Human Power Plant

Human Powered Dredger

Dredging Colony Friesland -- The Movie

In late May we organised a manual dredging workshop in Drachten, the Netherlands. The aim was to calculate how many people would be needed to dredge out the province and the whole country by hand. Here are the results. 

Video Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen

Human Power Plant (1.2): Work Songs

Video of the prototype in Antwerp. Made by Laura Zuallaert.

Everybody's talking about sustainable energy, but what is it exactly? And how does it sound? We try to answer these questions with the newest version of our prototype Human Power Plant, an off-the-grid renewable energy source that produces electricity, compressed air, and water under pressure.

In order to try and motivate people to generate their own power, we have equipped the human power plant with sound production. In earlier times, when physical labour was much more common than it is today in the industrialised world, people sang songs to increase work productivity, keep boredom at bay, or coordinate the actions of different workers. At the same time, these work songs were an outlet for humour, ridicule, and frustration.

Following the same logic, in the Human Power Plant every movement that produces energy now also produces sound. Consequently, each time the Human Power Plant is operated, a work song is composed. 

Human Power Plant 1.0

+ Human Power Plant 1.1

+ Human Power Plant 1.2

Zero Footprint Campus

How (Not) to Build a Zero Footprint Campus

The University of Utrecht wants to become entirely CO2-neutral by 2030. One of the strategies is to encourage the use of "green" energy sources. We calculated how much space is needed to power the campus with solar panels, store the energy, heat the buildings with locally grown wood, and more. The video is in Dutch with English subtitles.

Duurzame Campus. Kan dat? from Zero Footprint Campus on Vimeo.