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Of mini-Big Bang birth chambers, server farms, neo-cathedrals and the Tenth Circle of Hell
While everyone is waiting for the first high-energy collision of CERN's Large Hadron Collider sometime next month, might we interest you meanwhile with our previous posts on this mega-machine?
In our first, we wondered if all those scientists working at CERN — after having successfully mapped out the landscape architecture of reality, of course — would want to reconfigure The Machine so that it could levitate a grove of trees.
It's Dante's unexplored Tenth Circle of Hell, which is reserved for landscape architects designing absolutely boring landscapes.
In our second, we were struck by how cavernous some of the underground spaces are. They are Europe's new naves, domed interiors, barrel vaulted arcades and side chapels, very fitting ecclesiastical vocabulary where Science is the de facto New Religion and CERN its St. Peter's.
We wondered, too, whatever happened to one of its unbuilt basilicas, the Superconducting Super Collider down in Texas, and learned that one company is marketing it out as a server farm to credit bureaus, banks and other industries in need of high security data centers.
In other words:
You can probably skip our third and last post, but do look at the two photos there — one of which appears above — and let us know who the photographer is, if you do know. We're rather pedantic when it comes to giving credit to all the images that we use.
While everyone is waiting for the first high-energy collision of CERN's Large Hadron Collider sometime next month, might we interest you meanwhile with our previous posts on this mega-machine?
In our first, we wondered if all those scientists working at CERN — after having successfully mapped out the landscape architecture of reality, of course — would want to reconfigure The Machine so that it could levitate a grove of trees.
And self-powered lighting fixtures; some artificial turf and mildly meditative Zen boulders; a few dozen rabbits, cute or otherwise; anti-gravity hydrology; and of course, the all-important signage: “Warning: If Not Rapture, May Cause Death.”
And after you push a few buttons, flick one or two switches and drain Europe of all of its electricity, your floating garden then goes on an endless subterranean ringed journey.
It's Dante's unexplored Tenth Circle of Hell, which is reserved for landscape architects designing absolutely boring landscapes.
In our second, we were struck by how cavernous some of the underground spaces are. They are Europe's new naves, domed interiors, barrel vaulted arcades and side chapels, very fitting ecclesiastical vocabulary where Science is the de facto New Religion and CERN its St. Peter's.
We wondered, too, whatever happened to one of its unbuilt basilicas, the Superconducting Super Collider down in Texas, and learned that one company is marketing it out as a server farm to credit bureaus, banks and other industries in need of high security data centers.
In other words:
Where the Big Bang might have been simulated endlessly, extra dimensions observed for the first time, and the fundamental construct of Nature elucidated, it might soon be filled with the buying patterns of ex-urbanites at Wal-Mart, hilariously awful credit ratings of college graduates, and our entire archive of bukkake porn.
You can probably skip our third and last post, but do look at the two photos there — one of which appears above — and let us know who the photographer is, if you do know. We're rather pedantic when it comes to giving credit to all the images that we use.
The Rhizotron of Illinois
Over the summer we heard a lot about the Rhizotron and the Xstrata at London's Kew Gardens. In published reports, these new attractions were always twinned together; in fact, on the official website, it's the “Rhizotron & Xstrata Treetop Walkway.” The Xstrata literally takes visitors up to the canopies, and because of the close pairing, we naturally thought that its subterranean equivalent, the Rhizotron, was just as spectacular in terms of design and engineering.
Of course, this was before we saw photographs of the Rhizotron, before when we couldn't help but picture garden lovers navigating through damp and dimly lit passages, bumping their heads into gigantic (simulated) roots, watching all manners of animals burrowing and nesting in the soil (behind museum glass windows), and learning firsthand all the different soil horizons. (“The soil has architecture?!?!” the pasteurized denizens of the concrete jungle will cry out.)
