ISLANDS OF THE DAY BEFORE is a project that has its origins along the fluvial systems of the City of Linz, but is networked globally through the TeleAgriCulture platform, across a growing number of nodes, projects and participants. It explores historical engagements with microbe-macro food ecologies and agricultural production in modern contexts

The title of this project is appropriated from Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before (1994), a novel about how subjective histories can shape our journeys in life. The Island of the Day Before uses urban farming innovation, gastronomy and microbial science as a way to interface the public with local fluvial ecologies, in reference to their previous historical entanglements. The project brings together several different approaches, using traditional and modern methods to address Post-Anthropocenic ecosystem recovery and health, through promoting empathy and agency within these systems. This approach aims to examine what we can learn through revisiting historical, pre-industrial approaches and engagements with agriculture and ecology.

In a wide sprawling approach that intersects Augmentation and Ecological Aesthetics, Art and Science practice, digital networks and communities, along with publicly engaged actions such as workshops, exhibitions and public dinners, this project aims to create new public engagements and empathy through creating subjective agency and discourses through a publicly orientated approach.

Our basic goals are: 

1. propose new methods for microbial rewilding through modified post-natural environments and bio-refinement that aim to reverse and repair existing metabolic rifts,

2. intersect rigorous scientific study, bio-digital innovation, environmental sensing and informatics with artistic production, farming, cooking and fermentation,

3. network this project within the TeleAgriCulture platform and community,

4. produce performative public engagements in the form of exhibitions, art+science dinners, talks, workshops and collaborative community engagements.

For more information please visit our project page : https://teleagriculture.org/iodb-website/