Transgenic Zoo

If Peter Yeadon had his way, citizens of Toronto would now be happily feeding cloned sheep and petting human-ear-clad mice amidst bioluminescent vegetation at the Transgenic Zoo.



Situated in an urban park in downtown Toronto, the relocated Toronto Zoo would be supplemented with Dr. Moreau's menagerie: “The bioengineered beings are a stock of genetically modified creatures that are already available to us today, and will be tomorrow. Through recombinant DNA practices, we already make beings that heretofore never existed. We have spliced phosphorescence genes from fireflies and jellyfish into plants and animals to make them glow in the dark. We can easily change the color of peppers, even the taste. We have cloned goats, transgenically modified with spider genes to secret spider silk for military and industrial applications. These are 'designer' plants and animals of the biotech sector.”

One wonders what fantastic disembodied, self-living bio-souvenirs would be available at the gift shop.



But that's not all. Further blurring the line between living and nonliving, between the organic and inorganic, the zoo is envisioned as part of a “mixed development wherein humans live and work alongside animals in their habitats,” an unnatural combination that wouldn't be possible unless artificially assembled.

Like cloning. Like zoos. Like gardens.

In a hair and nail salon, for instance — at the zoo! — a polymer developed for growing human organs such as a liver or heart would be “used to decoratively cultivate and harvest growing parts of the human body” or as “cladding to support a snake-like skin that exfoliates and continually renews the facade.”



Which brings up endless scenarios of weather, air pollution, and even a raging smallpox epidemic affecting changes to the epithelial surface and tissued structure of buildings. Landscape as a modifier of architecture. Or landscape architecture.

The building is sick, and that's a good thing.

And: in trying to decide which new fashion to have for 2010, perhaps you can visit your plastic surgeon's petting zoo to have a look — and feel — at your choices of nose, ears, or limbs. After you've made your decision, you can help raise the donor animal, feed it lovingly with genetically modified vegetables grown in your prescribed allotment garden, and watch your face develop, your eyelashes lengthen on the back of a pig.

(Spotted from a comment made in this City of Sound post.)

More Gardens-in-a-Petri

Billions and billions of bacterial landscape architects pruning — no less in environments poisoned with antibiotics — other bacterial landscape architects, dead or alive, to form dazzling arabesque parterres. The self-organizing embroidery of organisms in constant Darwinian mode.















Look for them in the spring catalogues of Martha Stewart Living.

(All images come from the laboratory of Prof. Eshel Ben-Jacob of the Tel-Aviv University, specifically here, as part of a collaboration with Prof. Herbert Levine of UCSD’s National Science Foundation Frontier Center for Theoretical Biological Physics.)

In the Archives:
Gardens-in-a-Petri

Future Tense:
Yet More Gardens-in-a-Petri

Prunings XVI

(Lynn Geesaman, Hidcote Manor Garden, England, 1997. Source.)

On blogs discovered recently or otherwise.

Critical Spatial Practice, from the co-organizer of walking as knowing as making and urban / rural / wild

Bricoleurbanism, on urbanism, landscape, ideas, theory, and whimsy

Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society, Kicheriana et al.

StrangeWeather.info, “a resource hub about climage change for artists, writers and activists”

New Scientist Technology Blog

Times Online Gardening Blog

(More blogs to your right, in the sidebar, and also be sure to look through my bloglines subscriptions [good links] where new additions made during the current and previous months are archived separately.)

Interstate-5 / Invisible-5

This is absolutely amazing! Available in April 2006, the Invisible-5 Audio Project is “a two-CD, self-guided audio tour along Interstate 5 between Los Angeles and San Francisco. It uses the format of a museum audio tour to guide the listener along the highway landscape.”

Available now as an appetizer is the audio tour for Bayview Hunters Point / San Francisco.



Once wisher for a similar set for the entire American interstate highway system and navigable waters. Tocqueville x Steinbeck x Huckleberry Finn on your iPod. Or even for the New Grand Asian Silk Road.

(Spotted at Critical Spatial Practice.)

