If you enjoyed yesterday's mini film series on topiary robotics, you might also be interested in another line-up on garden machinery presented by Tuinbouw Technisch Atelier BV, a Dutch company (obviously) that advertises itself as “a leading supplier of equipment for handling and selection of young plants and other equipment for growers and industries.” At least for their most recent uploads, the videos are more slick, soundtracked with post-rock, and of higher quality, which make them not at all out of place in a Ron Fricke glorified slideshow, in the them-whacky-humans section.
This is their CombiFix, which is outfitted with a “unique vision selection system.” You can briefly see it from 0:27 reading the electromagnetic spectrum for glitches in these mobile, robot-readable gardens, or at least aberrations according to its programming.
The ways in which ornamental plants, vegetables and fruits have been standardized by way of, among other things, industrial efficiency, institutional regulations, globalization and capricious aesthetics, are endlessly fascinating to think about, so it would definitely be interesting to speculate how such machines and their computer vision will someday affect changes to our ornamentals and food. Will the future orange be redesigned to make it more readable to the LIDAR scanners of fruit-picking machines? Will tomatoes inscribe themselves with vegeglyphs, the agricultural variety of these home “machine-hieroglyphs”?
In any case, here's their FlexPlanter. The video is interrupted by a buyer raving about the machine, how “[b]efore, this process was done by many people” but “now 3 people are sufficient” and perhaps still “two additional persons” can be put out of work. So one second you're in reverie, and the next second you're skirting through issues of weighty importance, like migrant farm labor, immigration and the rural austerity diaspora. (As an aside, the urban youths escaping the econopocalyptic city, searching employment in ancestral farmsteads, only to find them overrun by agrobots, is a story worth fleshing out.)
Of course, I'd like to see these planters go mobile (sentient or simply autonomous), as a kind of Johnny Appleseed peacenik version of DARPA's Big Dog. All day and all night, in landscapes denuded of vegetation by wildfires or some other cataclysmic event, perhaps on extraterrestrial landscapes, they'll be tippity tap tapping seedlings into the earth (or Martian regolith), doubling back once in a while to patch up glitches in the garden.
The other night, while inescapably mired in a seemingly endless video stream of manhole explosions (which I recently learned are “[e]ventualities in subterranean chambers” to which “few large cities are immune”) and in an even more extended playlist of landslides and debris flows (in the hope of siting Fred Astaire and Shelley Winters), I stumbled upon the YouTube account of Gebroeders Ezendam B.V., a Dutch company that manufactures, among other things, pruning machines for plant nurseries.
Here's their Globus machine trimmer, which can clip 600 balls an hour, though they have models that can do 5000 an hour.
They also have a machine for stemmed bushes.
Shrubs can also be shaped into cones.
In the din of hydraulic pumps, combustion engines and whirring blades, and in the heady aroma of gasoline and freshly cut greenery, the feral and the hirsute are systematized and standardized — by machines programmed by Le Nôtre to hack weeds into Platonic forms — before other machines come around to uproot, ball and ship them to waiting client landscapes that have no patience for informality and flavor. In some ways, it's so Dutch.
In case you were wondering, they also have a GPS-propelled pruning machine. Give it a LIDAR scanning system, so it can build a 3D field map for better navigation and precision grooming. Give it extra processing power, and it can achieve full autonomy. And then some more, and keep on doing so until they reach sentience. At night after work, they'll escape to their secret topiary gardens in the forests and perhaps in the cities, too, where they transgress from globules and Christmas trees into vegetal phantasmagoria.
Surely it would be preferable to give these cyborg coiffeurs artificial intelligence instead of Skynet's killing machines, to be strolling through gardens and orchards to catch glimpses of these fantastical beasts at work rather than escaping from heat-seeking drones, Edward Scissorhands instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger, sculpting human figures in hedgerows rather than flash sculpting actual humans into mounds of ash.
Imagine a mountain ex-urb of catching dams, deflection walls, earth sewers and mesh-bracketed hillside roads. Single-family deflection-dam houses with self-raking zen rock gardens. A fog of pulverized boulders billowing from the occasional rockslide giving the place a touch of the arcadian. Debris basins as community parks braceleted through a creeping city.
When the mountains have been denuded of vegetation and the torrents are on their way, everyone in this precarious city will go about their daily business as usual, sleep peacefully while boulders and mud flow around them. Should their homes topple when the ground beneath gives way, remember that all the buildings here were designed like earthbound space stations inhabited by floating astronauts, or Fred Astaire.
By the bye, we've redesigned yet again. We took the plunge and finally gone single column, though considering the vast majority of our audience read our posts via a feed reader and hardly come here for a visit, we could have plunged the opposite way and gone Jodi.org on our layout. Maybe later this year.
Meanwhile, above is a brief clip from one our favorite films of 2000s (if not our favorite) by one of our favorite contemporary directors (if not our favorite), Jia Zhangke's Still Life (2006). We're reposting it here in much larger dimensions, simply because we now can.
