Stronghold, concept (2024)

Set in the Dutch dunes, Stronghold is a Cultural Center for Life and Death. Built on a monastic footprint, the structure will be community-owned and operated, while requiring minimal inputs to sustain itself. Currently in concept stage, Stronghold features spaces for residencies, retreats and workshops, cultural-educational publishing and event programming, a yoga studio and a restaurant that feeds on a permacultural garden.

Published in Real Review #17, our essay “Learning to Love the Standard Run” revisits the Club of Rome’s 1972 Limits to Growth model, showing how its “business-as-usual” trajectory has become reality. Rather than denying collapse, the essay advocates embracing limits, cultivating “Enoughness,” and building resilient, commons-based futures beyond extraction.

-> order Real Review #17

“Practices that renegotiate our relationship with death and the inevitability of our own bodily decay are there to teach us that everything is transient and part of a constant cycle of becoming and dissolving, from the cells in our bodies to our tech and our cathedrals; everything comes and goes. In light of this knowing, the desire to hold onto material objects or physical sensations is put into perspective.”

(from Fossils of the Anthropocene by Neo-Metabolism in Noia magazine #2: Reassemblage)

→ buy magazine
-> download article

For Sara Imari Walker’s talk in the context of Antikythera’s ‘Cognitive Infrastructures’ studio at CSM London, Neo-Metabolism designed the presentation. It lays lays out the principles and implications of her groundbreaking work on Assembly Theory, which offers a new, physics-based answer to the question “What is life?”. Sara explains life as the process that generates increasingly complex assemblages of information, encoded and passed on through matter. Following this definition, information-heavy technological systems such as AI can not be excluded from life.

-> watch ‘Recursive Worlds’

Living Systems, a practice for planetary architecture, urbanism, and technology aims to fundamentally reconstruct the architectural profession through applied research, integrative design, and alternative financing models. They develop approaches for human habitation that respect the planet's boundaries, serve the common good, sustain life at scale, and nourish the future. Neo-Metabolism created Living System's overall identity, from naming and profiling to producing visual assets and the site design.

→ travel to living.systems

Digital landscape for Living.Systems (2021)

Osmosis was a seasonal, full-spectrum food club, taking place around every solstice and equinox in 2023. About 20 people came together at our Amsterdam studio space for transcendent evenings of microdosing and artisanal foods and drinks, accompanied by ambient AV sets.

1x1 empowers people to make custom furniture, lighting, tools, and accessories with readily available materials. By providing 3d print files and assembly manuals, 1x1 enables the local production of circular products. This minimizes carbon footprint, and offers a resilient alternative to global supply chains. Neo-Metabolism advised on communication strategy during 1x1's launch phase, assisting with technical copywriting and scripting campaign reels.

→ visit 1x1.systems

Remote Control gives an audiovisual reality check with walks through cities, landscapes, and social settings. Chronicling the waste lands of late stage capitalism, this is an aesthetic enquiry into the pain points of civilization. Remote Control was initiated by Neo-Metabolism in collaboration with videographer Kurt Heuvens. Since the Russian invasion, Remote Control has collaborated with videographers and DJs from Ukraine on the ongoing series Ridne, with screenings at CTM Festival (Berlin), ICA (London) and Murmur (Amsterdam).

→ visit remotecontrol.club

Wordmark and site for Interspecies Library

Spells is a compendium of today’s most powerful AI image prompts. Neo-Metabolism produced the script for a successful fundraising campaign, and contributed multiple prompts and images, evoking the spirit of architectural ancestors from the Japanese Metabolist movement.

→ project site

Before joining Jean Paul Gaultier as creative director, Duran Lantink was known to destroy and repurpose the status items of late stage capitalism, turn them into sculptural assemblages of layered semiotics, and feed them back to the high fashion market. For the launch of the label's debut collection in 2021, Neo-Metabolism helped develop its overall identity, and took care of strategy, design, and production for Duran Lantink’s online presence, including an auctioning platform and unique mechanisms in support of long-term garment ownership.

Attrition vase and ashtray, industrial design comission for composite.nyc

For Voiz, Neo-Metabolism produced a growing collection of high-value NFTs as a community narrative and funding instrument. Voiz is a planetary justice DAO, channeling the critical energy of Gen Z towards a new wave of activism, financially and technologically empowered through web3 mechanism design. In collaboration with artist Jasper Griepink we also published an eco-fictional story about these SeedPods—hybrid eco-nano devices blending Indigenous knowledge and technology—that regenerate damaged ecosystems, and restore soils, waters, biodiversity, and planetary balance.

-> read ‘Vessels of Hope - A report on Seedpods’

Planetary Infrastructure as Resistance:
Solarpunk and Web3
This essay, published on Zora Zine in 2022, explores how web3’s decentralization, crypto-economics, and cypherpunk roots momentarily merged with solarpunk ideals. It highlights tensions between solarpunk’s ecological, collective vision and web3’s often market-driven ethos. While both embrace decentralization and resilience, solarpunk prioritizes a regenerative commons, whereas web3 risks replicating extractivist systems. Their intersection offers potential for reimagining equitable, sustainable infrastructures.

Founded in 2016, Real Review is a contemporary culture magazine dedicated to "what it means to live today". Since 2022, Neo-Metabolism is among the contributing editors. Shortly after, we supported with community strategy, the launch of the membership program and redesign of the website.

Real Review contributors include His Holiness Pope Francis, Virgil Abloh, Olafur Eliasson, Hito Steyerl, Chelsea Manning, Wolfgang Tillmans, Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Žižek, Extinction Rebellion, Stoya, Bifo Berardi, Cao Fei, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and many, many others.

→ visit real-review.org

Utopian Thinking in the Dark Times is a two-part research capsule offering reflections on utopian thought to understand its problematics, nuances, and possibilities. A thread running through the pieces published, is how ideas for a more liveable world can become reality, and how utopian imaginaries can be translated into practice. The series was initiated, edited, designed, and published by Neo-Metabolism in 2022.

→ Season 1
→ Season 2

Biosphere Solar makes solar panels without adhesive lamination, so they can be disassembles and repaired, and the precious materials can be reused. Neo-Metabolism supported in 2021, working on communication strategy, a pitch deck, product design, and visualisation.

HYACINTHE is an audiovisual installation by Matthew Lessner, that allow viewers to impact a film in real time through a neurofeedback interface. Viewers become conscious co-creators, sculpting the film experience with their mind. The project results from a year of intensive research and development, including footage from five sacred locations. We had the pleasure of hosting HYACINTHE in our Amsterdam studio in April 2023, with mind-expanding drinks provided by Leeway Tools.

“Instead of the fortress, there are numerous fortresses now, and various people have keys.”

Glif is the place where decentralized file storage and cryptocurrency interconnect. Instead of storing your files in a centrally governed cloud, imagine your data owned by you and stored safely by someone near you. Instead of trusting your company’s confidential documents to a single corporation, imagine it reliably stored with guaranteed longevity. In 2022, Neo-Metabolism produced the narrative and five avatars for a family of tools for the Filecoin Network.

-> take a closer look at Glif