This was also when we have already worked ourselves up into a frenzy by imagining and choreographing its spatial experience: first a descent into the abyss like Jules Verne, then all sense of geography gets lost — or you literally get lost — until somehow you emerge out into the open at the other end, squinting hard at the fullness of the British sun as you ascend up, up, up to the trees, the heaviness and claustrophobia of the earth replaced with buoyancy and vistas.
Alas, to the disappointment of our own making, we later learned that the Rhizotron is no more than a concrete bunker, not that extensive and probably not even wholly subterranean. Up against one wall is a bronze installation, a stylized root system inlaid with educational multimedia. On the floor is a strip of flashing lights. How all of these could engender a meaningful engagement with the hidden landscape is quite puzzling.
Consider, then, “the largest fossil forests found anywhere in the world at any point in geological time.” The discovery was first reported by practically everyone the summer before, and it is finding its way through the wires again this week with the report that these ancient rainforests — one of the first to evolve on the planet — was wiped out by global warming 300 million years ago.
What has always fascinated us about these mineralized landscapes is that they were found in underground coal mines in Illinois. To see them, you would have to put on a hard hat and maybe pack an emergency oxygen canister, because here, the proverbial walking through a forest means spelunking through an extensive underground network of tunnels.
Let the U.S. Department of Interior declare the tunnels a national park. Open it to the public, and you have the Rhizotron of Illinois.
There, while ducking low ceiling, getting soiled, fighting claustrophobia and coughing up pulverized coal, you get to survey the ecology of an extinct landscape. Up against one wall is a dense mat of ferns, and on another are some delicate fronds frozen in time. Look up, and you might see the grass-like leaves of the “giants of coal age forests,” the lycopids, or the diamond patterns of their bark.
The walls, ceilings and floors are plastered with complex geometries in such a way that we are reminded of incomplete mosaic floorings of imperial Roman villas. Typical of Roman paintings, we have images of nature decorating an interior space. It's a garden scene, in fact: a rainforest of the very distant past, a mythological age when the U.S. was straddling the equator, rendered with the tessarae of “ancient vegetation - now turned to rock.”
As splendid as Lascaux's prehistoric cave paintings. As marvelous as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (though this might have a truer version of the Creation story).
Accessing the Wilderness, or: A Proposal for a National Park of Abandoned Gold Mines
Over the summer we heard a lot about the Rhizotron and the Xstrata at London's Kew Gardens. In published reports, these new attractions were always twinned together; in fact, on the official website, it's the “Rhizotron & Xstrata Treetop Walkway.” The Xstrata literally takes visitors up to the canopies, and because of the close pairing, we naturally thought that its subterranean equivalent, the Rhizotron, was just as spectacular in terms of design and engineering.
Of course, this was before we saw photographs of the Rhizotron, before when we couldn't help but picture garden lovers navigating through damp and dimly lit passages, bumping their heads into gigantic (simulated) roots, watching all manners of animals burrowing and nesting in the soil (behind museum glass windows), and learning firsthand all the different soil horizons. (“The soil has architecture?!?!” the pasteurized denizens of the concrete jungle will cry out.)
This was also when we have already worked ourselves up into a frenzy by imagining and choreographing its spatial experience: first a descent into the abyss like Jules Verne, then all sense of geography gets lost — or you literally get lost — until somehow you emerge out into the open at the other end, squinting hard at the fullness of the British sun as you ascend up, up, up to the trees, the heaviness and claustrophobia of the earth replaced with buoyancy and vistas.
Alas, to the disappointment of our own making, we later learned that the Rhizotron is no more than a concrete bunker, not that extensive and probably not even wholly subterranean. Up against one wall is a bronze installation, a stylized root system inlaid with educational multimedia. On the floor is a strip of flashing lights. How all of these could engender a meaningful engagement with the hidden landscape is quite puzzling.
