“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.
For reasons I haven't investigated yet, goats seem to be popular pharm animals. At the University of California at Davis, researchers have genetically modified a herd of goats to produce milk that could greatly enhance one's ability to fight off diarrhea-causing bacteria. At Texas A&M University, meanwhile, researchers are planning to turn goats into malaria vaccine factories. So while some are being corralled as eco-mowers-cum-performance artists into the feral voids of post-econopocalypse cities, these super-goats might someday be saving sick kids.
Perhaps the most famous are the BioSteel™ Goats, which were augmented with spider genes to produce milk containing silk protein. When processed, this “silk milk” is transformed into microfibers for use in making bullet-proof vests and medical sutures. When the company that created these goats went bankrupt, some were sent off “far away from people” to the old Plattsburgh Air Force Base in Plattsburgh, NY. There, they were housed in possibly the most restricted part of the base: inside a Cold War-era bunker that used to contain a sizable arsenal of nuclear bombs.
A couple ended up at the Canada Agriculture Museum. The status of the other goats appears to be unknown. And therein lies my recurrent spatial fantasies about transgenic goats.
Once their usefulness as test subjects has depleted — or their owners go bankrupt, the animals are redacted from the record and then sent to pastoral meadows. No sign anywhere on the property gives any hint as to their genetic peculiarities. There are no electric fences, no surveillance monitors, and no sirens for use when these quarantined transgenic storms escape and wreak havoc on the surrounding chromosomal landscape. Even the agents from the Department of Agriculture assigned to look after the herd are disguised as shepherds. So generically Arcadian are these pastures that genetic purists smelling for a pogrom will pass them by unaware. Sun-dappled they may be, but they're biogeographical dark spots under a perpetual total genomic eclipse.
As reported by CNN and other venues, Japanese scientists apparently want to recruit wild monkeys to measure radiation levels in Fukushima Prefecture, specifically in a mountainous area of the city of Minamisoma. Each animal will be outfitted with a collar containing a small radiation meter and a GPS transmitter. While aircrafts and satellites survey the terrain from above, these living geiger counters will be reading the landscape from the ground.
I'm immediately reminded here of a couple of things. First, the “video naturalist, landscape architect, museumologist” Sam Easterson has been strapping video cameras on to animals, enabling them “to guide us around their world; what they look at, what catches their attention, how they move through space, and how they relate to one another.”
When I posted about these four-legged cineastes some years ago—speculating, among other things, about techno-lupine vigilantes being released into national parks, where they'll sniff and snuff out invasive species mercilessly to preserve ecological purity—in the comments, Bryan Finoki went awesomely unhinged, writing:
These could be the new surveillance weapons of the future refugee, the Dr. Dolittle border-crosser, Africa's desperate asylum seekers, whom all need extra eyes in the field to watch out for those pesky minutemen and other not-so-nice clansmen and militias out hunting migrants for the sport of it. Cattle ranchers along the border could rig their roaming bulls with little cams to keep vigil and let border-crossers know when it is safe. Armadillo watch dogs.
Then again, this Sousveillance Zoo might not be deployed as countermeasures but rather used to augment weaponized geotextiles carpeting border hinterlands, demilitarized zones, involuntary parks and the perimeter parklands of gated communities. Whenever an aberrant activity is detected, butterflies will flutter forth aeolian alarms while wolves upload images to central command.
Perhaps a less malign critter from this cyborg bestiary is Liam Young's Electric Aurora.
This “flickering swarm of cybernetic fireflies play above the rooftops. As a mobile network infrastructure, the flock broadcasts its signal in a luminescent cloud, fading in and out over the city. Following the intensity of the electromagnetic spectrum, they map network strength across the sky.”
So at night, when you're out trawling for free wifi to check your Twitter timeline, or maybe to upload sensational videos of your protest camp being violently decamped by security forces, who are now trying to track you down on the burning streets, you simply look up and follow an iridescent trail to the nearest and most secure shimmering aurora.
When the expected environmental and social collapse have forced you and your family to take on a poultry concern as a way to supplement your now meagre income and measly diet, a stopgap measure to stave off utter destitution rather than a first step to a heroic life of self-sufficiency, surely there will be times when a bit of levity is needed to cut the drudgery of backyard pastoralism — and that's when you attach small beautiful kites to your chickens.
