Pruned

When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a drone

2012-05-22T23:58:00.002-05:00

(Björn Schulke, Observer #2, 2003.)

72 Hour Urban Action in Stuttgart (and Imagining Kowloon Skyfavelas)

2012-05-21T03:54:00.009-05:00

(Stuttgart is calling!)

You have just about a week to put a team together and vie for one of the spots in the next edition of the 72 Hour Urban Action competition, which the organizers bill as “the world's first real-time architecture competition.” If you can find only a couple of interested colleagues or no one at all, you can still apply as an individual participant or a small team, and if selected, you will then be joined into a larger team.

There will be ten teams in all. On take-off day on July 11, 2012, those teams will be tasked to “realize projects in response to the spatial and social challenges the sites and missions offer.” That is, in just 72 hours, they will actually have to build something that will “leave a lasting impact on the city's urban fabric.” And for all their efforts, the winning team will receive $4,000.

The members of the jury is worth mentioning. They include Joseph Grima, the editor-in-chief of Domus, and Eva Franch i Gilabert, director of Storefront for Art and Architecture. Also a member is Benjamin Foerster Bladenius of Raumlabor, the urban collective who designed a bubble pavilion, called the Spacebuster, which can be inflated almost anywhere and anytime into “a billowing urban room.”

(Kowloon Walled City. Check out a larger version here; hover your mouse over the text for the English translation. Source.)

Meanwhile, you will have to excuse me for prolonging this post by again fantasizing about urban sites of social and economic disturbances that have seen countless urban actions. So many urban hackers have passed through over the years and decades that on these sites — delineated perhaps by an autocratic master planner from another century — now stand towering, Kowloon-like skyfavelas made of the accreted remains of past installations.

Say, for instance, on the topmost layer are pavilions that provide cooling shades to people, who sit on benches designed and built during a delirious 72-hour period. Not particularly following any traditional garden layout are feral groupings of planters. During peacetime, the vegetation rustles a delightful chime. During times of protest, when the state has jammed the electromagnetic spectrum, they are converted into antennas to broadcast images of the burning city to the rest of the world. Inscribed on the pavers are hieroglyphs that simultaneously set the rules for an urban recreation and mark the game space. Atop solar-powered lampposts are aviaries and apiaries.

Below all that is a catacomb of old pavilions, and below that is another catacomb of pavilions above another catacomb, and so on all the way down to the street. This network of interior bosquets are structurally prevented from collapse by the root system of guerrilla gardens and an internal buttress system made up of the bones of chickens and goats reared and butchered at the urban farmsteads. Somewhere within this sedimentary maze of fossilized and repurposed DIYs are the Holy Grails of urban adventurers: dumpster pools fed by water from rainwater harvesters attached to the vertiginous façades of these rubbish heaps.

If you get lost inside, you might as well stay awhile, as other drifters have done, making your squatter camp out of the detritus embedded in the superstructure — in 72 hours, of course.

(A pop-up squatter camp, 2008. Project by Benjamin Verdonck.)

Be sure to check out the installations from the Bat-Yam competition in 2010, and also the installations from an affiliated (until it sort of wasn't) competition in Melbourne last year.

Kerb 20

2012-04-08T15:39:00.000-05:00

It's that time of the year again when Kerb sends out another call for submissions. Overseen once more by an editorial staff of students at the RMIT University School of Architecture and Design in Melbourne, this year's theme is Speculative Stories: Narratives in Landscape Architecture.

Speculative narrative and the potential of imagination are important factors in creative production. It is considered that a multitude of small stories are the “quintessential form of imaginative invention”.

Speculation through narrative offers an apparatus through which we may investigate the concept of ‘reality’. Immersed within our current understandings, speculation is influenced by our contemporary condition. In these fictional dispositions, the variables and constraints of ‘reality’ can be controlled, omitted completely or utilized as key motives for the foundations of new territories.

Speculative Narrative can be an exploration of idealistic scenarios, the fossilization of information, or the creation of fantastical realms.

This allows the model of design to move beyond problem solving, crisis management and project liberation from the constraints of our existence. The augmentation through speculative narrative enables the reshaping of current processes, understandings and disciplines.

Speculative Narrative makes it possible to redefine ‘present’ and ‘future’.

The deadline is 4 May 2012.

Harvesting at the Biogas Farm

2012-03-28T01:15:00.000-05:00

(Image via Sohu.com.)

In one version, it's a woman from Binzhou in China's Shandong Province carrying a large plastic bag inflated with natural gas, tapped from a pipeline near some oil and gas wells. It's an illicit hack with “many latent dangers.”

(Image via Sohu.com.)

