Could our house plants someday tell us just how much we suck at being a parent?
Adrià Bassaganyes and Ben Salem, of Eindhoven University of Technology, in co-operation with Singapore National University’s Mixed Reality Lab, are exploring that possibility — and more — with their investigative project called Ambient Biomedia.
Quoting a quote published in a recent post in Next Nature:
Ambient Biomedia is an investigative project about using living beings, in particular plants, to display human lifestyle problems information. The working principle of our systems is taking data about the lifestyle aspect that the user wants to monitor, such as time spent with somebody, health aspects or bad habits, and semantically couple it into an aspect of a living being. The user would merge the plant with his daily environment, following the evolution of his problem’s state in a non intrusive way. Thanks to the empathical link existing between human and other living beings, the user would see himself reflected on the plant, feeling sorry for herself, meditating about his problem and hopefully, taking measures to solve it.
In other words, cropping up soon all over the place will be gardens that can diagnose a whole range of existing medical and psychosocial problems and which actually then become part of a prescribed therapeutic regimen.
Indeed, the data-gathering component of this ambient system is quite feasible in light of the following two research projects.
1) The first project was the subject of a post we wrote last summer and involves the development of an early detection system for Alzheimer's disease. In that project, a house was rigged with motion detectors to monitor changes, however imperceptibly small and wildly erratic, in the day-to-day activity of its elderly volunteer.
The theory is that as Alzheimer's begins destroying brain cells, signals to nerves may become inconsistent - like static on a radio - well before memories become irretrievable. One day, signals to walk fire fine. The next, those signals are fuzzy and people hesitate, creating wildly varying activity patterns.
Spot the tiny wobbles and wiggles and you can spot the disease early.
2) The second one we read about in an article published last year in The Economist. There, we learned that Yoshiharu Yamamoto, of the University of Tokyo, and his colleagues have discovered that “depressed people move in a mathematically different way from other people.”
In their experiment, the researchers monitored changes in the daily movement of those that were diagnosed with clinical depression and those that were healthy. To no one's surprise, they observed a difference in activity between the two experimental groups. When they plotted their data out on graphs, however, they were surprised to see the results feature the characteristic curve of a power law distribution.
The curves produced by plotting the lengths of low-activity periods against their frequency were strikingly different in healthy and depressed people. This reflects not inactivity by the depressed (though they were, indeed, less active) but a difference in the way that the healthy and the depressed spread their resting periods over the day. Depressed people experience longer resting periods more frequently and shorter ones less frequently than healthy people do.
Spot the tell-tale curvature and you can spot the disease, the research suggests.
Gathering actuatable data of any aspects of lifestyle, then, seems to be just a matter of building an in-house or external surveillance system using GIS, CCTV, remote sensing, complex algorithms, motion-activated laser beams and other cool toys mostly geared for the security industry.
So the next question is: how will all those data get manifested in plants? This, too, has been explored before, for instance, in an art installation called Spore 1.1.
But despite all these real-world examples suggesting plausibility, a working ambient system might not ever be successfully produced. But no matter, we still want to know what landscape architects will do with it.
Will landscape architects, for instance, march up to the Department of Children and Family Services with the designs for a garden that can actuate the abusive behavior of foster parents towards kids placed under their ward so that underpaid, overworked and overstretched case workers need only to drive by their houses for an evaluation? If the lawn is green or the rose bushes are lusciously flowering, then all is well inside, physically and psychologically. But if the verdancy of the hedges doesn't quite meet visual standards, then a home inspection is warranted? The suburban landscape vernacular as a measuring stick of domestic and social harmony — which, of course, isn't unheard of.
Will they instead design neighborhood parks finely attuned to the pederastic behaviors of unregistered sex offenders in the area, orchestrating a genetically-encoded series of seismonastic movements when one is detected?
Will they file patents on a rose hybrid that can actuate how much sex you're getting? If it desiccates when you're not having any, what will you do about it?
Finding that the “empathical link existing between human and other living beings” cannot be reliably counted on to spur people to take corrective measures, will they then commission the services of genetic engineers to enable the plants to produce an antidote in pollen form and to release it when needed whether one wants to be cured or not?
While again fruitlessly trying to clear our archives of accumulated links, we were happily reacquainted with Richard Box's installation called Field.
Realized in February 2004 while he was Artist-in-Residence of the Physics Department at Bristol University, the project involved over a thousand fluorescent bulbs “planted” underneath high voltage AC transmission lines. Unwired, the bulbs drew energy from the surrounding electromagnetic radiation and lit up, making for what must have been a marvelous sight.
The FIELD of tubes will flicker in to life across the hillside as the early evening light fades. The performance each evening is hard to anticipate as the daily operation of the electricity supply will differ and is always dependent on the weather. In all the best traditions of land art it is conditional on the variations of the great outdoors, and requires its audience to be patient. Here a parallel can be struck between FIELD and Walter DeMaria's Lightning Field sited in the Nevada Desert [N.B. it's actually located in New Mexico] - many visitors travel for days to see [it], camp beside it and are lucky if they experience the sort of storm that will make the lightning dance across the 'field' of conductors.
