Office and Farm for Bike (Urban Habitat Lab), 2008
Gallery 809, SAAG - Lethbridge, MST 4 Performance Art Festival, Calgary, AB
Office and Farm for Bike is an early iteration of Urban Habitat Lab, a self-sufficient, mobile research platform designed to foster sensory and ecological attunement within urban environments. Built from a modified bicycle, the lab operates through human-powered energy and low-tech systems, foregrounding sustainability, mobility, and embodied engagement as both method and ethics.
As the artist moves through neighbourhoods, the bicycle-laboratory functions simultaneously as workspace, archive, and field station; an “office” for observation and an experimental “farm” for cultivating attention to overlooked urban ecologies. Drawing on practices of DIY design, green consumerism, and participatory inquiry, the project invites passersby to interact with the living systems of the city and to reconsider their relationship to local habitats.
Rather than producing fixed data outputs, Office and Farm for Bike emphasizes process, presence, and exchange. The work reframes the city as a site of ongoing ecological conversation, positioning the artist as a facilitator of listening and shared discovery rather than an external observer. This project marks an early articulation of Andres’s long-term interest in citizen-led environmental sensing, mobile infrastructures, and more-than-human communication.