Conceived by Beatriz da Costa, a professor of arts, computation, and engineering at the University of California, Irvine, PigeonBlog “enlists homing pigeons to participate in a grassroots scientific data gathering initiative designed to collect and distribute information about air quality conditions to the general public. Pigeons are equipped with custom-built miniature air pollution sensing devices enabled to send the collected localized information to an online server without delay. Pollution levels are visualized and plotted in real-time over Google’s mapping environment, thus allowing immediate access to the collected information to anyone with connection to the Internet.”
Which makes one wonder what other sort of urban animals can be recruited as bloggers, letting us know the particulars of their day, uploading mobile cam photos to Flickr of street scenes or rush hour traffic on the freeways or that four-alarm fire in downtown, all done in real-time. Can we soon expect stray cats and dogs, sewer rats, and cockroaches to be thought of as critical infrastructure rather than something to be designed out of the landscape?
“A surface coated in spiky polymer molecules destroys the flu virus at a touch,” Scientific Americanreported last month. This nontoxic substance does so by “gouging holes in a microbe's cell wall and spilling out its contents. The polymer molecules stay rigid because they are all positively charged and therefore repel each other, like strands of hair standing on end from a static charge. The spikes have sufficiently few charges, however, that they can breach bacterial walls, which repel strongly charged molecules. The polymer probably neutralizes flu because the virus has an envelope around it suitable for spearing.”
As interesting as the image of viruses getting speared and eviscerated may sound, what is even more interesting is the fact that this “experimental substance, which can be applied like paint, might complement other germ control methods used in public spaces such as hospitals and airplanes.” So if the oft-forecasted influenza pandemic should come, those same public spaces will function more as biohazard filters instead of as urban vectors for the virus.
Even doubly more interesting is contemplating what possible landscapes this spiky paint and those “other germ control methods” might bring about. In fact, one cannot help but be giddy when one is reminded of the ubiquity of bollards, concrete planters, ha-has, and other topographical imprints of the Global War on Terror on our public spaces. And this despite their generally objectionable aesthetics.
So setting aside for now any and all skepticism of the polymer's ability to significantly mitigate some future species-ending plague, might we expect biocidal fountains to proliferate soon: like CCTV cameras, littering your daily commute, and misting you from the moment you exit your house till you finally settle down on your office chair? How about so-called respiratory oases retrofitted for the Ebola virus? Or benches, bathroom doorknobs, subway handrails, playground swings, elevator cars, and even nauseatingly boring public sculptures fostering an entirely new level of public intimacy? Etc.
Instead of barricading ourselves in our homes and bedchambers at the first sound of an ominous cough, we may prefer to seek shelter in our public spaces. Instead of avoiding it, we seek the crowd.
“Fed up with the cost of caring for the trees, with their errant fronds that plunge perilously each winter, and with the fact that they provide little shade,” Los Angeles has declared war on its iconic, though invasive, palm trees.
According to the New York Times, “The city plans to plant a million trees of other types over the next several years so that, as palms die off, most will be replaced with sycamores, crape myrtles and other trees indigenous to Southern California. (Exceptions will be the palms growing in places that tourists, if not residents, demand to see palmy, like Hollywood and Sunset Boulevards.)”
Director Nikolaus Geyrhalter takes us on a tour through the dizzyingly spectacular landscape of high-tech agriculture: from hermetically sealed chicken hatcheries as sterile as computer chip factories to geospatially precise cultivated fields where crops mature right on cue and on to utopian factories with frightening efficiencies but whose assembly lines would be the perfect setting for a Busby Berkeley musical.
No voice-over commentary and no interviews; just some choice music, and the “whirring, clattering, booming, slurping” hydraulic breathing of heavy machineries.
Designed by NL Architects, presumably with input from the local government and the public, the “intervention provides a quick solution to re-establishing the connection between the two parts of the divided township whilst also regenerating a space that had become dead, literally and symbolically in the shadow of the flyover.”
Moreover, this was the Joint Winner of the 2006 European Prize for Urban Public Space, a biennial competition organized by several architecture institutions.