No longer just a regular plot tucked into a small corner of the city, Lincoln Park Zoo now zigzags through neighborhoods, suburban outlets and farmlands further afield. It even extends through the lake. To make this spaghettified zoo continuous, wildlife overpasses are spliced in.
Inner precincts once barren of biodiversity now teem with exotic species. From living rooms and kitchens, one can spy on the wildlife scampering around in their habitat enclosures. Day and night, the sonic ambience of jungles and savannas mingle with that of the city.
In the summer, the zoo's small herd of wildebeest undertake their annual migration, usually doing at least a few, dusty orbits. Then it's the elephants' turn. On rooftops, bleachers are erected for spectators to watch this natural spectacle, NASCAR-style.
While rare, animals do escape from time to time, and when that happens, news helicopters are dispatched immediately to follow the retrieval team. On the ground, reporters shadow their every move like wildlife filmmakers, even emulating the hushed timbre of David Attenborough during their live telecasts. It's always a top story, even if people aren't savagely attacked or an outbreak of a virulent disease isn't imminent.
“When we speak about weather pets, it's assumed that more meaningful forms of communication are being avoided. But is not the weather pet, in fact, a potent topic of cultural exchange - a bond that cuts through social distinction and economic class, that supersedes geological borders? Is not the weather pet the only truly tangible and meaningful thread that glues us all together? Is not the weather pet the only truly global issue? In truth, contemporary culture is addicted to weather pet information. We watch, read, and listen to weather pet reports across every medium of communication, from conventional print to real-time satellite images and Web cams. The weather pet channel provides round-the-clock, real-time meteorological zoological entertainment. Boredom is key. But boredom turns to melodrama when something out of the ordinary happens. Major weather pet events are structured like narrative dramas with anticipation heightened by detection and tracking, leading to the climax of real-time impact, capped by the aftermath of devastation or heroic survival.” — Diller + Scofidio
Here are some bits collected from the news ticker.
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There is a rhinoceros foraging on the banks of the Jones Falls River in Baltimore, Maryland.
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Is China becoming the global fashion capital of apiancouture?
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Kitteh urbanism I: “Scientists at the University of Illinois and the Illinois Natural History Survey recently attached radio transmitters to the adjustable collars of 18 pet and 24 feral cats in southeastern Champaign-Urbana and tracked the animals by truck and on foot for more than one year. The research, published in the Journal of Wildlife Management, shows that pet cats maintain a rather lazy existence: they spent 80 percent of their time resting. They devoted another 17 percent to low-activity pursuits such as grooming and only 3 percent to high-activity pursuits such as hunting. Unowned cats rested just 62 percent of the time and spent 14 percent, mostly at night, being highly active. Feral cats roamed far more widely than researchers had expected: up to 1,351 acres. In contrast, pet cats stayed within an average of about five acres of home.”
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Kitteh urbanism II: “Cats in several suburbs of Sydney will be ordered to curl up inside from dusk to dawn under a curfew that hopes to curb overnight attacks on native wildlife.”
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The Round Butte Selective Water Withdrawal Tower is “a 270′ underwater tower designed to perform multiple functions that assist challenged fish migration within a dammed river system.”
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On its second trial run this summer in Portland, Oregon, the Goats on Belmont project is “merging urban ecology experimentation with land management strategy and urban event.”
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On animal webcams: “From amateur setups near backyard bird nests to elaborate video systems chronicling the daily activities of sharks and polar bears, live webcams of animals show us birth, romance, skullduggery and death — animals behaving like animals 24/7. Birds of prey such as hawks and eagles are particularly popular, but with a little searching, you can watch the day-to-day goings-on of squirrels, meerkats, bears and even chickens.”
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Coyote at the Kitchen Door: Living with Wildlife in Suburbia by Stephen DeStefano: “In 2006, a coyote named Hal turned up in Central Park, evading park rangers and the NYPD for two whole days while underscoring the coyote’s increasing prevalence in the population-dense Northeast. As adaptable as they are surreptitious, coyotes particularly love the suburbs, where food is abundant and natural predators rare. For wildlife biologist DeStefano, the coyote is thus an inspirational symbol of nature’s resilience: a wild animal that has learned to thrive amid human sprawl without our consent and in spite of our perennial efforts to banish them from our midst. Narrating the travels of a plucky female coyote, the author explores humans’ evolving relationship with nature and the violence of our light, noise, and traffic. Along the way, he offers us a glimpse at his own restless spirit, born in the Boston suburbs but drawn to the desert Southwest; resentful of human wastefulness yet exhilarated by the open road. DeStefano’s willingness to probe his own ambivalence about the possibilities of coexistence with nature allows this selection to be about much more than just wild canines.”