Consider, then, “the largest fossil forests found anywhere in the world at any point in geological time.” The discovery was first reported by practically everyone the summer before, and it is finding its way through the wires again this week with the report that these ancient rainforests — one of the first to evolve on the planet — was wiped out by global warming 300 million years ago.
What has always fascinated us about these mineralized landscapes is that they were found in underground coal mines in Illinois. To see them, you would have to put on a hard hat and maybe pack an emergency oxygen canister, because here, the proverbial walking through a forest means spelunking through an extensive underground network of tunnels.
Let the U.S. Department of Interior declare the tunnels a national park. Open it to the public, and you have the Rhizotron of Illinois.
There, while ducking low ceiling, getting soiled, fighting claustrophobia and coughing up pulverized coal, you get to survey the ecology of an extinct landscape. Up against one wall is a dense mat of ferns, and on another are some delicate fronds frozen in time. Look up, and you might see the grass-like leaves of the “giants of coal age forests,” the lycopids, or the diamond patterns of their bark.
The walls, ceilings and floors are plastered with complex geometries in such a way that we are reminded of incomplete mosaic floorings of imperial Roman villas. Typical of Roman paintings, we have images of nature decorating an interior space. It's a garden scene, in fact: a rainforest of the very distant past, a mythological age when the U.S. was straddling the equator, rendered with the tessarae of “ancient vegetation - now turned to rock.”
As splendid as Lascaux's prehistoric cave paintings. As marvelous as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (though this might have a truer version of the Creation story).
Accessing the Wilderness, or: A Proposal for a National Park of Abandoned Gold Mines
Agro-veillance
If blanketing UK cities with a thick scopic fog of CCTV cameras weren't enough, the countryside may soon find itself placed under similar heavy surveillance. But this, curiously enough, might be a good thing.
As reported by BBC News last month, researchers from technology firm QinetiQ and from Aberystwyth University flew an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) “over fields in England and Wales to map the nitrogen levels in soil, to determine whether fertiliser applications were needed.”
The data collected was then used to create a Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) map, which “tells you the difference between 'green crops' that are photosynthesising and bare ground.” Where there is bare ground, more fertilizer may be needed.
Equipped with this NDVI map, some GPS locators and a techno-pimped out John Deere, farmers would thus be able to target areas in need of supplemental nutrients and to better estimate how much to use, potentially releasing less fertilizers that otherwise would leach out and pollute water sources down the hydrological line. This is precision farming.
Of course, you can use the same information-gathering technique to monitor other environmental conditions, such as soil moisture, disease outbreaks and pest population.
The ecological impact is potentially huge. Imagine only watering crops that need to be watered (and only when required) instead of flooding the entire field. Imagine as well spraying just those diseased plants with herbicides (and only when there is an outbreak) instead of suffocating acres and acres of fields with poison all the time. Better yet, you send in a cadre of Medusa agrobots networked to GPS satellites to surgically excise these botanical tumors.
With a surveillance network such as this, one wonders if you can re-purpose it to monitor other things, say, the urban poor doing a bit of nighttime grocery shopping while the food crisis and subprime armageddon rage on in the inner cities. When detected, they get sprayed with herbicides.
How about GMO crops? Design these neo-plants to emit a characteristic glow in the infrared or ultraviolet wavelength, and you can be alerted when they've jumped the fence. And don't forget to allocate part of the network to keep a look out for anti-GMO anarchists.
It's entirely possible that future pharms will be as heavily monitored as prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and as maniacally firewalled as CIA servers.
Meanwhile, how about using a similar surveillance network to monitor acts of agro-criminality?
As food prices have soared in recent months, farmers in the UK and in the U.S. have started to abandon conservation programs. Through these programs, farmers receive government subsidies for letting some of their fields lay fallow, but not as much if they were to now grow cash crops like wheat, soybeans and corn. Consequently, many of these uncultivated croplands, which have greatly helped restore wildlife habitats and reverse topsoil erosion, are being farmed once again.
