We're big fans of the shake table, obviously, so here's another photo. On top this time is a wind turbine ready to ride a simulated seismic wave.
One wonders if this set-up isn't really for a science experiment but rather for an avant-garde staging of The Odyssey. It's Poseidon — the god of the sea, the enemy of Odysseus, the earth-shaker — as a hydrostatically pressurized steel platform against a mechanomorphosized Aeolus, the ruler of the winds. In Homer's tale, the hero managed to return to Ithaca with some help from Aeolus, but in this contemporary retelling on that tectonic proscenium, Poseidon may yet neutralize the winds and thwart the return of the king.
Of allthereasons put forth against building gigantic dams, perhaps the most fantastic one we have ever heard comes from Max Brooks: if you build them, a zombie apocalypse will sweep across the globe.
Patient Zero, we read in World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, was infected when the boy and his father was out “moon fishing, a term that describes diving for treasure among sunken ruins of the Three Gorges Reservoir. With more than eleven hundred abandoned villages, towns, and even cities, there are always hope of recovering something valuable.”
Quick to disavow any appearance of illegality, the patient's mother explains that “they weren't looting, that it was their own village, Old Dachang, and they were just trying to recover some heirlooms from the remaining houses that hadn't been moved.” When the boy resurfaced, there was “a bite mark on his foot. He didn't know what had happened, the water had been too dark and muddy. His father was never seen again.”
But just what (or even who) nibbled on the boy, the author doesn't elaborate. Just as well, since it makes it easier for us to imagine another moon fisher, another hydro-refugee displaced by the gigantic dam. He, too, was trying to recover his family's possessions and then some. With each dive, however, he was slowly being poisoned to death by the slurry of asphyxiated forests, leftover sewage and drowned cities. During one night of moon fishing, he just didn't surface. He is then reanimated by a landscape suffering from too much hydrology, but before it could resurface, the remnant wall of an abandoned house topples and traps his legs. Like an anemone siphoning off the waters for plankton, he flails about now in the deep, murky artificial lake, waiting until its hands and mouth touch living flesh.
And it does snare a couple of living flesh, a father and his son. The father dies and is consumed, but the son escapes with only a nibble. After the son returns to the surface, events unfold such that in the coming months, the world gets severely depopulated; governments after governments after governments collapse; Cuba ascends as the supreme economic and military power; and an oceanic society, called the Pacific Continent, develops out of shipboard refugees.
All of which make us wonder two things:
Firstly, is the reservoir, then, some sort of a biological-warfare testing ground, where new diseases are hoped to be created and incubated? A gigantic petri dish where the toxic sludge of former civilizations mutates existing viruses into a bioweapon? (Is Lake Powell a collaboration between the Center for Disease Control and the Army Corps of Engineers?)
Secondly, are the events in World War Z a genrefication of current world events? For instance, is Max Brooks' story about China exporting phantasmagorical cargos to Africa an intended metaphor for the deepening economic and political ties between the two, a relationship with landscape and architectural consequences? Additionally, is the creeping invasion of these same cargos to North America a parallel to the increasing transoceanic reach of China's pollution to Canada and the U.S., and also a frighteningly uncanny forecast of this year's panic over tainted pet foods, poisoned toothpaste, and lead-covered Barbie dolls? Are the zombies' worldwide colonization yet another metaphor for the monumental physical effects of China's inexorable march towards preeminent global superpower on the landscape of whole continents?
Anyway, speaking of ancient cities drowned by the insatiable appetite of nations for energy, there is Hasankeyf in the Kurdish region of Turkey.
Located on the banks of the river Tigris, near the border with Iraq, Hasankeyf dates back 10-12,000 years and bears evidence of Assyrian, Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk Turk and Ottoman civilizations. There are ornate mosques, Islamic tombs, cave churches, palaces, and centuries old houses carved into the limestone cliffs. And nearby is Allianoi, an ancient spa settlement dating back to the second century C.E.
All will be flooded.
A year later, a moon fisher will try to loot priceless Ottoman artifacts, searching from one cave-mosque to another, only to be bitten, infected; the pandemic then begins in earnest. It'll be a realized metaphor of an escalated Iraq War.
(For clips from Still Life, see #1, #2, #3, #4 and #5. And for another film directed by Jia Zhangke, we highly recommend The World.)