A similar urban intervention in nearby Amsterdam is West 8's CarrascoSquare, whose vacuity and hilarious desire lines inscribed on its neatly drafted geometry only make me wonder if letting it be inhabited by the homeless, drug addicts, prostitutes and their tricks, the idled youths, migrant workers, hardy native grasses, and landscape architecture PhD candidates on so-called field research would simply be a better use of public space.
In the U.S. there is Louisville's Waterfront Park, designed by Hargreaves Associates. This is the Great Lawn. The same office was also commissioned to do a temporary installation for SFMOMA's Revelatory Landscapes exhibition, taking as their site the intersection of Interstate 280 and Highway 87 — “a forbidding, yet somehow common landscape.”
Finally, from the master of messy public spaces, Walter Hood, there is Splash Pad Park in Oakland, California. Although you don't get to see much of the design in the website provided, just imagine the teeming masses you see in the photos buying their groceries, cooling off in the fountain, displaying a bit of civil disobedience, or simply minding their kids and walking the dog are doing so underneath a heavily trafficked highway.
POSTSCRIPT #1: Walter Hood's finished website now include photos of Splash Pad Park.
The Amos Power Plant in Raymond, West Virginia, as seen from an ordinary backyard, and as photographed by Mitch Epstein, who coincidentally is part of ecotopia, the 2nd ICP Triennial of Photography and Video.
“In a time of rampant natural disasters and urgent concerns about global environmental change,” the catalogue tells us in that familiar bombastic messianic tone that so many often employ, “this exhibition demonstrates the ways in which the most interesting and engaging contemporary artists view the natural world. Shattering the stereotypes of landscape and nature photography, the thirty-nine international artists included in this survey boldly examine new concepts of the natural sphere occasioned by twenty-first-century technologies; images of destructive ecological engagement; and visions of our future interactions with the environment. Considering nature in the broadest sense, this exhibition reflects new perspectives on the planet that sustains, enchants, and—increasingly—frightens us.”
The exhibition ends 7 January 2007.
Those not living or traveling to New York before then are fortunate in that some of the artists have their own website. For instance, Mary Mattingly, featured earlier here in this post -- her entire line of post-apocalypse haute couture, New Time timepieces, and wearable homes are online.
Sam Easterson's animal and vegetable videos, which I once mistook to be part of an extensive surveillance network in the American West monitoring the mental condition of reclusive landart artists and alerting the Army Corps of Engineers whenever their earth moving activities compromise the tectonic integrity of Nevada -- well, a handful of them are here.
As for the others, a search through artnet should suffice. Hopefully, fellow bloggers will start downloading some of these photographs, and create their own personal surveys of ecotopias for everyone to view for free. After all, an admission price of $12 is obscenely extravagant; the best things in life should be free.
“Why build a one-off ride that will eventually lose its appeal when you can create an infinite number of rides by using a programmable industrial robot?” asks gizmag.
Indeed, why go through all the trouble of clearing the last remaining stands of old-growth forest to make way for amusement parks that would only further unsustainable ex-urban development and extend travel time for gas-guzzling über-SUVs, when you could be building them, say, in the Loop or Millennium Park in Chicago as an interactive kinetic sculpture?
Quoting the article at length: “German company KUKA Roboter GmbH builds industrial robots for the automotive, aerospace and foundry industries, among others. Its fully-programmable 5- and 6-axis robots can reach of up to 3.7 metres with payloads of 570kg and are employed around the world for applications such as material handling and machine loading. Kuka has partnered with Canada’s Primal Rides to provide a new fully interactive amusement ride. The KUKA KR 500 robot will be used as the building block of Primal Rides’ new robotic gaming ride. The interactive ride can be designed to match customer’s requirements in theme, intensity and realism and to cost effectively change themes to adjust to rider appeal.”
And you can order the rides singly or as a whole group of Robocoasters, “each with its infinite range of programming options and ride variants: lined up in a row and performing the same acrobatic ride program in perfect harmony.”
Or you can order the Octomone, a swirling, gyrating mass of mechanized tentacles not that taxonomically different from a triffid.