In another version, it's a woman from the coming era of radical sustainability carrying a large plastic bag inflated with methane gas. Filling for about a week or so at the Biogas Farm Co-op, a puffy orchard of wind-fluttered arboreal dirigibles, she's plucked it off the ground as though a fruit off a tree.

A New Anti-Tsunami Archipelago for Japan

2012-03-26T09:58:00.001-05:00

(Image courtesy of Sako Architects.)

Instead of protecting Japan's coastal cities from tsunamis with massive seawalls, a strategy hardly foolproof as evidenced by the spectacular failure of the country's flood barriers during last year's disaster, why not concentrate all that concrete into tower blocks and resettle everyone on top? Instead of moving to higher grounds, you create higher grounds on the low-lying plains where people are too entrenched to consider a mass exodus.

That at least seems to be the idea behind a proposal by Tokyo-based Sako Architects for “elevated land-based islands” on the tsunami-ravaged areas of north-east Japan.

Most islands will be used for residential purposes, with between 100 and 500 houses and apartments. Fuel stations, waste disposal and storage facilities, and car parks are on lower floors. Commercial islands, meanwhile, will house factories and processing facilities for industries such as fisheries and agriculture. As well as lifting residents high above the destructive power of the waves, the design comes with a number of safety features. A reinforced gate at the back of each island automatically closes after a tsunami warning, while steps up the sides let people climb to safety.

Clusters of these islands could thus form towns and cities.

(Image courtesy of Sako Architects.)

(Image courtesy of Sako Architects.)

Of course, one wonders what would happen if an even more devastating tsunami comes along and overtops these islands? Would people finally abandon the coast?

(Image courtesy of Sako Architects.)

While I normally advocate retreat and throw things at the wall whenever I hear the Army Corps of Engineers and entitled beach resort communities funneling billions of tax dollars into coastal fortifications, I am somewhat beguiled here by the image of these islands growing taller and bulkier every time a tsunami comes along, swelling much higher than the previous one due to accelerated sea level rise, and wipe everything in sight. From their original 3-story heights, they accrete each fresh batch of debris into gigantic stalagmites.

Extending this a bit further, perhaps we could imagine these islands growing still higher, tsunami or no tsunami. People will keep adding more and more elevations, not even stopping when they're safe from the reach of freak megatsunamis. Each new stratum will compel them to lay down a new layer. It's a kind of geo-pathology, incubated over all those decades of disaster-proofing their archipelagos. The islanders won't be able to resist such terraforming compulsion, and in only a few more decades, the coastal landscape of Japan will approximate the karst landscape of Guangxi.

(A few karst towers around Guilin in China's Guangxi Province. Image courtesy of NASA.)

Could these be the future feral descendants of Metabolist towers? Modular units of past and future ruins accreting through a perpetual cycle of destruction and reconstruction.

(See also Anti-Tsunami Landscapes. Via AA Inter 3.)

Image of the (Leap Year) Day

2012-02-29T23:05:00.000-06:00

(While incarcerated for war crimes and crimes against humanity, a Nazi architect used to garden here.)

What is (non-)essential knowledge for (new) architecture?

2012-01-30T01:46:00.007-06:00

For the next 306090 book, guest editor David L. Hays wants to know, “What is essential knowledge for architecture?”

This frequently posed question targets fundamental principles of design, those basic criteria and priorities through which disciplinary stability is ensured. Yet, insofar as relevance is a core value of architecture, in both theory and practice, the contingent nature of the future guarantees that some forms of knowledge not presently considered essential will eventually become indispensable.

306090 15 is thus calling for “contributions that envision possible futures for architecture through speculations about new disciplinary knowledge. What specific methods, materials, or understandings—tools, ratios, formulas, properties, principles, guidelines, definitions, rules, practices, techniques, reference points, histories, and more—not presently considered essential to architecture could, or should, define its future? Pertinent knowledge might be previously forgotten, currently undervalued, generally misunderstood, or not yet recognized. Architects have long looked both to the outmoded traditions of their discipline and to other fields altogether when imagining possible directions for their work. In blurring the boundary between essential and non-essential knowledge, this inquiry seeks not to codify the contemporary state of the art for architecture, nor to assert the value of multidisciplinarity, but to envision, and potentially catalyze, new disciplinary approaches.”

This edition, then, will not be about the state of the art; instead, it's about what the state of the art could be, should be, would be, if...

The deadline is 30 March 2012.

Where is Alloura Zion?

2012-01-27T18:08:00.009-06:00

(Where the earth is the sky is the earth, where is Alloura Zion? Image courtesy of NASA. Source.)

Read more »

Gravity Base Stations

2012-01-26T23:53:00.026-06:00

(Possibly outdated data sheet for a gravity base station in JFK International Airport. Image courtesy of NOAA. Source.)

