“Scientists have connected the brains of a pair of animals and allowed them to share sensory information,” reportsThe Guardian today. This is a “major step towards what the researchers call the world's first 'organic computer.'”
The US team fitted two rats with devices called brain-to-brain interfaces that let the animals collaborate on simple tasks to earn rewards, such as a drink of water.
In one radical demonstration of the technology, the scientists used the internet to link the brains of two rats separated by thousands of miles, with one in the researchers' lab at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and the other in Natal, Brazil.
This is “[l]iterally an Internet of Animals,” tweeted Anne Galloway.
Among many projects, including Vanessa Harden's Mouse Assisted Interplay (2010) and its associated speculative Mousematch social network, I'm reminded of Anna Flagg's Cuddlebot project in which simulant pets are turned into multi-touch devices.
As you can see in the video embedded above, this “haptic creature” [pdf] is no mere gesture sensor. It can physically react. For instance, “when a gentle touch is sensed, the servo motor moves the fur calmly and slowly up and down, similar to a restful breathing. When the more playful touch is sensed, the servo moves the fur quickly and eagerly in smaller bursts of excitement.”
Two things interest me here.
1) Just like with the Botanicus Interacticus and, to bring it up from the archives, the Mud Tub, the Cuddlebot offers a sensual alternative to the machinic sleekness of the standard touchscreen. When fingers press down on those glass surfaces, skin and nerves seem to melt away. Wrists deaden, as if paralyzed with Botox. Human touch has evolved over millions of years, but all the fine tuning might just end up for naught. And who knows what else is being suppressed and eventually smoothed away.
Whatever we may be surrendering to the glass (and to the Kinetic void), perhaps turning our domestic bestiary into a multi-touch critter network — actual organic living creatures, albeit cybernetics, rather than completely inorganic toys — might mitigate the loss. This might come with its own cost, but surely it would be worth it if the benefit is we all become Tilda Swintons.
A mission for you. Go outside, hold an animal to your breast. That is real warmth, not the glow of your screen. I typed this on a rabbit.
2) As with all technology stuff that I post here on Pruned, the technology itself is ultimately a secondary concern. My overriding interest is always their spatial effects: how they might form and inform spaces at all scales.
How might this envisioned form of cross-species relationship might physically manifest itself in the domestic sphere? Will this simply mean hoarding a litter of stray cats, augmented and networked, in your house or apartment? With a different species for each social network you signed up to, will our homes be biological hotspots as diverse as any zoo? All day and all night, the whole city will drone with an Amazonian din, convulsing like a colony of ants thickly carpeting the forest floor.
Where (and how) will the cloud nest otherwise?
You take your dog (or hyena) to the neighborhood park for a walk, and there it frolics with other beasts on the cybernetic meadow and through the ShrubPlugs. And pets are many-times cross-petted. Is everyone updating their Facebook timelines and flirting on Twitter?
You're on a stroll, but following you behind on the sidewalk and also hovering in the air, as though you were Snow White whistling a hypnotic melody, is the entire content of the zoo. You've got mail (and Tumblr updates, unread posts on Google Reader, new edits on Google Docs). You head into an Anthrozoo station, pick the cutest from the lot, and after a few rubs and caresses, it shivers its attached data packet in LOLmorse.
It was only a matter of time before someone turned household plants into a multi-touch interactive device, because now we have the Botanicus Interacticus.
Based on the sophisticated Touché sensing technology Botanicus Interacticus creates a magical experience through the non-invasive instrumentation of living plants. Aurora like particles are emitted around different plants, triggered and transformed by gestures and proximity between the human and the living organism. A range of plants such as a bamboo, an orchid, a snake plant and a custom build artificial one were explored, where each plant presented its unique interactive, visual and auditive character.
I'm utterly amazed at the possibility that soon I could be tweeting with orchids, even write blog posts such as this with maybe spider plants, their shaggy bodies and multi-plantlets collectively emitting a massive aurora with which you could manipulate with endless gestural patterns. Depending on how many social web accounts you tend to, your indoor garden might approximate a jungle.
But why simply turn them into mere keyboards and remote controls? Why not also turn them into “display” devices, thus opening up even more radical means of interaction and visualization, with spatial effects?
Each morning, you take a stroll in your back garden or hike up the fire escape to your roof garden past your neighbor's vertical garden or just get up of bed in your oxygen garden pod hurtling windowless through deep urban space (for this parallel world Botanicus Interacticus has turned every city into a jungle) to watch the foliage physically deforming and chemiluminescing the day's cluttered signals. You no longer pore over streams of text and images. Instead, you read landscapes.
It should be no surprise that due to their graphic qualities, parterres become fashionable again as landscape ornaments.
