Knowbotic research (KR+cF) - Yvonne Wilhelm, Alexander Tuchacek, Christian Huebler - is based in Cologne. With the partners of Westbank Industries and Tactile Technology and the support of Academy for Media Arts, KR+cF has founded "Mem_brane", a laboratory for media strategies. KR+cF has received major international Media Art Awards.

KR+cF devises a dynamic infrastructure for a Public Knowledge Space in which a dialogue about a potenial nature can take place. Here knowbots as hypothetical elements equipped with generative algorithms incorporate scientific, economic and political forces within the Antarctic Research and expose a confrontation with the dynamic complexities of Computer Aided Nature.

Recorded series of measured values represent natural conditions in the form of digitally coded data structures. For the purpose of these transformation processes, Antarctica is surveyed (in the deep sea as in the orbit, in its pack ice as in volcanic craters) by a formidable array of automatic measuring instruments which, installed and maintained by scientists, observe and record natural phenomena as an extension of perceptual organs. These measuring instruments divide the entirety of nature into pro-cessable information units. Their sensory capacities are highly specialised and focused on individual phenomena which are additionally broken down into space and time fragments to generate information output. Natural scientists transform exterritorialized nature into models, formulating functional mathematical equations to reflect system effects as they might take place in the reference nature. Nature becomes a concept.

The current scientific dialogue relies increasingly on reconstructed form of nature. Answers are no longer supplied by reference nature via the experiment, but by the medium, i. e. the computer. At the same time, the dialogue is popularied in the sense that it becomes generally accessible through public data networks.

The circle of participants in the dialogue widens. Reconstructed nature detaches itself from its technological synthesizing process. It becomes emancipated form its reference basis and assumes the role of an autonomous partner in the dialogue emerging as Computer Aided Nature.