It has been remarked that Richard Box was trying to draw attention to the dangers of overhead power lines but the artist maintains that he was simply making visible what is otherwise invisible.
The New York Times today takes a look at Work Architecture Company's Public Farm 1, this year's winner of the Young Architects Program at the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens.
Where sightseers once splashed about in silly algorithmic frotteurism, they will be treated this summer to an $85,000 community garden, whose “rural delights” will probably not go to supplement the nutritional needs of the disenfranchised but rather will go to make bloody marys and beer for architecture students.
Spatially, the scheme submitted by architects Dan Wood and Amale Andraos will involve “heavy cardboard tubes — the largest is a yard in height, and in diameter — in part because of the shadows they would cast and because of their resilience. Columns will be bolted together to form a span that rises on either side of a pool like a large V.”
Furthermore:
Each tube will play its own role. Some will contain plantings on dirt shelves equipped with liner bags to prevent leakage.
There is a fabric tube that people can enter through a curtain “where you can hide from the party, if you’ve had enough,” Ms. Andraos said.
There will be two sound columns — one that plays farm sounds when you sit down, another in which you can look upward, see stars and hear crickets. There is a phone-charging column, a children’s grotto of columns with swings, an herb-growing column with circulating fans dispersing scents like basil or lavender, and a juicer column where fresh juice will be made and sold.
It all sounds a bit too much, but then again, that's a good thing. We like messy public spaces.
Conceptually, the husband-and-wife duo are mining familiar territory. Industrialization/pre-industrialization, globalism/regionalism, fast food/slow food, urban/rural and landscape/architecture have all been well-dichotomized before.
Urban Farm [is] a magical plot of rural delights inserted within the city grid that resonates with our generations' preoccupations and hopes for a better and different future. In our post-industrial age of information, customization and individual expression, the most exciting and promising developments are no longer those of mass production but of local interventions. As cities have finally proven their superiority to their suburban counterparts – in everything from quality of life to environmental impact - they should again become our much needed laboratories of experimentation: opening our minds and senses towards better living with each other and the world.
Channeling the last utopian architectural projects about the City that examined its potential, represented its promises of liberation, and captured its pleasures –from Superstudio's continuous monument to Koolhaas's Exodus– Public Farm 1 (PF1) is an architectural and urban manifesto to engage play and reinvent our cities, and our world, once more.
One wonders here if they are familiar with Wheatfield by Agnes Denes?
In any case, according to the chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, “it’s just so unlike anything that’s been done before. It’s the first one that’s not canopies or party spaces. In some ways it’s almost in counterpoint to the program.”
Indeed, earlier installations were merely xeroxes of fixed images orchestrated beforehand with a computer program, apolitical bores whose range of interactivity were laughably limited. Though the current proposal involves a canopy-like structure, the total program will largely depend on continually shifting, real-time conditions. Rather than to a prescribed set of formulas, the space will be finely attuned to the weather, pollution, the disintegration rate of materials and uncertainty.
Dan Wood nicely summarizes their strategy: “We’re not sure what’s going to grow.”
And if this “rural oasis” becomes a wasteland due to climate change, a Category 5 hurricane or the deficient gardening skills of the architects, the project will not necessarily be a failure.
First is the winning entry from architects Thomas Raynaud and Cyrille Berger. Presented with the slogan DripFeed, they propose to turn one of the islands in the lagoon into a sort of algae power farm using organisms that already live in the tidal marshes to convert water pollution into clean energy.
It'll be a site of production and leisure.
Or as described by the Paris team: “Our project for the urban park of Sacca San Mattia consists of reinvesting the island in a Venetian, multi-functional approach to urban planning, in the context of an enlarged metropolitan, tourist centre. The Drip Feed project on the Island of Sacca San Mattia puts into place an above-ground ulva rigida cultivation device that is in keeping with the Greenfuel system. A saprophyte structure that ingests polluted waste from local industry, and conceptually redefines the lagoon’s future water level, without harming the natural state of the island.”
Second is the entry from the Spanish team of Josep Tornabell Teixidor, Gerard Bertomeu, Miriam Cabanes and Enrique Soriano. Called InstantGel, their proposal also makes use of existing water-borne organism and pollutants but this time they are to be used to set off a chemical reaction with layers of flexible gelly structures, creating fantastical island-sized foamy water lilies.
The cranes in the image above suggest perhaps that in the future climate-changed Venice St. Mark's will be transferred onto one of these floating islands.
Or perhaps Askin Ozcar's fake Venice will be realized here. Duplicate canals, duplicate churches, duplicate palazzos, duplicate Venetians and duplicate film festival and biennales, all floating above and tethered to the lagoon. And every couple of years (another biennale of sorts), it gets disconnected to become a mobile museum, mall and casino.