As always, you head over to the fruiting hedges, and see that a clump of berries has formed during the night. You've got mail. The tumorous looking ones have attachments, while the rotten ones have been flagged as spam. To open and read, simply pick them off. Pocket those you want saved; squish to delete.
The technology for interaction through taste hasn't yet been perfected, or perhaps such behavioral literacy still isn't widespread. As for smelling, that technology has matured. So, you stop by the rose bushes and smell the weather forecast. When a hurricane is on the way, the air has a certain pungency to it.
Before heading back in, you snatch one or two apples from your Netflix/YouTube/Bittorent orchard. (The fruit as data storage and cloud.) Slice or bite to begin play.
In the garden, then, is the future of ubiquitous computing, where the computer will be made invisible, made to disappear into the garden itself.
To the ever growing list of computer interfaces now infesting our bodies like viral prosthetic limbs, you can add another, one that's far less arthritic than a keyboard, less prosaic than a tablet/stylus combo, and while without that technolicious sheen of a multi-touch screen is nevertheless as immersive and unconventional as one can get.
By sloshing, squishing, pulling, punching, etc, in a tub of mud (yes, wet dirt), users control games, simulators, and expressive tools; interacting with a computer in a new, completely organic, way. Born out of a motivation to close the gap between our bodies and the digital world, the Mud Tub frees the traditional computer interaction model of it’s rigidity, allowing humans to use their highly developed sense of touch, and creative thinking skills in a more natural way.
Gerhardt further describes how this interface might work.
Where the Mud Tub differs from [other experimental interfaces] is its use of a richly textured organic substance that takes advantage of human ingenuity and complex sensory ability; pioneering a new open-ended interaction typology where prescriptive goals are centered around states, rather than specific user manipulation. I.e., instead of having a user click a mouse button with their pointer finger, or gesture with two fingers in a specific way, he or she is simply asked to create a state in the Mud Tub surface, which can be accomplished in any manner of ways, including digging, molding, pressing, piling, etc. This creates a “buffer” between physical user action and digital result that allows for user improvisation and makes the system inherently adaptable.
So can we soon tweet by playing in the mud? Our tweets will just be gibberish, meaning there won't be much difference from the norm.
When might we expect to be able to go to our neighborhood park, find a patch of wet or merely damp earth, plug in our iPad and update our blog, all the while using the soil for power?
Can we use our (muddy) backyard garden to create a digital 3D model of our next landscape project?
We're reminded here of David Gissen's chapter on mud in his marvelous book Subnature. Mud, he writes, is “a type of unstable ground that must be overcome in the construction of foundations. In the development of modern cities, rather than discussing mud as something wanted or desirable, it was identified as the product of poor drainage and ineffective engineering.” It “signifies a type of failed engineering” and “operates against modern concepts of circulation; it slows the city down like slush.”
[T]he development of ideas about mud is intimately related to the rise of modern economies, industrialization, urbanization, and the birth of the modern state. Mud has run counter to virtually all of these formations. When economic prospects went bad, in a sense, they turned into mud (or dust); urban routes were slowed, and mud infiltrated all manner of economic enterprises, from farms to mines.
It's interesting, then, that Gerhardt is using mud to facilitate communication, enable commerce and bridge distances. By lessening the disconnect between our physical bodies and our network identities, this mud liberates rather than bog us down. Rather than neutralize the city, mud is seen as engendering community, virtual or otherwise.
GlobalSoilMap.net is a project started by a consortium of soil scientists to create a digital soil survey map of the entire world. It's a wildly fantastic undertaking, one which aims to provide an easily accessible tool to address nothing less than the most challenging global issues of our time: food security, climate change, environmental degradation, water scarcity and threatened biodiversity.
As avowed addicts of soil maps, we couldn't resist posting some of the gorgeous maps from the site. The maps we have selected, however, are the fading, dusty, conventional kinds — probably those saved from disintegration in some corner filing cabinets of some windowless office of some civil servant and then scanned and archived to help produce the next generation maps.
Specifically, we chose the ones of Africa, because these beautiful abstractions of geology often mask less beguiling ground conditions. In the case of Zimbabwe, its soil maps provide an illustrative history lesson on its colonial past (white farmers settled on the most productive polygons while black farmers were gerrymandered to less productive tendrils and globules) and also on its post-colonial hangover (those same polygons, tendrils and globules are the sites of violent land redistributions under Mugabe). In the case of Ethiopia and Sudan: famine, drought-induced genocide and harrowing stories of displacement.
Once finished, the digital soil maps will be freely available and web-accessible.
Paul Torrens is someone after our hearts, for he has developed a realistic computer 3D model that can predict crowd behavior in various spatial configurations.