Farmers are required to notify the government when they opt out of these programs. But do they really? Could they not be alerting the local agriculture bureau in order to keep their subsidies?
Specially in the U.S., it's rather difficult to tell if a farmer is being honest or not. There is just too much land. To make it easier to detect promises kept and promises broken, the U.S. Department of Agriculture initiated the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP).
NPR had a report on this crop crime unit:
We are told that the maps generated from these overhead reconnaissances aren't released to the public, as doing so might violate the farmers' privacy. But imagine releasing them to the internet wilderness of distributed grid computing, data pornographers, meme-hungry social networking sites, open source virtuality and web-savvy eco-guerrillas.
It'd be like Stardust@home or SETI@home, except you're asking the teeming Web 2.0 masses to look for terrestrial counterfeit. Instead of surveying the Martian landscapes for uncatalogued craters and landforms, citizen agro-agents will survey nearer terrains in search of horticultural deviants, the tenuous peace between the urban and the rural be damned.
Persuade Wired, Boing Boing, Engadget, Slashdot and even Land8Lounge to blog about this, and you could have an army of volunteers comparing maps for hours on end, late into the night, during lunchbreaks or boring studio lectures to spot planted fields where there should be reconstructed prairie or wetlands. This may even be the only time they get to interface with that other wilderness beyond the urban periphery — with Nature — for an extended amount of time.
Protecting your tax dollars while saving the environment and enjoying the outdoors.
But will England's green and pleasant land become an aviary of sorts for pilotless airplanes (how about solar powered mini-dirigibles?), whose droning bird songs in B-flat will commingle with the melodic twittering of traditional birds, the hypnotic chirping of crickets and the nostalgic rustling of grains against the wind? “Ah, the sounds of summer,” passing urbanites will plaintively sigh.
Will America's majestic horizons darken with a murmuring data cloud kicking up a neverending electromagnetic storm?
POSTSCRIPT #1: Boing Boing picked up our post on Agro-veillance, and the comments there are worth a read. They form a dialogue that a lot of blogs long for.
On agro
InfraNet Lab: Enviro-veillance
If blanketing UK cities with a thick scopic fog of CCTV cameras weren't enough, the countryside may soon find itself placed under similar heavy surveillance. But this, curiously enough, might be a good thing.
As reported by BBC News last month, researchers from technology firm QinetiQ and from Aberystwyth University flew an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) “over fields in England and Wales to map the nitrogen levels in soil, to determine whether fertiliser applications were needed.”
The data collected was then used to create a Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) map, which “tells you the difference between 'green crops' that are photosynthesising and bare ground.” Where there is bare ground, more fertilizer may be needed.
Equipped with this NDVI map, some GPS locators and a techno-pimped out John Deere, farmers would thus be able to target areas in need of supplemental nutrients and to better estimate how much to use, potentially releasing less fertilizers that otherwise would leach out and pollute water sources down the hydrological line. This is precision farming.
Of course, you can use the same information-gathering technique to monitor other environmental conditions, such as soil moisture, disease outbreaks and pest population.
The ecological impact is potentially huge. Imagine only watering crops that need to be watered (and only when required) instead of flooding the entire field. Imagine as well spraying just those diseased plants with herbicides (and only when there is an outbreak) instead of suffocating acres and acres of fields with poison all the time. Better yet, you send in a cadre of Medusa agrobots networked to GPS satellites to surgically excise these botanical tumors.
With a surveillance network such as this, one wonders if you can re-purpose it to monitor other things, say, the urban poor doing a bit of nighttime grocery shopping while the food crisis and subprime armageddon rage on in the inner cities. When detected, they get sprayed with herbicides.
How about GMO crops? Design these neo-plants to emit a characteristic glow in the infrared or ultraviolet wavelength, and you can be alerted when they've jumped the fence. And don't forget to allocate part of the network to keep a look out for anti-GMO anarchists.
