We are forced to face the reality on a daily basis that environmental damage is more advanced than experts predicted. As global warming becomes the top of almost every government’s agenda, recent trends have put pressure on world leaders to act immediately: for instance, forced recycling, carbon offsetting and a 10-year campaign to make environmentally friendly living fashionable.
Nitta then asks:
Are these efforts really improving the environment? Are these activities saving the Earth?
Considering that her “project takes current green trends to the extreme,” Nitta's answer seems to be that our current efforts are not making a dent, hence the Animal Messaging Service.
The A.M.S. is an alternative form of communication whereby so-called extreme green guerrillas “send messages internationally by hacking into the animal migration system.” The environmental benefit of this is that it doesn't tie you to big corporations, as one would be if using the Internet and mobile phones, and unlike conventional postal systems, it doesn't leave a huge carbon footprint.
But how does it work?
As but one of Nitta's scenarios, animated here in this flash animation for the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, an EGG member relays his favorite recipe from London to New York by first hacking it into an RFID-tagged whooping swans as they pass through in April during their annual migration. These swans would then fly off, stopping along the way in Iceland. There, unbeknownst to them, the recipe would be hurriedly extracted, either automatically or with further hacking by camouflaged EGG members, who then waits for polar bears to transfer the electronic package into their embedded RFIDs. Amazingly, these bears can swim from ocean-locked Iceland to Greenland, where once again the recipe has to change hands, so to speak. “What is this recipe for?” we have to ask at this point; with this much effort put into getting it from one place to another, it must be for something spectacular. Well, whatever it is for, the last leg of its journey to New York will be undertaken by RFID-tagged salmons. Salmons? Hmm.
In any case, there is also a local version of this service using RFID-tagged pets and visitor animals.
One wonders if instead of hacking into an inorganic apparatus, you actually hack into the animal's biological systems. Instead of uploading the data into an RFID, the sender imprints the message into the animal's behavior, so that rather than downloading electronic bits of information, the receiver decodes the recipe from the subtle wiggling of salmons as they head upstream. To find out how much organic and locally grown basil in the solar roasted Piguail, a very close reading of the landscape is needed. Did that tail fluster or did it flutter? You'll need to brush up on hermeneutics.
You head out to Central Park to read an endearing note from your pen pal across the oceans through the murmurings of millions of starlings. Bird watching will never be the same.
The next day, you take the few flights of stairs to your rooftop garden or your neighbor's to watch honeybees waggle dance the time and place of your best friend's birthday party.
Of course, without RFIDs, one would need to provide a mechanism in which the information can jump between species. This again could be done by hacking each conscripted carrier, either genetically or behaviorally or both, to enable direct interspecies communication. For instance, a love letter translated into a humpback whale's song that starlings can understand and then transliterated into elaborate aerial maneuvers.
There might be a chance that the love letter gets garbled along the way into a message of hate, in which case, that is the price you pay for really saving the planet.
But as always, our overriding interest here would be the effects of an Animal Messaging Service on the built environment.
What if everyone, to the ultimately surprise of Michiko Nitta, fully subscribes to her vision of the extreme green lifestyle and cities everywhere adopt the A.M.S. as the default mode of communication? What then would the physical form of the city be like if its networked infrastructure is based primarily on zoology?
Is this where “vegi.tecture” reaches its true potential?
And how does one site these “natural sanctuaries” as data ports into the spatial grid? Are we going to look back again to Frederick Law Olmsted's Emerald Necklaces for our model?
Or could there be a new landscape paradigm, one that is formed and informed by aberrant interspecies interaction; the threat of Avian flu; increasingly depleted natural resources; climate change; and the growing possibility that geoengineering may just be our best chance to counteract global warming?
For answers to those questions, you will most assuredly not find any in this article, but you will read about some interesting facts about a massive government-sponsored faunal surveillance system designed to track the food supply of the U.S. by tagging livestock, poultry and other animals with RFID.
We begin with Michele Gauler's ossuary for the information age, a project which she developed as a student at the Royal College Art in London.
Digital Remains, a beautiful, personalized data-storage artifact equipped with a Bluetooth connection, allows users to log on to the digital remains of a loved one and receive their data on personal digital devices. Search algorithms dig through the data, pulling out relevant personal traces, like a photograph from a holiday spenth together or a favorite piece of music, evoking the presence of the deceased.
This is not in our archives but we have covered similar examples of electronic mourning and remembrance before, for instance, those being experimented with at Forever Fernwood as part of its green burial practices. As their website explains: “Fernwood uses GPS and GIS to collect and manage detailed information about graves on this site. Using this technology allows us to keep accurate records and link to digital LifeStories about people who are buried in natural burial areas while minimizing the impact on the land.”