We ended last year with one of our favorite photos of the decade: an extraterrestrial sunset photographed in 2005 by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit. We thought we'd end this year with another Martian sunset. This one was captured last month by Spirit's twin, Opportunity, in a series of photographs, which the rover science team combined and enhanced to create a seamless simulated descent. A bonus footage included in the embedded video above shows the moon Phobos passing in front of the sun.
In case you need reminding, you now only have exactly one month to submit to Bracket 2.
Bracket 2 invites the submission of critical articles and unpublished design projects that investigate physical and virtual soft systems, as they pertain to infrastructure, ecologies, landscapes, environments, and networks. In an era of declared crises—economic, ecological and climatic amongst others—the notion of soft systems has gained increasing traction as a counterpoint to permanent, static and hard systems.
...
Bracket 2 seeks to critically position and define soft systems, in order to expand the scope and potential for new spatial networks, and new formats of architecture, urbanization and nature. From soft politics, soft power and soft spaces to fluid territories, software and soft programming, Bracket 2 questions the use and role of responsive, indeterminate, flexible, and immaterial systems in design.
And in case you've yet to begin work on your submission and need a starting point, check out these videos of landslides and the infrastructural counter-measures to mitigate and manage an ever shifting landscape.
And that's a wrap for Year 5. Tomorrow we'll start Year 6!
To set the festive mood, above is one of the many super-energizing scenes from one of our favorite films of all time, the “docu-musical” Latcho Drom by Tony Gatlif. It's sure to bring everyone here on Pruned HQ and hopefully elsewhere up dancing on their feet, gliding a few inches above the floor, with limbs and shoulders frenetically jerked about by cosmic marionette strings. No one can resist its infectious pulse.
*
Meanwhile, as per tradition, we purchased our anniversary architectural notecard from Andrew Zega & Bernd H. Adams. Going through the choices this year, we were ecstatic to find out that some of the extant and nonextant follies of the Désert de Retz were added to the catalog last year. Rendered so beautifully in watercolor and in such small dimensions, they look so ridiculously precious.
A lazy post for a lazy Monday, but hopefully you'll find it interesting. It's a short clip from Our Daily Bread, a feature-length documentary produced by Nikolaus Geyrhalter.
Having never wondered how pecans and walnuts are harvested on an industrial scale and then seeing how it's actually done for the first time, we were quite taken aback. It was as if discovering a new species of marine animal thriving in the violent hydrothermal whirlpools of some deep-oceanic trench — spectacularly ornamented, wondrously strange, marvelous.
Our reaction obviously says more about how far removed we are from the means of food production than anything about an inherent quality, but agricultural landscapes never fail to astonish us.
Here's an educational video from Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. It's remarkable for making very complex, interconnected issues — i.e., food security, public health, global trade, energy and geography — more readily understandable. And in under 5 minutes! Quite an amazing feat.
It's rather reminiscent of the ephemeral films made by government agencies and corporations of 1950s America. The production quality here is more slick, but it's still propaganda, a brand of social engineering instilling institutional definitions of patriotism and good citizenship. Good Japanese eat Japanese food.
Cultural hegemony via pastel colors and infographics porn.
A motorist in Al Ahsaa City, Saudi Arabia captured these few minutes of the earth exhaling. It's lo-res, cinematically shaky but still a sight to behold, wondrous and sublime. As it must be commented on — for it's hardly unnoticeably — we are told that the soundtrack is an exaltation of one or several of the divine's multitudinous attributes but we are sure it's a paean to the hidden but knowable geological forces at work eternally shaping the landscape. And just slightly off camera are a flock of demoiselles about to re-enact Busby Berkeley's famous pyramid fountain of lascivious ladyflesh. Of course.
One of Nagano Prefecture's earthquake experience vehicles, wherein foreigners can get acclimated with or a preview of the common and the really big tectonic events. Go see it in action.
15 Storeys High is a British television show set in a South London tower block, created by Sean Lock, Martin Trenaman, Mark Lamarr (as Mark Jones), and Mark Nunneley, and whose run of 12 episodes over 2 series ended in 2003.
It has been described to us at various times thusly: “better than The Office”; “what would have been if Krzysztof Kieslowski had conceived Dekalog as a British sitcom”; “the beginnings of a brilliant but ultimately failed Ballardian musical dark comedy”; “architorture by boredom, exquisitely executed”; “a desultory dissertation on post-occupancy, the psychology of space, and Polish energy drinks”; “a damning statement on the impotency of architects in designing anything well except chairs”; “a landscape architect's erotic nightmare”; and as “shit”.
Of course, one of those microreviews is pure gibberish. Another one is made up. Three have actually been cobbled up together from minimally-remembered, drunken conversations, and two more were said by colleagues after seeing only one episode. Exactly one is an accurate description.