It's entirely possible that future pharms will be as heavily monitored as prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and as maniacally firewalled as CIA servers.
Meanwhile, how about using a similar surveillance network to monitor acts of agro-criminality?
As food prices have soared in recent months, farmers in the UK and in the U.S. have started to abandon conservation programs. Through these programs, farmers receive government subsidies for letting some of their fields lay fallow, but not as much if they were to now grow cash crops like wheat, soybeans and corn. Consequently, many of these uncultivated croplands, which have greatly helped restore wildlife habitats and reverse topsoil erosion, are being farmed once again.
Farmers are required to notify the government when they opt out of these programs. But do they really? Could they not be alerting the local agriculture bureau in order to keep their subsidies?
Specially in the U.S., it's rather difficult to tell if a farmer is being honest or not. There is just too much land. To make it easier to detect promises kept and promises broken, the U.S. Department of Agriculture initiated the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP).
NPR had a report on this crop crime unit:
Farmers may seem like trustworthy people, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture is taking no chances. It's spending tens of millions of dollars to create an enormous computerized map of every farmer's field in America. The program is intended to make sure farmers are doing what's required to earn their government subsidies.
It's an enormous task, keeping track of those subsidies. They add up to billions of dollars each year and they go to more than half a million farmers, scattered from Maine to California. Some farmers receive payments for protecting streams and wetlands; others, for growing specific crops. In each case, the payments depend on accurate information on the amount of land involved. So the USDA has resorted to a program of overhead reconnaissance — something akin of spy flights.
We are told that the maps generated from these overhead reconnaissances aren't released to the public, as doing so might violate the farmers' privacy. But imagine releasing them to the internet wilderness of distributed grid computing, data pornographers, meme-hungry social networking sites, open source virtuality and web-savvy eco-guerrillas.
It'd be like Stardust@home or SETI@home, except you're asking the teeming Web 2.0 masses to look for terrestrial counterfeit. Instead of surveying the Martian landscapes for uncatalogued craters and landforms, citizen agro-agents will survey nearer terrains in search of horticultural deviants, the tenuous peace between the urban and the rural be damned.
Persuade Wired, Boing Boing, Engadget, Slashdot and even Land8Lounge to blog about this, and you could have an army of volunteers comparing maps for hours on end, late into the night, during lunchbreaks or boring studio lectures to spot planted fields where there should be reconstructed prairie or wetlands. This may even be the only time they get to interface with that other wilderness beyond the urban periphery — with Nature — for an extended amount of time.
Protecting your tax dollars while saving the environment and enjoying the outdoors.
But will England's green and pleasant land become an aviary of sorts for pilotless airplanes (how about solar powered mini-dirigibles?), whose droning bird songs in B-flat will commingle with the melodic twittering of traditional birds, the hypnotic chirping of crickets and the nostalgic rustling of grains against the wind? “Ah, the sounds of summer,” passing urbanites will plaintively sigh.
Will America's majestic horizons darken with a murmuring data cloud kicking up a neverending electromagnetic storm?
POSTSCRIPT #1: Boing Boing picked up our post on Agro-veillance, and the comments there are worth a read. They form a dialogue that a lot of blogs long for.
On agro
InfraNet Lab: Enviro-veillance
Is Landscape Architecture dead?
Editors at kerb, the annual landscape architecture journal compiled by undergraduates at the Landscape Architecture program @ RMIT, are calling for submissions for their 17th edition. They want to know:
Got some thoughts? Then send them to kerb@ems.rmit.edu.au.
The due date for abstracts is only a few days away — 5 September 2008 — but we are told that they will be happy to accept abstracts and full submissions up until 26 September 2008.
And by abstracts, they mean a 100-250 word outline of the proposed submission - be it written, multimedia, photoessay, model images, etc. The format is open; anything submitted will just need to be accompanied by text.