Indeed, one of the appeals of these digitized rituals is that they are a sustainable alternative to the gas-guzzling, water-guzzling, space-guzzling and money-guzzling Arcadian lawns with which most (American) cemeteries are landscaped.
The following two projects were referenced in a post about a new bioengineering technique in which disembodied meat is grown in laboratories and thereby forgoing rearing livestock on a farm.
A small-scale prototype of a “leather” hacket grown in vitro, Victimless Leather is a living layer supported by a biodegradable polymer matrix shaped like a miniature coat, offering the possibility of wearing leather without directly killing an animal. Catts and Zurr believe that “biotechnological research occurs within a particular social and political system, which will inevitably focus on manipulating nature for profit and economic gain.” They argue that if the things we surround ourselves with every day can be both manufactured and living, growing entities, “we will begin to take a more responsible attitude towards our environment and curb our destructive consumerism.”
In vitro-cultured meat production may have many advatages, but it raises practical questions, as well as some complex philosophical and ethical issues. What should this meat look like? What flavor should it have? How should it be served? King answers the first question: “A mobile magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) unit scours the countryside looking for the most beautiful examples of livestock. The selected specimen is scanned from head to toe, and accurate cross-section images of its inner organs are generated...to create molds for the in vitro meat. We...might still want to re-create a familiar shape to better remind us where the 'artificial' meat come from.”
Whether grown with features simulating cows or reminiscent of a Thanksgiving turkey from your halcyon childhood or that of your favorite celebrities, say, Michael Jackson, the landscape implication is quite staggering. Imagine growing all our meat in ultra-efficient manufacturing plants that consume dramatically less energy and resources and produce less waste. Also requiring less real estate, imagine then what all those obsolete farms will be transformed into.
Will they be converted to make biofuels exclusively or turned into vast algal ponds to produce hydrogen gas?
Will half of Kansas be covered with solar panels?
Will we have a golden age of national parks?
In any case, let's move down on the list.
Light Wind, a project by Jeroed Verhoeven and Joep Verhoeven, comes with this brief description.
With traditional Dutch windmills in mind, the designers of the studio Demakersvan have created an outdoor lamp that generates its own energy. with every breeze Light Wind stores the energy that it later uses to produce light.
We will be brief as well by simply directing you to these wind turbines embedded with LEDs and also to these Jersey barriers within which are double-stacked Darius turbines.
Moving right along, we find several examples of Google Earth mashups. These mashups, we read, “combine different sources into a single platform, making them one face of collaborative design on the Internet.”
One of the more widely reported mashups is the flood maps from flood.firetree.net that shows coastal areas prone to sea level rise due to global warming. At a setting of +14m sea level rise, you can see entire cities and towns, whole communities and landscapes become inundated in simulated disaster. If not provocative, these maps are at least informative.
More visceral though in terms of driving in the point that your home will be flooded and pulled away into the seas as though by a slow moving but still destructive tsunami is Eve S. Mosher's project that is part public art, part guerrilla theater and part Christoesque interactive installation. From Prunings XXXI:
Artist Eve S. Mosher is leaving behind a trail of blue-tinted chalk as she winds her way through the coastal neighborhoods of southernmost Brooklyn. This chalk line, The New York Times reports, “demarcates a point 10 feet above sea level, a boundary now used by federal and state agencies and insurance companies to show where waters could rise after a major storm. Relying partly on research conducted by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University, Ms. Mosher is trying to draw attention to projections that the chance of flooding up to or beyond her line could increase significantly as a result of global warming.”
Finally, we come to the BEE'S, a project by Susana Soares.
Soares has conceived a series of alternative diagnosis tools that use trained bees to perform health checkups, detect diseases, and monitor fertility cycles. “Bees have a phenomenal odor perception,” explains Soares. “They can be trained to target a specific odor.” The Face Object has two chambers. Bees that detect certain odors in the breath--some of them even connected to forms of cancer--will go into the smaller chamber if they sense them. The Fertility Cycle Object has three chambers: The largest corresponds to the ovulation period, the second to preovulation, and the third to postovulation. The bees will fly into the relevant chamber. The Precise Object has an outer curved tube that prevents bees from flying accidentally into the interior diagnosis chamber, making for a more precise result.
Also training bees as a diagnostic tool is Professor Nikola Kezic of Zagreb University. But instead of using them to detect medical problems, these Croatian bees are being trained to sniff out explosives that might have been missed by de-mining teams. In a post in which we proposed a park for North Korea's DMZ, we quoted a BBC News article as follows:
Training the bees to find mines takes place in a large net tent pitched on a lawn at the university's Faculty of Agriculture.