Though this New Scientistarticle on “the biggest and baddest platforms for faking quakes, tsunamis, hurricanes and fire” is unfortunately behind a subscriber-only firewall, there is this short video on one of the featured “disaster machines” uploaded to YouTube. It's the Large High Performance Outdoor Shake Table, the largest of its kind, topped with a 7-seven story building weathering a seismic storm.
Personally, we'd like to subject the Farnsworth House to a few tests just to see if it can survive a major New Madrid event. We'll seat on plush, midcentury Eames chairs, eat popcorn, and wait for the moment of disintegration. Or maybe Mies will completely surprise us, and we witness his house escape a tectonic hurricane unscathed. That too much context, apparently, isn't a problem at all.
An overlay of parking and sports grids, as spotted by Alex S. MacLean in Waltham, Massachusetts; there is also a carless version. In the middle of the night, after the last shopper and basketball player have gone home, guerilla gardeners do battle with Wal-Mart security guards.
Meanwhile, in the Portfolio section of MacLean's website, the series Dwelling merits a good look.
A few years before the first landing of an Apollo crew on the moon, scientists recontoured a volcanic field just outside of Flagstaff, Arizona, with artificial impact craters resembling those found on Mare Tranquillitatis, the proposed first manned American landing site.
With high explosives, they terraformed a lunar surrogate right here on the surface of the earth.
There, during the 60s and 70s, nearly all of the Apollo astronauts who walked on the moon were taught the basics in extraterrestrial exploration and earthworks. They learned how to make field observations, how to make maps, and how to properly collect lunar samples. It is there as well that the tools with which human beings would physically deform another world for the first time were tried out.
Hammers, adjustable sampling scoops, rakes and tongs, rock drills and rover vehicles. Together with astronaut boots and gloves, these would soon leave an imprint, albeit minimal, where before meteors and the solar wind held a monopoly in lunar resurfacing.
If we can digress here briefly, it would be to ask whether these simulated landing sites — where the earth is turned and upturned, displaced and scarred — are a kind of Japanese rock gardens.
Because are not the tracings of human activity highly considered gestures, laden with abstract notions and cultural baggage?
Are not these scoured terrains imprinted with a complex, messy network of interrelated cultural, political, technological, philosophical and even metaphysical concerns that are worth contemplating? A field turned into a text which, if it cannot be understood through the writings of a revered Buddhist monk, can perhaps be deciphered through the Cold War speeches of John F. Kennedy.
Did the astronauts not use a rake?
To return back to Crater Field, as the Arizona training site is called, one wonders whether there are other simulated moons out there, or in the drawing boards now that plans are underway for an American return mission.
And is there a surrogate Mars, wherein a duplicate Opportunity tested entry descent scenarios into a duplicate Victoria Crater?
A Titan facsimile?
An analogue for Venus?
Two things seem worth mentioning right about now.
Firstly, a post at Wired Science last month told us that a group of nine intrepid scientists and engineers spent four months cooped up together in a remote simulated Martian habitat.
Their space habitat (the size and shape of an expected martian abode) is located near a crater on Devon Island above the Arctic Circle in Canada. The simulation is an experiment in planetary exploration and its demands. The team was looking at what happens to a crew in a remote, harsh, close-quartered environment under simulated Martian conditions (crews would only go outside the habitat during a fully simulated EVA) when they are working on real science.
Secondly, from an article in Reuters, we learned that “scientists are using the pine-forested slopes of a Mexican volcano as a test bed to see if trees could grow on a heated-up Mars.” At an elevation of 13,780 feet, planetary scientists from NASA and Mexican universities are investigating “what makes trees refuse to grow above a certain point, where temperatures drop and the air becomes thinner, to see how easily they could grow on Mars.”
Hypertechnological innovation has always underpin American agriculture. In the later half of the 1800s, for instance, flotillas of proto-steampunkdredge boats plowed through the Illinois landscape, as their their lived-in land-sailors carved canals, straightened rivers and re-knitted its embryonic, post-glacial hydrology, draining and transforming the weedy, swampy, supposedly pestilential swat of the American prairie into the most productive landscape in the world.