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One of the stars of CSI: Wildlife is Carol Meteyer, a forensic veterinarian who “solves cases of mysterious wildlife death using advanced forensic skills to help prosecute people who kill animals in violation of federal law.”
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Fashioning Feathers, an exhibition that closed last month at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, but lives on as an online catalogue, looks into “the complex geographies of collection, production and consumption behind the making of such ‘feather fashions’. From the hunting and killing of birds in their natural habitats, to their processing in metropolitan plumage sweatshops and crafting by professional and amateur milliners, to their becoming adornments on the heads of women in Europe and North America.”
The Dirt: You say most of us, unwittingly, live in a zoopolis, a multi-layered place where the city meets the zoo, an overlap of human and animal geographies. How then can landscape architects design cities so that humans and different animal species can better co-exist? Do we even want to design cities so they are more livable for species like crows?
Lyanda Lynn Haupt: Oh, we definitely don’t want more crows! The role of the landscape architect in creating cities livable to creatures in the more-than-human world involves the opposite—working to structure human habitations that are more hospitable to a greater variety of native animals, and less hospitable to species such as crows. There is no one way to do this. For decades the wisdom from conservation biology has involved the preservation of large forest fragments—the bigger the better, and this was viewed as the most important thing. And it’s true—leaving remaining woodlands undisturbed is essential. But we’re learning that there are other elements at play—when we decrease impervious surfaces, increase the number of trees (especially native trees, including conifers where appropriate), and work to create a multilayered botanical structure, more native forest birds turn up, even in urban places.
Following is an excerpt from The Book of Scotlands by Momus, an outline of “one hundred and fifty-six Scotlands which currently do not exist anywhere. At a time when functional independence seems to be a real possibility for Scotland—and yet no one is quite sure what that means—a delirium of visions, realistic and absurd, is necessary.”
It is reprinted here with permission.
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Scotland 24
On October 14, 2035, Scotland was suddenly covered by a black swan.
The swan swanned down from space, where it had been flying largely unobserved (some astronomers, alerted to irregularities, had declared that certain stars were disappearing and reappearing).
The swan and Scotland were a very similar size and shape; an excellent match.
The swan draped itself over Scotland, covering part of the landmass with its black feathers and clinging to the coasts with its claws and beak.
Scotland became, of course, very dark and warm.
There was also a large quantity of swan dung falling in Ayrshire.
A state of emergency was initially declared, but soon people became calm.
Streetlights were left on night and day, but the extra electricity was more than made up for by the warmth of the swan's body. This reduced heating and insulation costs. And there was a very pleasant smell coming from the swan's body.
Satellite imagery showed Scots how the bird looked from space, and most agreed that the impression created was a good one. It was as if Scotland had draped itself in an expensive swan-feather coat.
Other nations were filled with admiration, and some jealousy.
Scotland's tourist industry boomed as visitors all over the world came to experience life under the swan and fill their lungs with the swan's pleasant perfume (lard, fir, salt).
Sometimes when you drove to the top of a mountainous road (like A93 to Braemar, or the Tornapress to Applecross Road) your car roof would scrape the swan's feathers and the bird would shuffle slightly to give you more room.
The swan was, on the whole, considerate. However, not all Scots were willing to respond in kind. Two days after its arrival, one small boy attempted to set the swan on fire by walking to the top of a mountain with a cigarette lighter. The swan's greased feathers failed to ignite, but the bird was irritated and pecked the boy fatally with its beak.
On Guy Fawkes Day the government imposed a strict fireworks ban, but some stray rockets tickled the swan's underbelly. Fortunately, it was asleep at the time.
The government asked the army to prepare a report on how to get rid of the swan, should the need arise. The army studied the problem and concluded that nothing should be done. All munitions fired at the swan would rebound on Scotland, with disastrous consequences.
The Americans also confirmed that their nuclear missiles would be useless against the black swan. CIA offers to destabilise the swan with dirty tricks were declined. Experiments with high and low frequency sound proved ineffective.
The swan mostly slept, or preened itself.