When I first stumbled upon these poorly scanned data sheets of so-called gravity base stations, I thought they were actual “stations,” that is, actual gravity sensing devices that are constantly taking measurements of local geodetic conditions. Compact machines like those humidity monitors you see in museums and galleries that are sometimes mistaken for art installations.

To protect them from the environment and public tampering, I imagined each device encased in a metal canister, permanently embedded in concrete or stone and topped with a benchmark disk, itself stamped with an identification number and a warning of a fine or imprisonment to anyone who disturbs them.

I also imagined them forming a pointillist sensor network, just another sedimentary layer of a much more totalizing enviro-veillance network superimposed on the surface of the earth. Deployed in the most unassuming corners of the built environment, they pique little interest outside the insular worlds of geologists and geocachers.

But I was giddy with the possibility that they might be like buoy stations set adrift by NOAA not in the open ocean but on “solid” ground. Instead of ocean waves, they surf on invisible gravitational swells and troughs. And instead of the hyperactivities of the weather, they monitor something beyond our lived experience and even beyond their operational lives: gravitational fluxes caused by the million- or billion-year-long gyrations of tectonic storms.

Then I read up more on them, and...

(See also The Geomagnetic Terrain.)

(Im)possible Chicago #31-40

2012-01-25T16:53:00.003-06:00

((Im)possible Chicagos is a series of hallucinatory joyrides through one hundred and twenty five asynchronous Chicagos.)

Mythologizing the Dredge Boaters

2012-01-24T21:30:00.020-06:00

(Steampunk terraformers draining a swamp. Image courtesy of Walkerton Area Historical Society. Source.)

Once the cities established their beachheads, the dredge boaters and their mud-suckers entered the soft, defenseless womb-belly of the Great Dismal Swamp.

There was an Empire to be made.

(Photo courtesy of Bill Hewitt. Source.)

Some began on the margins, gnawing away at the neither solid nor liquid surface, leaving an alien grid of ditches and canals, by which the wetlands were sucked dry. Others were dropped in the middle of the marshy wilderness, carrying planks of timber, bushels of coal, and the iron marvels of nascent modernity, all assembled together at the gooey center before cutting their escape routes.

At the vanguard of each cadre was the giant, steel hardened, biting snout of the sludge-extractor, which swiveled left and right to regurgitate its cargo of excavated slime. It was both the mouth and the anus of the monstrous beast. At the back were rooms where the dredge boaters ate, slept and passed the time away. Indeed, these dredge boats were their homes for the weeks and months and sometimes years that it took to exsanguinate the wetlands. They were terrestrial-sailors plying the waves of an inland prairie-sea.

(Image courtesy of Arthur Public Library, via Illinois Digital Archives. Source.)

(Image courtesy of Arthur Public Library, via Illinois Digital Archives. Source.)

Once in a while, the dredge boaters passed through a pioneer township, a sort of Land Grant port of call. Like their seaborne counterparts, these landlocked mariners relieved themselves on booze, cabaret, gambling and prostitutes. One or two even left with a partner. Some of the newcomers became lived-in whores for the crews, while others actually married into the dredging life, in which case the dredge boat was turned into a floating cathedral for the wedding.

(Image courtesy of Walkerton Area Historical Society. Source.)

The new couple was then given their own dredge boat, and there they raised a family, a new crew of dredge boaters. They birthed swamp babies on dead-straight lines of stagnant waters, sent them to floating schools staffed with traveling minstrel-teachers from the East, entertained them with stories of the Bog Monster, apprenticed them on the art of marsh-bloodletting, and indoctrinated them on empire-building.

And there, on that same dredge boat, that's where they also died, had their quivering as steam whistled lamentations in the front, before being scooped up by the bucket-ladder and buried on some stretch of dredged tumulus-levee, at peace with the knowledge that they did their heroic part in preparing the landscape for the heroic farmers, the heroic ranchers, the heroic rail builders, and the heroic megalopolis.

(See also Trailing Suction Hopper Dredgers.)

Gardens as Crypto-Water-Computers

2012-01-23T20:52:00.017-06:00

(Vladimir Lukyanov's water computer, 1936. Image courtesy of the Polytechnic Museum, Moscow.)

I only recently found out about Google's reverse image search functionality. Since then I've been busy feeding its search engine some of the more mysterious images that have been littering my archives for years, hoping finally to figure out what they are actually pictures of, and why I even found them interesting enough to keep in the first place.

One of those images is the one you see above. According to a translation of this article published by the Russian magazine Science and Life in 2000, it shows one of the “monuments of science and technology” that “brought [the Soviet Union] to the forefront of the analog computer” — Vladimir Lukyanov's marvelous water computer.