More recently, a new form of agricultural practice has been developed. Called precision farming, it entails using some of the most advanced remote sensing technology and analytical tools out there. These include aerial and satellite imagery, global positioning systems (GPS), sensors and information management tools (GIS). It isn't quite clear yet, however, if blogging, RSS feeds, Twitter, SMS and MySpace are involved.
Now we learn, from an article published by Wired and another by the Associated Press, that troops of robotic harvesters are being readied to invade America's industrial orchards and vegetable fields.
On these mechano-hydras, the AP writes:
Mechanized picking wouldn't be new for some California crops such as canning tomatoes, low-grade wine grapes and nuts.
But the fresh produce that dominates the state's agricultural output - and that consumers expect to find unblemished in supermarkets - is too fragile to be picked by the machines now in use.
The new pickers rely on advances in computing power and hydraulics that can make robotic limbs and digits operate with near-human sensitivity. Modern imaging technology also enables the machines to recognize and sort fruits and vegetables of varying qualities.
Wired goes into more details. At an orange orchard, we read, “two robots would work as a team: one an eagle-eyed scout, the other a metallic octopus with a gentle touch. The first robot will scan the tree and build a 3-D map,” after which “it has to evaluate each piece of fruit. What size is the orange? What color is it? Does it have black spots on it?”
After the fruits have been digitized and evaluated, the scout robot will then determine “the best order in which to pick them. It sends that information to the second robot, a harvester that will pick the tree clean, following a planned sequence that keeps its eight long arms from bumping into each other.”
If we forgo the important issues of migrant labor, immigration, social justice, food security and even globalization, with which these machines are entangled, we are left to wonder what would happen, assuming they are networked to the interweb, if they were hacked?
What if China, fresh from infiltrating computers in the Pentagon, were to take control of a platoon of these fruit-picking robots? What if the People's Liberation Army, instead of killing our dear Mister Snagglepuss and cuddly Lady Grizabella by exporting tainted pet foods, they do it by injecting neurotoxins into our locally grown produce?
Or what if an installation artist who's been rejected by one too many Manhattan art galleries decides to take his work to a different direction and takes full control of an entire division of pneumatic farmhands? Onto the flat terrain of Kansas he grafts a sort of anti-Jeffersonian grid, whatever that may be. He then carves out a second Double Negative, a homage, right next to the original. And having decided to try his hand on performance art, the artist terrorizes James Turrell at Roden Crater, Turrell's maniacal screams reverberating through the stellar tunnels of his unfinished volcanic observatory; the recording of this will be phoned in to +1 (206) 337-1474.
Even more interesting, what will happen if they become self-aware and go out to pasture? Fitted with solar panels, grazing from one oil well to another, domiciling in abandoned gold mines, what new ecologies will they terraform?
1) On the American Southwest. During the summer, CNET News.com reporter Daniel Terdiman went on a “gadget-laden journey”, sending dispatches from places such as the storm drainage tunnels underneath Las Vegas; the Very Large Array in New Mexico; the Grand Canyon Skywalk, where his body and mind were “in rebellion because standing on a glass bridge through which you can see thousands of feet down into the Grand Canyon is simply wrong”; the Earthship World Community, a testing ground for off-the-grid, fully sustainable houses that can maintain comfortable interior temperatures even if the temperature outside is swelteringly hot or far below zero; and Hoover Dam, where he reports that “Lake Mead is 108 feet below its traditional level, the result of the many years of low rainfall, and these dry years could soon have some serious effects on the region.”
2) On Shrub U, where apparently landscape architects go to learn how to trim better topiaries. Very infuriating characterization of our profession.
3) On France in China, at Super Colossal, wherein Marcus Trimble wonders whether a residential development in Hangzhou, China is evidence that “France is making a backup copy of itself” and that China is the “USB external hard-drive of the French built environment.” The territoire replicated in stratospheric Tibet and in the arid west.
4) On APEC in Sydney, at City of Sound, wherein the recently transplanted Dan Hill muses on The Fence encircling parts of the city and separating all the Pacific Rim world leaders from terrorists, protesters and Dan Hill. The situation there reminds us of the urban stratification and anxious terrain of London in Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men and Pittsburgh in George Romero's Land of the Dead, both films we recommend highly.
![Agrobots](http://lh3.ggpht.com/_yiiPzeRfNBQ/TJUIUaPM81I/AAAAAAAAB70/xRsNZR40h-I/s800/070909_hacking_4.jpg")