When everyone in Scotland was equipped with a decoy duck whistle and asked to blow it at a specific time, the swan cocked its head, but quickly lost interest.
Meanwhile, the black swan entered the mythology of Scotland. In films and songs and books it was portrayed as a luck charm, a saviour, a mascot.
The black swan became the official symbol of Scotland and appeared on the nation's flag. Everybody loved the black swan.
Then disaster struck. At 6:16 am on June 2, 2036, the swan suddenly departed.
Steadying itself with flapping wings, the black swan stood upright, craned its neck, stretched slightly, then—with a single cry—threw itself into the air, lifting off slowly, gradually gaining heigh, and disappearing into the sky. Soon it was lost in the blackness of space.
The sudden searing light was unbearable to Scots long accustomed to the comfort of darkness. Even though it was summer, Scotland felt icy cold. And the reassuring smell of the swan's soft black down had gone.
Scotland was in uproar, crestfallen.
At the Scottish parliament, the swan flag flew at half-mast, tugged by an unfamiliar wind. Only Ayrshire seemed happy.
Scots demanded the return of the swan or, failing that, suggested that a huge canopy of swan feathers be fitted over the nation like a trellis.
But the national budget wasn't enough, and with the imminent collapse of the swan tourism industry, things would only get worse.
Scotland entered a fifteen-year depression. Alcoholism grew rife as Scots struggled to cope with their loss. The national economy—not to mention the national ego—reached its lowest ebb.
And then the swan returned. Not to Scotland, but to New Zealand.
The black swan covered both the North and South islands. Its arrival was mostly welcomed by the locals.
In view of the Scottish experience, it was quickly decided that the swan should be physically secured. Its claws and beak were attached by reinforced cables to concrete blocks sunk deep into the soil and anchored, below, to the bedrock.
The plan seemed to work. The swan stayed put.
Many nostalgic Scots emigrated to New Zealand to be reunited with their beloved bird. The tourist industry boomed and New Zealand flourished.
Unfortunately, the captive black swan died, and its enormous corpse began to rot. The smell was awful. It lingered over New Zealand for months.
As far away as Tonga and Samoa, people are still wearing facemasks.
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Forthcoming next month is The Book of Japans, which, like The Book of Scotlands, is part of the Solutions series published by Sternberg Press.
No doubt you're already aware of the Animal Architecture Awards, and probably hard at work on your submission. But just in case, here's part of the brief:
Animal Architecture seeks exciting projects that engage the lives, minds and behaviors of our alternate, sometimes familiar companion species — insects, birds, mammals, fish and microorganisms — each one with unique ways of world-making. As our society re-examines its place in the global ecology Animal Architecture invites your critical and unpublished essays and projects to address how architecture can mediate and encourage multiple new ways of species learning and benefiting from each other — or as we say it here: to illustrate cospecies coshaping.
The deadline to register is 15 May 2011. Check the project's website for more information.
Meanwhile, here are the posts we've tagged with #faunaphilia since the last retrospective. Hopefully they'll provide some inspiration.
31)Fish Ladder: a new hydrological continuum for fish to bypass brackish rivers and reach their spawning grounds.
32)Walking Apiary: foreclosed houses turned into roving urban honey farms.
33)GPS Coyotes: a tour of the city in search of indigenous cyborg fauna.
Upon learning of the shortage of slaughterhouses due to proliferation of small, independent farms catering to locavores, Theo Jansen has transformed his unburdened beasts into nomadic abattoirs. Before only the salty air of the coast breezed through their skeletal frames, now pasture-raised livestock pass through its pneumatic innards, ensanguining and disemboweling them with precision. They can even milk cows.
Once the job is done, they set off to another homestead. They move through the landscapes with the same plodding calmness of a herd of elephant. Gentle creatures but with a violent and bloody vocation. If there's no appointment, they simply go out to pasture, grazing side by side with the comestibles. On weekends, they are corralled to the local farmer's market.
A comment left on our post on Australia's lyrebirds pointed us to the work of Nina Katchadourian, specifically Natural Car Alarms, a piece which was installed in 2002 at several locations around New York.
For the exhibit, the Brooklyn-based artist hacked the alarms of three cars to emit not the natural soundtrack of the city but the sonic pattern of real birds. This urban automotive flock, in other words, was “re-edited” into counter-lyrebirds.