A hive of bees sits at one end, with several feeding points for the bees set up around the tent.
But only a few of the feeding points contain food, and the soil immediately around them has been impregnated with explosive chemicals.
The idea is that the bees' keen sense of smell soon associates the smell of explosives with food.
Also mentioned in that post is a genetically-modified weed that can detect the chemical signature of mines and a bunch of fungi that can eat explosives and neutralize radioactive substances. Appropriated as a landscape material, you could have not only a diagnostic tool but a cure to contaminated sites.
Our tour ends here but the exhibition will close May 22, 2008.
Last month MoMA opened its new exhibition, Design and the Elastic Mind, to enthusiastic reviews, with Nicolai Ouroussoff even calling it “the most uplifting show MoMA’s architecture and design department has presented since the museum reopened in 2004” before finally declaring — and perhaps while also trying to elicit a bit of pity for those unable to see the exhibited works in person — that “thanks to its imaginative breadth, we can begin to dream again.”
Thankfully, we the geographically displaced are able to get a sense of this “imaginative breadth” and partake in the shows unbridled optimism through the exhibition's website, which is refreshingly easy to use. Militant anti-flash website that we are, we were nevertheless disarmed by its multi-navigational interface. For over a week now, we've been madly clicking away like trigger-happy Blackwater soldiers. And we don't see ourselves stopping anytime soon, as there is this link archive provided by MoMA.
In any case, while combing through the website, we were happily reacquainted with some of the projects we have covered before and some that are conceptually similar to ones we have written about in the past. There are about a dozen of them.
We are going to archive them in two separate posts.
One of the unexpected outcomes from our recentself-linkingbacchanalias is that they highlight one of this blog's overriding themes — how natural processes, like hydrology, growth and decay, become entangled with human culture.
Corollary to that is the role technology — old, new, and imagined future ones — plays in this entanglement, a role which can often lead to and indeed does result in dramatic landscape changes. This is another theme that appears again and again on Pruned. And it also underpins all the disparate choices for this MoMA exhibition, which, as the online catalogue explains, “explores the reciprocal relationship between science and design in the contemporary world by bringing together design objects and concepts that marry the most advanced scientific research with attentive consideration of human limitations, habits, and aspirations.” With these upcoming self-linking bacchanalias, then, we should have another chance to at least vocalize another longstanding interest.
Here is Part I.
We'll be your docent, absolutely free of charge.
First on the list is the AMOEBA, or the Advanced Multiple Organized Experimental Basin, “a circular basin about the size of an inflatable children's pool” that is used “to evaluate the effects of waves on ship designs.”
Using the fifty plungerlike mechanical units installed along its rim, AMOEBA can produce a variety of wave conditions and then calm the water's surface on command. One of [Shigeru Naito]'s students found another use for this equipment: creating the alphabet on the water's surface. When waves in various frequencies converge, the water's surface rises at specific points; by connecting these points, lines and shapes can be drawn.
Of course, we also found another use for it, specifically to inscribe the Gardens of Versailles in their entirety and in full scale somewhere in the South Pacific.
Hydrology coalescing into elaborate parterres, Baroque statues, and architectonic hedges and borders — all of which doubling as aquariums. A pack of humpback whales, for instance, will be gliding gently alongside as you sail down the main axis, their timeless chanting filling the breezy tropical air. Enter any one of the many bosquets dotting the landscape and you're soon surrounded by a swarm of fish. Enter another one and you're soon privy to the mating rituals of giant jellyfishes, seemingly weightless. Ethereal. Watch out for the one with the great white sharks though.
Then at night, you set anchor in the middle of a tapis vert, a simple grass lawn on land perhaps but out in the Pacific, it's a vast cultivated field of bioluminescent dinoflagelletes.
We also found how this Baroque fountain can play a role in maritime warfare.
Next is Contour Crafting, invented by Behrokh Khosnevis. This project is listed under the thematic group Thought to Action with other “new methods of manufacture and behavioral rules that establish the future of design forms and capabilities.”
A single house or a colony of houses may be constructed automatically by the process in a single run, with all plumbing and electrical utilities imbedded in each house; yet each building could have a different architectural design. An average size custom-designed house may be built by Contour Crafting within a day.
This simplified manufacturing process thus has the potential to save energy and reduce waste. Furthermore:
The implication is especially profound for emergency-shelter construction and low-income housing. This new mode of construction will be one of the very feasible approaches for building on the moon or Mars, both of which are being targeted for human colonization before the end of the century.
