4) In Be Your Own Souvenir, you take a pose and a 3D printer will spit out a tiny model of you in that pose.
5) Philip Connor's Fire Season is an account of the author's nearly half decade work as a fire lookout in the Gila National Forest. Paris Review has an interview with Connor, and at the interviewer's blog are some extra Q&As.
For this ad of the 2009 Honda Civic, a stretch of highway has been engraved with a specially sequenced sets of rumble strips. When a car drives through, the wheels and car body vibrate a distinctive musical tune. In this case, it's the William Tell Overture that soundtracks the passing landscape.
It goes without saying that longer pieces are needed. Imagine driving through the unrelenting vastness of the American West, and all of a sudden, your car begins to shudder an entire Aaron Copland score. This will surely gladden your heart and fluff up your patriotic spirit. Or equally likely, trigger a prolonged bout of road rage, in which case more than 30 seconds worth of jingle is probably not such a good idea.
Apparently, it's in Chicago. Called Exelon City Solar, it was completed last year, generates 14,000 megawatt-hours of electricity per year, and powers up to 1,500 homes. More interestingly for us, it sits atop a 41-acre brownfield.
The Dirtsees it as part of an emerging trend. Instead of paying for a costly clean up of their heavily polluted sites, cities invest the money into solar farms.
Might this escalate to the point that we see the Fukushima Exclusion Zone turned into the largest wind farm in the world? Sure the place is radioactive but at least there are no militant NIMBYs living there to protest against it. The worse the disaster gets, the larger the contamination site — which ironically translates to more clean energy.
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.
1) “Upper Toronto is a science fiction design proposal to build a new city in the sky. The CN restaurant might be ground level, or imagine a city sitting on top of the Bay Street towers. When Upper Toronto is finished, all residents of will be relocated upwards and Lower Toronto will transformed into some combination of intentional ruin, national park, and farmland.”
5) There was an International Conference on Global Land Grabbing. Land grabbing refers to the global rush in recent years to buy or lease farmlands abroad as a strategy to secure basic food supplies or simply for profit. The buyers, usually large multi-national agribusiness concerns, have been criticized for gobbling up prime arable lands in countries with food security problems of their own and with weak governance to control environmental and labor abuses.