Katchadourian writes: “Almost as important as matching the sounds was finding a patterning that mimicked the swooping cries and punctuated honks of the familiar six-tone siren. They also needed to be as loud, intrusive, obnoxious and surprising as the real thing. Ideally, I wanted to replicate some of the ambiguity I had experienced in the forest, where the urban and the natural were suddenly very continuous. Car alarms were after all a completely natural part of the Long Island City landscape where the piece would be shown.”
It's worth pointing out that one of the mimicked birds is actually a Superb Lyrebird. This copying of a copier could have set out the marvelous scenario, in which a lyrebird, upon hearing its own song converted into a car alarm, proceeded to mimic its reprocessed mating call. And then Katchadourian comes along again intent on making another remix.
One of those ubiquitous David Attenborough nature documentaries, called The Life of Birds, was playing in the background the other day. We weren't paying attention much until Attenborough focused his hushed voice on the Superb Lyrebird (Menura novaehollandiae). The name comes from its lyre-shaped plumage but surely it also refers to the male lyrebird's extraordinary ability to mimic almost any sound.
In the video embedded below, you can hear the bird mashups its own songs with that of other birds, such as the kookabura, and with man-made sounds — a camera shutter, another camera with a motor drive, a car alarm and chainsaws — all with amazing fidelity.
In other YouTube videos, you see the birds not on the floor of a real forest but enclosed in imitation surroundings at the zoo. You can also hear an expanded selection in their repertoire, which includes a jack hammer, a truck and a two-way radio. Dipping into the uncanny valley, that radio unnervingly comes with a replay of an analogue human voice.
Though these copied sounds came from a building site inside the zoo, it is nevertheless interesting to imagine that a similar soundtrack might have been playing in their home forests before being rescued and brought to their present cages. What visitors are listening to, then, are the narratives of their displacement, from their own voices. Their birdsongs are a kind a strange audio tour through environmental degradation and ecological extinction, something more direct and visceral than an exhibit label that most only glance at.
We are reminded here of Abraham, a pet of David Gissen's neighbors. Abraham is an African Grey Parrot, and it “squawks and squeeks” the sounds of their neighborhood: alarms on microwave ovens, screeching brakes of busses, the clanging of dishes, pots and pots. “In short, Abraham is a type of architectural and urban, living archive.”
Gissen later learns that African Grey Parrots “engage in a migratory pattern in Africa that extends from Liberia into the Sudan. In other words, Abraham’s species-kin move through some of the most troubling areas of the African continent in the very expression of their lives.”
From this, Gissen proposes what must be one of our absolute favorite speculative projects, the Socio-natural Archive.
[I]magine the naturalist, the geographer and the urban historian collectively capturing some of these birds, with the violence they have recorded, and bringing them into our urban zoos. One might imagine recoding the zoo, an archive that appears as a space of entertainment, as the representation of trans-continental war and conflict that it really is — those animals come from somewhere (usually an “elsewhere”). If we can imagine bringing Abraham’s brothers and sisters into a space where we might reflect on their song of urban and social destruction, we will hear things that will shock us, frighten us and make us consider the particular power and moving nature of archives that are part of life itself. When we consider the way non-human life is used as an archive, we realize that the social, the natural and the historical cannot be so easily divided.
It's hard to resist imagining future historians getting frustrated that the only first-hand accounts of our present wars are irretrievable from ancient data storage devices. So they turn amateur ornithologists, netting birds whose ancestors might have eavesdropped on the long ago conflict and then passed on their precious recordings to their offsprings, who then passed it on to the next generation, and so on. The signal after centuries of analogue downloading and uploading might be garbled, but perhaps there's enough there to reconstruct something, anything, a song being broadcast from deep time.
According to SciDev.Net, “swarming micro air vehicles” might soon be deployed over disaster areas to set up emergency wireless networks. Developed by scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, these flying robots will be “emitting a wireless signal” to establish “temporary radio or mobile communication networks to coordinate the search for survivors.”
“To distribute the vehicles effectively above a designated zone,” the article goes on, the research team “took inspiration from the way ants leave chemical trails to guide colonies to sources of food. Some of the vehicles hover in small circles linked to the location of rescuers and the other vehicles navigate around these markers.”