We, on the other hand, thought that it could also be turned into a cenotaph mega-machine, capable of printing thousands of Pharaonic mausoleums based on designs by Boullée, resulting in entire provinces or states or even whole nations becoming literally valleys of the dead, hosting thousands of encapsulated monumental voids.
The PlayPump water system is a merry-go-round that uses kid power to pump water. As they play, children spin the PlayPump, powering it to the pump underground water into an aboveground tank. This 660-gallon storage tank provides easy access to water with the simple turn of a tap. The storage tank also serves as a billboard, which can be used to promote messages about social issues relevant to a particular community.
By some accounts, these hydrological playgrounds are quite successful in augmenting infrastructural deficiencies in several African countries, but we did wonder last year if there was a better strategy in giving African children better access to fresh water while also greatly benefiting American kids.
Wouldn't it be better to just slice off a sizable chunk of what we in the United States spend on public water services — for instance, to recreate some sort of Edenic fantasies in the desert Southwest with water diverted from severely depleted sources — and give this piece to sub-Saharan African nations where the money will be used to improve their hydrological infrastructure, and we are the ones who get to install the PlayPumps in our school grounds and playgrounds, wherein a growing population of obese, diabetic, allergic children, the ones inured to the hardship of suburban domesticity, are forced to trim a little bit of the fat, reduce their susceptibility to diabetes and prevent future addictions to Allegra® and Claritin® and simultaneously teaching them about the incredibly, wonderfully awesome subject of hydrology and imparting a life long commitment to water conservation?
We apparently forgot to breath, but in any case, our answer then and now is a resounding “Yes!”
With Non-Stop shoes, Padrós looks at the energy potential of everyday routines such as walking, climbing, stairs, and opening doors. Energy generated during the day by these activities is stored in the shoes and may be used later to power devices such as a lamp, a radio, or a fan. Containers could be used to collect energy from the shoes of a whole family to feed more power domestic appliances.
This is one of the projects that we did not cover before, but it is astonishingly similar in concept to Alberto Villarreal's BrightWalk, the winner in last year's Metropolis Magazine Next Generation Design Competition.
Villarreal's shoes were mentioned in a post with other projects experimenting with piezoelectric membranes as an infrastructural with which renewable energy can be harnessed. These other projects include a Japanese train station whose ticketing gates are embedded with piezo pads and Elizabeth Redmond's PowerLeap, both of which also investigate the potential of piezoelectricity and, in the case of these two, how can be spatialized on an urban scale.
Also worth mentioning here is Crowd Farm, a proposal by James Graham and Thaddeus Jusczyk to — you guessed it — “harvest the energy of human movement in urban settings.”
Weaving through the urban landscape along with our already dense infrastructure of consumption will be an equally dense filigree of an infrastructure of production.
Speaking of human kinetics, there is the Power Assist Suit, “a battery-powered exoskeleton” built by Dr. Keijirou Yamamoto of Kanagawa Institute of Technology as “a response to the fact that Japan does not have adequate number of healthy young people to take care of its rapidly aging population. The suit is designed to help a caregiver carry a bedridden patient.”
Again, we never wrote about this, but there was one similar project that we did. It's called the Bleex, or Berkeley Lower Extremity Exoskeleton, and this DARPA-funded exoskeleton allows the wearer to carry hundreds of pounds (potentially more) with little physical effort. In other words, using the Bleex, you can carry as many as a dozen bedridden patients, if you wanted to.
Or:
It's the future of guerrilla gardening. You get suited up with the Bleex, and with your night vision goggles, satellite navigation systems and weaponized hoe, you set about re-wilding urban concrete wastelands. Under the cover of darkness, a squadron of Bleex Soldier-Gardeners carries out sabotage on Wal-Mart parking lots. With prairie grasses and wildflowers.
The Bleex, unfortunately, may be too expensive for the local garden enthusiast, in which case there is the Muscle Suit.
And finally for today is the image above from one of The Inner Life of the Cell animations, conceived by professors at Harvard University and animated by XVIVO. This animation and others in the series are used as a teaching tool for undergraduate students.
It was quite extraordinary seeing it then, and it still is. The video used by MoMA for its website is a bit tiny, but a larger version — with a soundtrack — can be viewed here.
A couple of days ago, the HiRISE Team, which oversees the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, released 9.9 terabytes worth of image data. Probably the most reported images are the four avalanches “caught in action,” one of which is captured in the photo above.