It can simulate, for instance, how people navigate through busy city streets, shoppers through urban shopping centers, and tourists through unfamiliar landscapes.
For the greenish, this has obvious practical applications. According to a press release from Arizona State University, “the project will develop simulations to explore avenues of sustainability in downtown settings, such as how cities can promote walking as an alternative to driving, and how pedestrian flow can be better integrated with transit-oriented development.”
Of course, you can also use the 3D model to simulate far less quotidian, obscenely more interesting scenarios.
“The goal of this project is to develop a reusable and behaviorally founded computer model of pedestrian movement and crowd behavior amid dense urban environments, to serve as a test-bed for experimentation,” says Torrens. “The idea is to use the model to test hypotheses, real-world plans and strategies that are not very easy, or are impossible to test in practice.”
Such as the following: 1) simulate how a crowd flees from a burning car toward a single evacuation point; 2) test out how a pathogen might be transmitted through a mobile pedestrian over a short period of time; 3) see how the existing urban grid facilitate or does not facilitate mass evacuation prior to a hurricane landfall or in the event of dirty bomb detonation; 4) design a mall which can compel customers to shop to the point of bankruptcy, to walk obliviously for miles and miles and miles, endlessly to the point of physical exhaustion and even death; 5) identify, if possible, the tell-tale signs of a peaceful crowd about to metamorphosize into a hellish mob; 6) determine how various urban typologies, such as plazas, parks, major arterial streets and banlieues, can be reconfigured in situ into a neutralizing force when crowds do become riotous; and 7) conversely, figure out how one could, through spatial manipulation, inflame a crowd, even a very small one, to set in motion a series of events that culminates into a full scale Revolution or just your average everyday Southeast Asian coup d'état — regime change through landscape architecture.
Or you quadruple the population of Chicago. How about 200 million? And into its historic Emerald Necklace system of parks, you drop an al-Qaeda sleeper cell, a pedophile, an Ebola patient, a migrant worker, a swarm of zombies, and Paris Hilton. Then grab a cold one, sit back and watch the landscape descend into chaos. It'll be better than any megablockbuster movie you'll see this summer.
Equally plausible, Chicago does not suffer total critical system failure. In fact, the built environment is surprisingly malleable, so very accommodating to a wide range of extreme radical transformations, that the city actually thrives during this catastrophe and in the end successfully expels the intruders. Far from being a vector of apocalypses, cities will save the world.
In any case, the resulting video from the simulation will be entered into a film festival near you.
On a return visit to the website of Forever Fernwood, which is one of the premier experimental sites in green burial in the U.S. and owned by Tyler Cassity — he with the young J.F.K. physiognomy and velvety vibrato (like a leopard's purr), and the fondness for hiring down-on-their-luck porn stars — we stumbled upon the photo below.
And its caption, which reads: “Fernwood uses GPS and GIS to collect and manage detailed information about graves on this site. Using this technology allows us to keep accurate records and link to digital LifeStories about people who are buried in natural burial areas while minimizing the impact on the land.”
So while your molecules may have long ago leeched deep into the lithosphere, recycled into migrating tectonic plates and supermountains, or expelled out into interstellar space, the site of your disintegration will forever remain recorded, precisely and accurately and more importantly to some, permanently. Uploaded and downloaded by generations of your offsprings in neverending, rhyming resurrections of unconscious memory. ESRI ArcView as digital ossuary.
Found a short AVI file while cleaning our archives. It's from Crowd IT, a utility tool for 3d Studio Max that can simulate very large crowds, thereby allowing you to make your computer generated landscapes, cities, and buildings seem more realistic, if so desired.
Probably there are better crowd-rendering tools out there, but for now, we are more interested in this particular movie and its complete lack of context. There is simply the crowd, following some sort of external parameters imposed by the designer, creating patterns and timelines.
And so we wonder: can you create a park without its accoutrements — no shrubs, no benches, no paths, no water features — but simply the pageantry of mass psychology? No tectonic elements to program activities or direct traffic, only a flat terrain and its mass ornament, self-organizing (or even self-destructing) under its own internal logic.
Or do they already exist? Are streets in a way already a parkless park? How about prison courtyards — where the built environment always plays secondary to group dynamics? People-watching as if your life depends on it, and it does.
Lastly, what will the crowd actually do in a real parkless park? What Busby Berkeley musical formations will thousands of people enact? And what would happen if I throw in a screaming man infected with Avian flu? Or confect a scene in which an al-Qaeda cell finds itself in the company of a pack of Texans? How about a pedophile or two? Would the crowd keep its distance or swarm around and stone them to death? Or how about a zombie?