The iconography of extraterrestrial landscapes

From the Geologic Map of the Uruk Sulcus Quadrangle of Ganymede in which “[a]lbedo, surface morphology and texture, and crater densities were the principal characteristics used to distinguish one unit from another, following planetary photogeologic mapping conventions. Crosscutting relations were used to determine the three-dimensional relations between units. However, unlike the terrestrial planets, for which the techniques for planetary geologic mapping were developed, Ganymede has landforms that, apart from impact craters, are largely structural features. Although every effort was made to identify individual material units, the map has as much in common with tectonic maps as with geologic maps on which units are distinguished in terms of lithology and age. Thus, on this map some units of the same apparent lithology and age are distinguished from one another by different surface features.”



One cannot help but imagine that a thousand years from now, after Ganymede has long been terraformed and colonized, our ancestors may be in the midst of a civil war borne out of border disputes and conflicting claims of territorial legitimacy, the legacies of an imprecise quadrangle map.

Future Jovian israeli-palestinian warfare as a function of geomorphological abstraction. Terrorism as an offspring of ancient mapping iconography.

Link:
USGS Astrogeology Research Program

Gardens-in-a-Petri

(“Bits and Bobs of BacterioPoetics” from Social Fiction.)

So while BLDGBLOG continues its fascination with Martian viro-invaders, Social Fiction has been expanding its microbial menagerie: godless ecologies simmering with selfish codes and data silently contesting for survival — fractal, pointillist, and mercilessly lethal.



“Trees and ferns often grow in fractal forms,” this website tells us. ”Bacteria colonies can, too.”

For instance, these colonies of Bacillus subtilis:



Which is why someone should market them alongside these Gardens-in-a-Bag and the equally portable Flowers-in-a-Can. Certainly our reliably adventurous and near-future spacefaring Dubai sheiks can be convinced to invest in these instant landscapes, perhaps even finance viral hunting expeditions to new Edens, where not only new bird and frog species lay uncatalogued but prized super-strains of Avian flu and Ebola-HIV hybrids also await collection and classification by CDC-licensed landscape architects.


(Another from Social Fiction's unsanitary wunderkammer.)

And if they happen to run out of test tubes, an unfortunate landscape architect can just as easily be converted into a greenhouse, his body then FedExed off to the manufacturing plant, whence every crevices are swabbed, tissues dissected, and bubbling fluids bottled. Afterwards, the samples are cultured and espaliered with nutrient agar and antibiotics before finally beging shipped off along major air traffic routes to waiting WHO-certified gardeners.

(Or maybe the expedition encounters a malicious band of orchid hunters and transnational ex-CIA miner-loggers. Everyone's sweaty, no shower in weeks, and the constant high pitched droning of the forest has made all trigger-happy and quite insane. The Hot Zone meets Adaptation meets Aguirre.)



Meanwhile, these are some examples of rotex fractal growth found in colonies of Bacillus subtilis (B 168): “The colonies grow by the movement of bacteria droplets, filled with bacteria spinning around a common center. Smaller droplets explore the space left by the larger, leading droplets.”



“Under adverse conditions, B 168 usually grow in compact clusters, because the bacteria are immobile. However, if the colonies are grown for very long periods, they sometimes exhibit a new mode of branching growth.”



These varying branching patterns occur by modulating environmental parameters.




(Streptococcus from Social Fiction.)

So simply arrange them atop your coffee table. Nothing will bring your guests to chat ironically about post-9/11 bioterrorism faster.

(Except where noted, images were lifted here.)

Future Tense:
More Gardens-in-a-Petri
Yet More Gardens-in-a-Petri

Public Smog

Public Smog is “a public park composed of intangibles and built in the economic realm of carbon offset trading. Offsets purchased and controlled by the public will be inaccessible to polluting industries. The park will exist as a construct of heightened air quality occurring in this unfixed public space. The park's size will vary, reflecting shifting financial control of carbon offset shares, compounded by naturally occurring seasonal fluctuations in air quality.”

Lunar regolith

More asteromo aftershocks: these microscopic slivers of the moon -- extracted from a report by the Lunar Regolith Materials Workshop, organized by NASA “to establish requirements for the production and distribution of terrestrial analogs of lunar regoliths.”

As luminous on earth as it is in the firmament.











Might we soon expect self-illuminating lunar regolithic hardscaping, ionized and prismatic? A future market in moon pavers irradiated with the solar wind. Mini-auroras in the backyard. That or I'd settle for a sequel to Bedrock: The Film.

More shimmering microscopic moon rocks here.

In the Archives:
“Ground truth”: or, Wanted: Fake Moon Dirt