Editors at kerb, the annual landscape architecture journal compiled by undergraduates at the Landscape Architecture program @ RMIT, are calling for submissions for their 17th edition. They want to know:
Is Landscape Architecture dead?
Does Landscape Architecture have the capacity to deal with the potentials of the future?
What is the future of Landscape Architecture?
How can landscape be shaped by concepts/models/ideas/theories that are not normally considered relevant to Landscape?
Got some thoughts? Then send them to kerb@ems.rmit.edu.au.
The due date for abstracts is only a few days away — 5 September 2008 — but we are told that they will be happy to accept abstracts and full submissions up until 26 September 2008.
And by abstracts, they mean a 100-250 word outline of the proposed submission - be it written, multimedia, photoessay, model images, etc. The format is open; anything submitted will just need to be accompanied by text.
Cacti Crime
In Palm Desert, California, we read in BBC News, “$20,000 (£11,000) of golden barrel cacti have been stolen in six months.”
In an effort to conserve water in drought-stricken southern California (and money in economically anxious times), the city substituted its “lush lawns” with native desert plants. Now their xeriscaped roadside verges and median strips are lined with cactus, agave, red bird of paradise and lantana. Unfortunately, the “slow-growing varieties, such as golden barrels and agaves, have been targeted” by thieves. The large golden barrels, in particular, “can fetch up to $4,000 (£2,200)” while the smaller ones, with a wholesale price of $100, can be resold in the black market for $50 to $60.
So now “hidden security cameras monitor places where large numbers of the plants are located, while officials will start putting microchips in some cacti, so that stolen ones can be identified.”
They will also soon start recruiting migrant workers for their new Cacti Scene Investigation task force, unfortunately undoing their fiscal conservation.
This crime fighting unit, of course, will inspire a new police procedural drama on network television. CSI: Botany. In each episode, using state of the art gizmos and plain old human insight, dashingly photogenic botanists will hunt down horticultural deviants: orchid thieves; rogue pharmers hired by Iran to breach America's food security; identity theft rings hacking into the wireless networks of major retail stores using outdoor fake shrubbery; guerrilla gardeners; Ken Smith and many others.
POSTSCRIPT #1: The U.S. Department of Agriculture's crop cops doing some forensic aerial photography.
In Palm Desert, California, we read in BBC News, “$20,000 (£11,000) of golden barrel cacti have been stolen in six months.”
In an effort to conserve water in drought-stricken southern California (and money in economically anxious times), the city substituted its “lush lawns” with native desert plants. Now their xeriscaped roadside verges and median strips are lined with cactus, agave, red bird of paradise and lantana. Unfortunately, the “slow-growing varieties, such as golden barrels and agaves, have been targeted” by thieves. The large golden barrels, in particular, “can fetch up to $4,000 (£2,200)” while the smaller ones, with a wholesale price of $100, can be resold in the black market for $50 to $60.
So now “hidden security cameras monitor places where large numbers of the plants are located, while officials will start putting microchips in some cacti, so that stolen ones can be identified.”
They will also soon start recruiting migrant workers for their new Cacti Scene Investigation task force, unfortunately undoing their fiscal conservation.
This crime fighting unit, of course, will inspire a new police procedural drama on network television. CSI: Botany. In each episode, using state of the art gizmos and plain old human insight, dashingly photogenic botanists will hunt down horticultural deviants: orchid thieves; rogue pharmers hired by Iran to breach America's food security; identity theft rings hacking into the wireless networks of major retail stores using outdoor fake shrubbery; guerrilla gardeners; Ken Smith and many others.
POSTSCRIPT #1: The U.S. Department of Agriculture's crop cops doing some forensic aerial photography.
Michael Jackson as Landscape Architecture
Taking inspiration from Michael Jackson — that creature from a future “world of pure synthesis, pure self-creation“ — let's fantasize the modified body becoming a legitimate site for landscape architecture.
