The SpreeBerlin Buoy is a speculative artistic–scientific prototype developed by Symbiotic Lab (Jakob Kukula) in collaboration with Alexander Mohr, Yazdan Verhagen, and students of the Tech Tales course at TU Berlin, led by Sara Reichert and Athena Grandis.
Conceived as both a narrative object and a future ecological interface, the buoy explores how rivers might communicate their conditions, needs, and presence within urban space.Currently exhibited at the Humboldt Labor, the buoy is not yet deployed in the water, but presented as an evolving research object and public imagination device.
Combining environmental sensing technologies, storytelling, and sculptural design, it proposes new ways of relating to the River Spree — not merely as infrastructure or resource, but as a living entity and potential political actor.
The long-term vision for the buoy is its future placement within the river itself, where it will gather and translate real-time ecological data into sensory experiences such as sound, light, and digital visualisations. In its current form, however, the buoy functions as a cultural and speculative artefact: a prototype for future relationships between technology, ecology, and more-than-human representation.