Elsewhere and earlier, we learned from Wired that, should dictators cut off their country from the internet, there are ways to restore connectivity to the populace. The U.S. military, for instance, has converted a cargo plane into an “airborne broadcasting center,” which “hypothetically” can boost Wi-Fi bars in bandwidth-denied areas to full strength. Any of the military's aircrafts can be converted into “cell towers in the sky” by attaching cellular pods to their wings or bellies.
To this arsenal, one can supposedly add the above flying robots. When the switch is turned off, they'll be released from their roost to swarm over revolutionary spaces to churn up an electromagnetic storm of Facebook schedules, retweets and Anderson Cooper's adoring visage.
But instead of hovering over disaster and conflict areas, how about urban and rural dead zones or in even more remote locales? And instead of drones and toy airplanes, you conscript pigeons, starlings and other flying weeds into a wi-fi network of cyborg fauna?
This network needn't be online all the time. The birds, after all, need some rest. So you simply let them loose, say, during rush hour to temporarily augment the network.
One imagines urban homesteaders converting a water tank into an aviary for their robo-starlings, next to their urban apiaries, urban chicken coops and urban farming tool shed. When they need to communicate with other urban homesteaders, either nearby or in another Detroit-like ruin pornscape, they only need to open the hatch. It's an artisanal wi-fi for networked off-grid living.
In order to lessen e-waste, each starling is equipped with a homing beacon, which will signal home should the animal die in flight. The homesteader simply has to trace the electronic beeps to collect the carcass and its outfittings. In the meantime, the beacon will be powered by the decaying organic matter.
Returning briefly to the topic of adaptively reused bomb craters, we stumbled upon the above image during a recent nighttime googlegasm. We can't see any signs of aquaculture, such as the jutting scaffolding of hatchery pens, but National Geographic does assure us that those craters “now serve as fishponds.”
These scars are still very much a part of the Vietnamese landscape. In Quang Binh and Vinh Linh provinces (just nort and south of the former demilatrized zone) the landscape resembles the face of the moon, with craters 30 to 50 feet in diameter and several yards deep.
Villagers have transformed the bomb craters into ponds for growing fish, a staple of the Vietnamese diet. In the south, bomb craters are favored sites for houses, with a replinashable source of protein at the doorstep.
One house here, another house there, and still more over there. Soon a city accretes around these calderas, its neighborhoods encircling, like atolls, a necklace of aqueous farmlands, while nearby streets ripple out like wavelets dissipating from the point of impact.
All unexploded ordnances may have long been found and disposed, the soil fully remediated of tactical herbicides and defoliants, all traces of war erased, except of course these bomb craters permanently embedded into the urban grid.
There's the mousetrap coffee table. By placing crumbs on top, perhaps left there during a canape-laden soiree, mice are attracted to climb up the hole in its over size leg. When sensors detect that a mouse is standing on the trapdoor in the center, this door opens. The unfortunate critter then falls into a microbial fuel cell housed underneath, where it gets digested and converted into energy to power the table's electronic parts.
Two kinds of infestation battling it out here: conspicuous consumption and vermins. And since there might be hundreds of rats hiding behind the walls, we really shouldn't feel sorry for the rats decomposing in the table's innards.
Meanwhile, there's also the fly-paper clock, which is powered by insects captured on its flypaper roller and digested by its own microbial fuel cell.
Another one is the fly stealing objet d'art, which you could hang on that central space on your wall reserved for an LCD jumbotron or a flea market-bought watercolor. Like the rest, this, too, is powered by a microbial fuel cell, which churns up dead flies picked up from a web spun by its resident spiders.
One wonders if, rather than bringing spiders to it, you could just bring it to the spiders, at whichever corner of the house they may be. In other words, you'll have an excuse to rearrange or even refurnish your entire living room to match the relocated mobile. Domestic boredom feeding on itself.
One also wonders about trapping larger preys that intrude on the domestic sphere, like wildcats and alligators that regularly stumble into the backyard of houses abutting their home range. In such cases, one could turn swimming pools into carnivorous pitcher plants. When a coyote climbs down to drink from its shallow water, it closes its tarp cover and drains the water along with the animal down to its microbial fuel cell. While this pool provide a similar form of dark entertainment as its interior counterparts, it ensures a more basic domestic need: a bubble of habitability amid the wilderness. It'd be perfect for a jungle homestead.
As protection against the feral, augmented trees snatch avian flu-infected birds using their cyborg branches.
The coyote seen roaming around Downtown Chicago the other night may not be one of the pack fitted with GPS devices and let loose around the city “to help deal with rats and mice,” but learning that there is actually such a pack sent us into ecstatic fits.