Soon, we are told, our bloodstream will be teeming with “crab-like” microrobots gouging their way through arterial blockages.
These robots, we are also told, will be powered by the contraction of cloned rat muscles.
Sukho Park of Chonnam National University and a team of researchers affixed heart tissue from a rat onto the body of the robot. When the tissue contracted, the robot’s six horizontally aligned legs (see image above) pulled together. When the tissue relaxed, the legs drew apart. The pulses propelled the robot (video below) forward through a solution at 100 micrometers per second (about 0.0002 mile per hour).
The researchers hope to make other biocompatible devices that could one day carry clot-busting agents to clogged vessels. But the robot on that fantastic voyage will have to be faster and stronger than this prototype in order to force its way against flowing blood (which travels at about 2 mph).
But how does one translate this into a landscape application, we wondered. How would you spatialize this disembodied cardiac propulsion system? A colleague offered one possible scenario:
“Perhaps in the future immigrants found dead trying to cross the border might have their cardiac muscles culled which will then be reanimated in Wal-Mart-sized cloning facilities and implanted into lawnmowers and other garden implements.”
There's a fine article today by the New York Times on Piet Oudolf, the Dutch avant-gardener and rarely mentioned co-conspirator of the future elevated park of New York's High Line. Go read and find out why “the real test of a well-composed garden is not how nicely it blooms but how beautifully it decomposes” and also why Oudolf got tired of “the soft pornography of the flower.”
Last week, The Guardianreported that Europe is looking to Africa to serve part of its energy needs by basically turning the continent into one giant solar power plant.
Europe is considering plans to spend more than £5bn on a string of giant solar power stations along the Mediterranean desert shores of northern Africa and the Middle East.
More than a hundred of the generators, each fitted with thousands of huge mirrors, would generate electricity to be transmitted by undersea cable to Europe and then distributed across the continent to European Union member nations, including Britain.
Billions of watts of power could be generated this way, enough to provide Europe with a sixth of its electricity needs and to allow it to make significant cuts in its carbon emissions. At the same time, the stations would be used as desalination plants to provide desert countries with desperately needed supplies of fresh water.
Of course, one is compelled to wonder here what would happen if Africa provided Europe with all of its electricity?
Most likely that won't happen; no European country would want to subject their whole energy security to regional volatility. However, one could imagine a fairly optimistic scenario wherein this energy cooperation would provide a stabilizing force to unstable states, help cure both continents' post-colonialhangover, counteract China's growing geopolitical influence in the region — and all the while reducing carbon emissions to zero.
But, as always, what we are immediately most interested in is this: in what ways would this energy pact be physically manifested in Africa?
As but one illustration of how energy consumption is spatialized, there is the so-called mountaintop mining, whereby whole mountains are leveled off, literally grounded down, to get at coal deposits instead of using tunnels. The erased geology would then be dumped nearby, chocking streams and old growth forests.
In one of the best (and certainly longest) articles on the subject that we have ever come across, Eric Reece, in Harpers Magazine, writes:
Where once there were jagged forested ridgelines, now there is only a series of plateaus, staggered grey shelves where grass struggles to grow in crushed rock and shale. When visitors to eastern Kentucky first see the effects of this kind of mining, they often say the landscape looks like the Southwest - a harsh tableland interrupted by steep mesas.
In other words, heating up your ex-urbian McMansion is right now turning Appalachia into Arizona and New Mexico.
One can easily picture Julie Bargmann and her D.I.R.T. Studio, like ambulance chasers circling a scene of devastation, salivating over photos of negative mountains, scheming away at plans to reclaim them from destruction, waiting for that commission.
But returning back to our question: what will Google Earth tourists see when they point their vigilant eyes towards an electrified North Africa? Will they come upon vast plantations of coronal fields, perfect geometries arrayed in similarly perfect arrangement, irrespective of terrain but nevertheless finely attuned to the sky? Pure form, pure function coexisting without contradiction.
And what about the people on the ground? Where once was desert, might they now enjoy newly sprouted oases fed with water from solar-powered desalination plants?
An Emerald Necklace of Olmstedian design inscribed in the Saharan landscape.
Will foreigners descend en mass to undertake a Bowlesian journey, trekking from one incomprehensible terrain to another equally unfathomable recess of the desert, utterly unprepared for the otherness of it all but obviously so seduced that they travel on, even while in the grips of dysentery, losing themselves psychologically and literally to the sands? All bearings and comfort are lost.
And then just as things couldn't get any stranger, they will come upon a stand of solar updraft towers; there are hundreds of them, possibly thousands, forming a kind of arid rainforest mechanically evapotranspirating.
But in their parched and hallucinatory conditions these adventurers will mistake them for Persian tower tombs, divining the surrounding air into a vortex, the whirring blades resonating ghostly howls.