Cameras orbiting Mars have taken thousands of images that have enabled scientists to put together pieces of Mars’ geologic history. However, most of them reveal landscapes that haven’t changed much in millions of years. Some images taken at different times of year do show seasonal changes from one image to the next; however, it is extremely rare to catch such a dramatic event in action.
For more spectacular photos, you can browse through this database in retinal ecstasy.
One of Nagano Prefecture's earthquake experience vehicles, wherein foreigners can get acclimated with or a preview of the common and the really big tectonic events. Go see it in action.
A couple of weeks ago and again last week, Wired featured a nanocrystal that can absorb carbon dioxide. Discovered by scientists at UCLA:
The sponge-like material, called ZIF-69, promises to hold 60 times its volume in carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas scientists say is primarily responsible for climate change.
And:
ZIF-69 is like a carbon dioxide trap, allowing only CO2 in, while screening out molecules with different shapes. Under pressure, the compound allows the carbon dioxide in, but not back out. Then, when scientists decompress the material, the gas is released, allowing scientists to dump the captured CO2 into a storage system.
But what is this storage system? Wired, again: “Right now, engineers are planning to inject the CO2 into the ground in a process known as geological sequestration.”
Of course, there are critics to this approach of combatting climate change — “a pie-in-the-sky idea that entrenched fossil fuel companies promote to stave off the implementation of truly renewable technologies like solar and wind power.” It's greenwashing, in other words.
Meanwhile, with this ZIF-69 greenwashing now commingling in our minds with Gross. Max.'s proposal to use nuclear power to help reduce CO2 emissions, we were reminded of a waste treatment reactor built by the Israeli firm Environmental Energy Resources (EER) that can turn “radioactive, hazardous and municipal waste into inert byproducts such as glass and clean energy.”
This technology will not make nuclear power plants any safer; it can only make their waste and collateral damages that much easier to eradicate — i.e., not carted away into distant storage sites where they remain dangerous; they are actually decontaminated — and in a manner that, we are told, “does not harm the environment and leaves no surface water, groundwater, or soil pollution in its wake.”
But the process does leave something in its wake:
The EER reactor combines three processes into one solution: it takes plasma torches to break down the waste; carbon leftovers are gasified and inorganic components are converted to solid waste. The remaining vitrified material is inert and can be cast into molds to produce tiles, blocks or plates for the construction industry.
In other words, you can use these carbon leftovers to build an entire city.
The morning after Russia's presidential election and the vodka-soaked celebration parties at the ruling oligarchy's palatial ballrooms, one of Putin's henchmen and now president-elect Medvedev's vassals — a Russian nouveau riche who made his multi-billion ruble fortune from oil and gas — inexplicably becomes afflicted with the Rockefeller syndrome. After nearly a decade of being a party to the environmental degradation and human rights abuses of post-Yeltsin Russia, he now wishes to make amends. He wants redemption.
He looks into donating a substantial amount of money to charitable organizations and philanthropic works. He meets with museum curators and trustees to see if they want him to buy for them that new expensive Old Master painting that's just entered the market or fund that new gallery wing for which they have been fruitlessly whoring themselves around. He even explores the possibility of creating a world class university from scratch. These may or may not undo his sins, but at least he will look his best in the amnesiac eyes of the future.
But then he reads something about EER's reactor. He immediately realizes that it could provide a way to clean up Chernobyl, where he was born, where he had spent the halcyon days of childhood and from where he was exiled by the 1986 meltdown of its nuclear power plant. He realizes that salvation awaits him there.
To save Chernobyl and his soul, then, he will raze everything down — offices, Soviet apartment blocks, hospitals, roads, pavements, gardens, playgrounds, schools, trees, forests, everything within tens of kilometers around the reactor — and scoop up everything else — soil, roots, bedrock, sewers, etc. An entire landscape surgically excised, as one would a tumor, and then incinerated.
And then using the harvested chunks of “lava-like rocks,” a new Chernobyl will spring forth from the detritus of interrupted lives — radiation free and inhabitable once again.
Twenty years from now, when this new city has been repopulated with former nuclear exiles and new gardens and verdant parks have sprouted — on a morning just like any other when the sun has just appeared in the horizon — the whole city will glow in bright emerald iridescence.
The anxious terrain of Drangagil Neskaupstaður in the east fjords of Iceland — where catching dams, braking mounds, deflection earthen walls, diversionary canals and other tectonic reconfigurations of the earth's surface lay waiting in the summer for winter's snow.
They're avalanche protection structures, but they may as well be MOUT facilities where landscape architects are trained to deal with future disasters that may or may not come; a new subgenre of public art; or the shooting location for Guy Maddin's sequel to Careful.
