On J.G. Ballard, a Flickr photo pool. “Drained swinmming pools in suburban landscapes, gated communities with their security video surveillance, highway embankments, deserted airport concourses, the post industrial nightmare of the end of the western empire.”
On sampling the park, exploring “the social history of a downtown city square in Montreal using sound, image and GPS sensors” and looking “at the ways in which memory is inscribed in space, drawing on field recordings, oral history, and archival material to form a deeply-layered mediascape.”
Edenfern™ has been shown to remove arsenic deposited in the soil through heavy industrial and agricultural activities. And does so without the benefit of genetic manipulation.
“Discovered in the southeastern U.S. by university researchers, this beautiful fern has a unique ability to soak up arsenic from the ground into its fronds, which may be clipped and disposed of safely. With a powerful cleaning action 200 times stronger than in other plants, the fern quickly lowers soil arsenic levels. Use the edenfern soil cleaner if you know arsenic is in the ground, or even 'just in case' - because whether or not arsenic is present, the fern serves as an attractive addition to a lawn or garden.”
So while they're giving you peace of mind in peace and quiet™, they're sucking out poison and carcinogenic chemicals. Hope they can also suck out shit?
Obviously, I'm repeating myself here, but this fern is worth mentioning again, a second time to point out that it is commercially available exclusively from Edenspace Systems Corporation. The name sounds mildly sinister, nevertheless the company offers actual working solutions to environmental degradation: phytoremediation of lead, uranium, chromium, and other metals, metalloids and organic compounds; brownfield site development and use; wetlands restoration and protection. Etc. No superficial cosmetics. Just heavy duty stuff.
An air-conditioned landscape-within-architecture-within-landscape architecture-monument-landscape as proposed by the engineer Charles-François Ribart for the site where the Arc de Triomphe now stands in Paris. I personally prefer Ribart's. Where else can you now dine in a forest in the underbelly of an elephant? The mad modern Parisian traffic might be circling outside, but inside you're refreshed and calm, cooled down by an elaborate internal pachyderm hydrology.
POSTSCRIPT #1: For a much larger and color version of the image, go here.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