Landscape design begins to infuse recombinant DNA techniques into the creative process. To be licensed as landscape architects, interns must be well-versed in advanced genetic engineering. To be able to deform and reconstruct, they may even be required to get a medical degree.
Urban agriculture then takes a provocative turn. We become our own self-fertilizing, mobile edible estates. Locavores measure distances not in miles but in feet and inches, if not at all. Transporting food achieves zero carbon footprint, which becomes negative if the pollution-eating properties of our neo-organs get factored in.
But what of our food service sectors, such as restaurants and supermarkets and the infrastructure that supports them? What of the clothing, personal grooming and home furnishing industries? Will we dwell as usual? No, the urban grid needs to be radically reconfigured.
And what of our parks? There are still large ones, but an instant Central Park can be constituted anywhere and anytime there's a large crowd, for instance, during rush hour traffic on the “streets” or inside/outside the Olympic stadium watching the fireworks of the opening and closing ceremonies. It's the parkless park. Organize a rooftop “barbecue” summer party, and a temporary rooftop garden in the form of blobby geo-bodies gets landscaped. In other words, parks and gardens are still a physical manifestation of urban sociability and diversion.
One thing remains unchanged as well. The body, like gardens, is still a terrain manipulated by the demands of style, fashion and pretense. The body, like gardens, is the site and object of consumption. Grooming your GMed anatomy, like gardening in the aristocratic landscape of Versailles or in the cul-de-sac frontyards of Orange County, is a tactical game of social one-upmanship. No one wants to be caught dead using cheap turf or with a dry patch or having less alterations than Michael Jackson, unless it's considered au courant in your socioeconomic milieu.
In any case, if we find ourselves landless in the crowded city of tomorrow, perhaps amidst the future ultramegametropolis of New Tokyo-Beijing-Shanghai-Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Manila, we can cultivate our own epidermic Eden.
Bouffant Topiary
Taking inspiration from Michael Jackson — that creature from a future “world of pure synthesis, pure self-creation“ — let's fantasize the modified body becoming a legitimate site for landscape architecture.
Landscape design begins to infuse recombinant DNA techniques into the creative process. To be licensed as landscape architects, interns must be well-versed in advanced genetic engineering. To be able to deform and reconstruct, they may even be required to get a medical degree.
Urban agriculture then takes a provocative turn. We become our own self-fertilizing, mobile edible estates. Locavores measure distances not in miles but in feet and inches, if not at all. Transporting food achieves zero carbon footprint, which becomes negative if the pollution-eating properties of our neo-organs get factored in.
But what of our food service sectors, such as restaurants and supermarkets and the infrastructure that supports them? What of the clothing, personal grooming and home furnishing industries? Will we dwell as usual? No, the urban grid needs to be radically reconfigured.
And what of our parks? There are still large ones, but an instant Central Park can be constituted anywhere and anytime there's a large crowd, for instance, during rush hour traffic on the “streets” or inside/outside the Olympic stadium watching the fireworks of the opening and closing ceremonies. It's the parkless park. Organize a rooftop “barbecue” summer party, and a temporary rooftop garden in the form of blobby geo-bodies gets landscaped. In other words, parks and gardens are still a physical manifestation of urban sociability and diversion.
One thing remains unchanged as well. The body, like gardens, is still a terrain manipulated by the demands of style, fashion and pretense. The body, like gardens, is the site and object of consumption. Grooming your GMed anatomy, like gardening in the aristocratic landscape of Versailles or in the cul-de-sac frontyards of Orange County, is a tactical game of social one-upmanship. No one wants to be caught dead using cheap turf or with a dry patch or having less alterations than Michael Jackson, unless it's considered au courant in your socioeconomic milieu.
In any case, if we find ourselves landless in the crowded city of tomorrow, perhaps amidst the future ultramegametropolis of New Tokyo-Beijing-Shanghai-Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Manila, we can cultivate our own epidermic Eden.
Bouffant Topiary