According to researchers involved in The Cook County, Illinois, Coyote Project, there are over 250 coyotes fitted with radio collars now roaming the streets, parks and backyards of the metropolitan area. This is “the largest urban study of coyotes in the world.”
We have tracked the coyotes day and night and located the collared coyotes more than 40,000 times. This allows us to peek into the hidden lives of urban coyotes. We use results from this unique project to answer common questions regarding coyotes in urban areas. Many aspects of coyote ecology have direct management implications. Although our study was focused on Cook County, Illinois, we believe the things we have learned about coyotes and people living together are indicative of many metropolitan areas in the Midwest and eastern United States.
Set up an API to give mobile software developers a way to access those radio pings, and there might be apps to track the coyotes' urban ramblings. Google Coyote®. And yes, we're betting that it will have an audience. It's no different than nature webcams and participatory GIS platforms, like Google Earth, both of which have sizeable user base. It's also not uncommon for a lot of people to have their only extended contact with the wilderness mediated virtually. Make the interface slick, and the data pornographers and Tufte zombie acolytes will come in droves.
Develop it into an iPhone app, and you have the makings of an urban safari fad, as popular as birdwatching or urban GPS-tagged fruit harvesting. And to make it more interesting, that is, to approximate the conditions of a Serengeti safari, dial down the app's locative precision. Instead of giving you exact coordinates, it only tells you that the coyote is roaming somewhere in Hyde Park.
Touring the city in search of indigenous cyborg fauna.
1) David Bowen's Swarm, as described by Art in America, consists of “a plastic globe propped up by long rods attached to a wheeled platform, which moves erratically within a black circle on the floor. Its path...is determined by the progress of a swarm of flies captured inside the globe. A sensor attached to a microcontroller at the foot of this device translates the flies' aggregate movement into mechanical motion.”
2) A couple of days ago, Geoff Manaugh giddily reported that “a single-family home in California has been 'invaded' by bees—so much so that honey is now leaking from the electrical outlets, coming 'from a giant beehive behind the walls.'” After the bees, “honey-hungry ants” might soon arrive.
— now less unrelated:
In Walking Apiary, a foreclosed house is propped up by long rods attached to a wheeled platform, which moves erratically around an abandoned suburban development. Its path is determined not by the paved streets circling around empty lots but by the chaotic activities of bees that have colonized the house. Add more foreclosed houses droning with million of bees, and you have a roving urban honey farm.
It's an overwrought attempt at squishing Archigram into contemporary preoccupations with destabilized ecologies, unpaid mortgages and utopian food systems.
Instead of building a fishladder only long enough to let migrating fishes go around just a single dam, how about one that bypasses not just that one dam or all the dams on the river but the entire river itself?
Starting at the mouth of the river, this fish ladder loops and curlicues a new hydrological continuum, passing through forests and hills and even cities, doing arabesques around mountains, sometimes on stilts and sometimes tethered. Like an aqueduct staggering through the plains of Latium.
Sometimes it flows besides its parent river, which has been nearly desiccated by global warming, Aral Sea-style irrigations or over damming by energy gluttons from faraway Los Angeles and Phoenix. Awaiting the fishes at the end is a reservoir replicating their ancient spawning grounds.
Along the banks of this artificial river valley, this infrastructure of pure ethology, might be a series of public viewing areas from which to view the endangered spectacle of wild animal migration. And/or catch dinner.
18) A camera trap captures sublime scenes of wildlife escaping a wildfire and then returning to a devastated landscape. Also captures the firestorm itself.
19) The Animal Messaging Service is an alternative form of communication whereby Extreme Green Guerrillas “send messages internationally by hacking into the animal migration system.”
20) From the American Museum of Natural History, photographs of landscape facsimiles in various stages of recreation; creatures undressed or nearly dressed; ethology imprinted on a three-dimensional canvas; and exterior habitats crammed into architectural spaces.
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21) In Small Food Nation, miniature pigs, miniature spring lambs, miniature deer, miniature cattle and miniature other are reared alongside chickens in the backyard.
22) Take a toxic tour through Maryland's industrial poultry landscape.
28) Connected by flexible tubing to ports in a perimeter wall, the interior volumes of Chair I and Chair II are literally part of the outdoors, making them inhabitable by insects.
