peng (10 CdS attended), Xueying Mao (7 attended), Jina Zhu (7), and John Evans (6). We would like to thank you for sticking with us and shaping this series for the better!

Felix Moesner, Science Consul & CEO at swissnex China, and John Evans with his community award

Felix Moesner, Science Consul & CEO at swissnex China, and Jina Zhu with her community award and iconic gesture

The New Year Café des Sciences started this year on a high note. In 2020, we plan to keep the current format of Café des Sciences and bring in more engaging topics. Thank you again for all those who have been involved in this project!

Stay tuned for the next event!

(For more event pictures from the night, please click here.)

Triple Parade Contemporary Jewelry Exhibition Opens in Shanghai

Contributed by Cissy SUN, Project Leader for Interdisciplinary & Special Projects

Under the theme “Three Times: Past, Present and Future”, the 4th Triple Parade Contemporary Jewelry Exhibition opened on 19 October at HOW Art Museum in Shanghai.  Featuring in Asia for the first time, the exhibition presented a selection of 500 pieces of artworks by nearly 300 artists from 34 countries and regions, which included designs selected by open call, international galleries and curators. In addition, a special section featuring crossover designs from contemporary visual artists was presented, which created inspiring dialogues between fashion, art, design and innovation.  

Opening speech by Prof. LOU Yongqi, Dean of Design and Innovation Collage, Tongji University (Photo by Haley LU)

The project was presented jointly by Design and Innovation Collage of Tongji University and HOW Art Museum, which consists of exhibition, symposium, lectures and workshops. The exhibition will last till 6 January 2019 and the public programs will be held during the exhibition period at both Tongji University and HOW Art Museum.

More:

http://tripleparade.org/tp2018/

http://www.howartmuseum.org/article/index/id/425

Official Pictures of the Exhibits

Field Re-mediations: Carbon

Contributed by Karolina Sobecka and Jamie Allen, Swiss-based artists-researchers behind the Field Remediations: Carbon project

Image: Carbon Collextion at CAC

Field Remediations: Carbon​ explores human and technological interactions with the carbon cycle, sampling the spectrum of material practices, opportunities and challenges associated with development of remission and Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs). The goal is to align the science-fiction of carbon capture with the science-fact of its current research and implementations. The fieldwork conducted in Switzerland, Canada and in Shanghai also populated the CARBON Collection of the Field Remediations Library, which was installed for ​the ​Machines are not alone​ exhibition at Chronus Art Center​.

The project was enabled by generous strategic support from swissnex. Our enormous thanks go to Felix and Rahel for providing us in the last minute with a means of transport for our group and a fantastic driver who expertly delivered us to every fieldwork location (a task not to be taken for granted in Shanghai). The project couldn’t have happened without it, plus we got to meet the wonderful swissnex team. And we also acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Art.

One of the highlights of our field visits in Shanghai was a visit to Professor Zhu Xinguang’s lab, and the Plant Systems Biology Group at the Chinese Science Academy​, where we learned about their efforts to engineer more ‘efficient’ rice. These and related bioengineering initiatives are designed to significantly increase agricultural crop yields, making them into ‘better’ carbon sinks. Dr. Xinguang is involved in a number of international collaborative research projects, in the works for years, that are showing promising, ifn tendentious, results. If we were to similarly engineer all industrial and large scale crops, they could create a global drawdown of carbon that would sequester much more atmospheric CO2 than currently, transforming the climate and its changes.

While in Shanghai our team also visited Shanghai Baosteel, one of the largest steel enterprises in the world, which is working to lower its CO2 emissions. Because of the chemical processes at the heart of steelmaking, the plant cannot completely cut its emissions, so it faces a dilemma that we all face on a planetary scale. In order for the plant to be ‘carbon neutral’, and in order for global CO2 emissions to reach net zero negative emission technologies are a necessity.

One less controversial negative emission technology is a technique developed by a Swiss startup Climeworks​, which we visited before our trip to China. The technique they use is known as Direct Air Capture (DAC), which is the extraction of CO2 from ambient air. Carbon dioxide in the air is very dilute (there are only around 400 molecules of CO2 in a million molecules of air), so extracting it was thought too costly to make these kinds of DAC techniques realistic. Today, several demonstration plants are in operation, and Climeworks is expecting to commercialize the technology, aiming to capture 1% of global carbon emissions by 2025.

We visited a coal-fired power plant with one of the first Carbon Capture demonstration plants. We learned about the carbon markets from the designers of Chinese carbon market standards, and from ‘carbon accountants’ who are working to develop emissions inventories. ​At the ​Carbon Capture and Storage Research Center at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University​ we ​learned about the recently opened Low Carbon College, which centers its education on low-carbon industry on three directions, low carbon engineering, carbon policy and carbon finance. This interdisciplinary approach follows from understanding of the technology as a complex sociotechnical system, which is exciting to see and learn from this experiment in structuring truly interdisciplinary, problem-led, technical education.

Our next phases include organizing, activating and expanding all the fascinating material collected, relationships developed and paths forged for new ways of thinking about the carbon cycle, with Chinese partners, and in China.

Image: Professor Zhu gave us a tour of his lab and discussed the benefits of engineering C4 into rice. One way he sees his work is as a kind of deep-time realignment of the of plants with the environment. Most earthly plants evolved when atmospheric conditions were very different, and we can now design a more optimal photosynthesis machine for today’s environment. The demand for crop productivity is projected against continuous population growth and changes in diet. “We need 50% more productivity,” he says. This is a promise that has purchase with Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other funding agencies. The project is a multinational collaboration developed spanning the last 10 years and funded by both private and state funds.

Image: The lab is trying to genetically engineer a C4 metabolic pathway into C3 plants, beginning with rice as a pilot plant species.

Image: On the lab’s farm outside Shanghai, the different tests can be scaled up to field experiments.

Image: Climeworks collectors in Switzerland, atop Hinwil waste recovery plant in Zurich.

Image: Lab setup at SJTU, Jiao Tong University, demonstrating three different mechanics of isolating CO2 form emission stream. The valve is our collection was part of this complicated setup that the PhD students were putting together.

Image: Dr Zhang Yongjie of Boasteel’s research division, describing a heat recovery prototype, one of the 7 approaches in which the plant can reduce its energy use. With its Paris Agreement commitment to lowering emissions, China started putting in place policies that put pressure on the industry to make improvements in efficiency. Baosteel’s average total CO2 emissions are 35.83 million ton/year. Its current mandate is to reduce emissions to 90% of this number by 2020.

Image: The entrance to the Baosteel power plant, north of Shanghai.

Image: The CO2 captured at the Baosteel site is ‘food grade’ quality, which means over 99% pure CO2. It is reused in the beverage industry - pumped into soda drinks that are bottled in Shanghai and sold all over Asia.