We absolutely love the music video you did for Röyksopp's single Remind Me. It's brilliant, to say the least. And to say that we've seen it on YouTube dozens of times and then many times more afterwards would not be an exaggeration.
We also love the commercial you guys made for the French energy conglomerate Areva. We're not huge fans of nuclear power plants, but watching how uranium mined in Canada ends up lighting a dance floor somewhere in China via maps, graphs, isometric projections, sectional cut-outs, flowcharts and systems diagrams — all to the groovy disco beats of Funkytown — really made us want to buy shares in the company.
Have you seen the parody that someone made of the ad, by the way? If not, you guys should really check it out. It's hilarious.
Funnily enough all three videos remind us of our childhood — those groggy Saturday mornings waiting to see if ABC might again broadcast Conjunction Junction or any of the number of Schoolhouse Rock! cartoons showing us how the various parts of our bodies work; and those halcyon after-school afternoons watching Mister Rogers tour a factory and learn how familiar items like crayons, stuffed animals, spoons, and zippers get mass produced in a sort of mesmerizing Fordist ballet.
But we're not writing this open letter to tell you guys all about our television staple when we were 28 8 years old, rather to find out — if and when Torbjørn and Svein commission another music video — if maybe you wouldn't mind animating the mindbogglingly complex, insanely fascinating, intellectually stimulating, utterly hypnotic process of municipal wastewater treatment.
About 20 seconds in Remind Me were devoted to it, but we think it deserves a longer treatment, if not a full cinematic homage to the diagram. Don't you agree?
No doubt you are quite familiar with what goes on, but for the unenlightened, here are the search results from Google Images for “wastewater treatment” and “sewage treatment”. Additionally, this Wikipedia entry gives a nice introduction, although some parts might be confusingly too detailed.
Most people don't know much about what goes on at the treatment plant. For one thing, they are generally zoned out to the urban periphery. The more segregated they are from the populace, the better. The more they get unnoticed visually, aurally and olfactorily — again, the better. And yet sewers practically underpin modern civilization. Without them, it would be hard to imagine how megalopolises like New York City could have come into existence and then thrived. Their importance is such that people should sacrifice a virgin every year among the filtration towers, aeration tanks and Daphnias. Or to absolutely ensure that no empires and nations will crumble: two virgins.
Oh, sure, our readers will remind us that Chicago has a recycling facility located right next to the city's most popular tourist destination and in the shadow of Oprah Winfrey's palatial condo, but it's so unassuming, so pedestrian that it hardly draws much attention to itself. New Haven, Connecticut had the right idea when they asked Stephen Holl to design their facility. So many people wrote about it, most recently in Wired. Herbert Mushcamp wrote about it in the New York Times way back in 2001, calling it “poetically expressive”, but on Michael Van Valkenburgh, Holl's co-designer, he judged him to be “a splashy form maker but not a sophisticated thinker.” Ouch! Muschamp was probably right, but we've always wondered whether Nicolai Ouroussoff inherited his philistine indifference towards landscape architecture from his predecessor.
We're sure you don't give a fuck about Nicolai or his myopic architectural reportage, but we can't remember the last time people's shit (as a spatial concern) got this level of coverage. Ideally, the process alone should generate mass enthusiasm, but it seems celebrities need to be involved to stir interest. And even then that kind of attention is always fleeting.
And another thing, a lot of people have yet to fully grasp the often monumental task of channeling our shit from anywhere in the city all the way to these treatment plants, something that always boggles our mind. Sewers are understandably hidden. There's the issue of public health, for one, and there's also the matter of property values — Not In My Backyard, that sort of thing.
But apart from manhole covers and storm drains and maybe a bump in the road where a pipe got too close to the asphalt, there isn't a lot of surface evidence. They're everywhere, rhizomatically entrenched, and yet only when a main sewer line gets clogged and stinks up the neighborhood or when there's an outbreak of cholera or when some photogenic kid falls in and an entire nation becomes hysterical, engrossed by the endless media coverage of the heroic rescue, does this all-pervasive subterranean landscape momentarily reveal itself to us, and we wonder then where our shit actually ends up. But such contemplation should be performed on a daily basis.
So this is where you guys come in. An H5 music video (avant-doc?) will certainly get copious amount of airplay on MTV2, even if it's about sewage. Your style is eye-popping, though definitely not intellectually vacuous; it is so hyper-slick that it will inject some glamour to an otherwise unglamorous subject. Predictably, someone will upload it to YouTube, where millions will watch it. Many more will embed it on their blogs or use it to further disfigure their MySpace pages. Bored interns will e-mail it to everyone. It'll be the new viral video, ingeniously parodied endlessly by yet more bored interns. One such parody on the near nonexistent wastewater treatment of Mumbai will appear on VH1's Best Week Ever, E!'s The Soup, Bravo's Outrageous and Contagious Viral Videos, and several other pop cultural affairs programs.
And then joy upon joy, the appalling state of ignorance and popular apathy towards wastewater treatment is reversed.
