Photo and Credit: Espace pour la vie  

REGEN is a five-year interuniversity research-creation project at the intersection of design, digital art, biology, and mechanical engineering. Focusing on plant regeneration and its implications for artistic creation, the project investigates how adaptive artworks developed at the crossroads of biodesign, reinforcement learning (RL), and soft robotics can generate regenerative operations with, for, and from plants and their environments.

Regenerative design fosters the co-evolution of human systems with living systems while supporting biodiversity and planetary health. It draws on the adaptive capacities of ecosystems to create socio-environmental benefits for both human and more-than-human communities. In a context marked by ecological emergency and the ubiquity of technology,  research-creation can contribute rethinking dominant modes of material production and   activate new imaginaries in dialogue with scientific communities and broader publics.

The project hybridizes technological and biological processes to implement principles of circularity, resilience, and interdependence through situated artistic objects. By experimenting with soft, adaptive bio-objects capable of responding to their contexts and intervening beneficially within their immediate environments, the research  examines how processes such as plant growth, maintenance, and restoration, in relation to their surrounding ecosystems, can foster embodied and sensory experiences that encourage lasting and ethical human engagement with the ecosystems they inhabit.

Adaptive and regenerative interactions between plants and their environments  create productive exchanges among theoretical questions, artistic practices, scientific frameworks, and public engagement. The project unfolds across prototyping, collective residencies, public workshops, open source tools, and more.