Built in 1936, this machine was “the world's first computer for solving [partial] differential equations,” which “for half a century has been the only means of calculations of a wide range of problems in mathematical physics.” Absolutely its most amazing aspect is that solving such complex mathematical equations meant playing around with a series of interconnected, water-filled glass tubes. You “calculated” with plumbing.

To better explain how it works, here is a description by Steven Strogatz of what I'm assuming is a comparative device. Built in 1949, nearly a decade and a half after Lukyonov's, it's called the Phillips machine, after its inventor, Bill Phillips.

In the front right corner, in a structure that resembles a large cupboard with a transparent front, stands a Rube Goldberg collection of tubes, tanks, valves, pumps and sluices. You could think of it as a hydraulic computer. Water flows through a series of clear pipes, mimicking the way that money flows through the economy. It lets you see (literally) what would happen if you lower tax rates or increase the money supply or whatever; just open a valve here or pull a lever there and the machine sloshes away, showing in real time how the water levels rise and fall in various tanks representing the growth in personal savings, tax revenue, and so on.

“It’s a network of dynamic feedback loops,” Strogatz further writes. “In this sense the Phillips machine foreshadowed one of the most central challenges in science today: the quest to decipher and control the complex, interconnected systems that pervade our lives.”

(A diagram of the Philips machine, alternatively named the “Moniac” by a Chicago economist “to suggest money, the ENIAC, and something maniacal.” Source.)

To go back to Lukyanov, his water computer was built specifically to solve the problem of cracking in concrete, a “scourge” that slowed the construction of railroads by his employer. Doing so meant developing manufacturing regimes for concrete blocks that took into account the complex relationships between material properties, the curing process and environmental conditions. Existing “calculation methods were not able to give fast and accurate solutions.” Lukyanov's invention did.

Appropriating and altering Strogatz's text, we get:

Filling up not just a corner but the entire room, inside not one but several structures that resemble large cupboards with a transparent front, is a Rube Goldberg collection of tubes, tanks, valves, pumps and sluices. You could think of it as a hydraulic computer. Water flows through a series of clear pipes, mimicking the production line of concrete blocks. It lets you see (literally) what would happen if you change the type of cement used or increase the load capacity of the concrete or whatever; just open a valve here or pull a lever there and the machine sloshes away, showing in real time how the water levels rise and fall in various tanks representing material properties, curing time, temperature, and so on.

Changes to the water level in the “measuring tube” would be marked on a graph paper (“a kind of curve”), and “these marks build schedule, which was the solution of the problem.”

Because of the simplicity of their design and programming, subsequent models were “successfully used” in other fields such as geology, thermal physics, metallurgy and rocket engineering. The first and second generations of digital electronic computers could not match their computing abilities. In the mid-1970s, they were still being used in “115 manufacturing, research and educational institutions located in 40 cities” across the Soviet Union. “Only in the early 80s” were digital computers cheap, configurable and powerful enough to match the “possibility of [the] hydraulic integrator.”

(A museum display at the Polytechnic Museum, Moscow, presenting an incomplete history of computers. Photo by Mikhail Shcherbakov. Source.)

Having briefly traced the history of water computers forward from Lukyanov to the rest of the 20th century, I can't help but thread the timeline backward to include some of the most elaborate hydraulic engineering schemes used in sprawling aristocratic gardens of early modern Europe, such as the always indispensable Versailles, the hydro-acoustically drenched Tivoli, the masterworks of Salomon and Isaac de Caus, and one of my top favorite gardens, Pratolino.

Garden historians usually characterize the technical control of water in stately gardens as part of a system of social control. As an alternative, or at least to offer another layer of meaning, this augmented timeline presents a crypto-historical narrative of gardens as gigantic water computers.

(Etienne Dupérac's bird's-eye plan view of the gardens at Villa d'Este, Tivoli. Source.)

All those water-screws, force pumps, water-lifting wheels, vents, wells and settling tanks, all those reservoirs, canals, aqueducts and pipes buried under mountains and rivers, and all those jets spurting out of vases and statuaries, creating water rainbows and sonic merriment, and all those fountains, water parterres, giochi d'acqua, automatas and damp grottos: those are the gurgling circuits, the programmable interfaces, the data storage devices and the visualization screens of landscape proto-supercomputers.

To operate it, you will have to consult an unpublished edition of Solomon de Caus's Les raisons des forces mouvantes, avec diverses machines tant utiles que plaisantes, auxquelles sont adjoints plusieurs dessings de grotes & fontaines, from which the following may have been excerpted:

Embedded in the earth is a Rube Goldberg collection of tubes, tanks, valves, pumps and sluices. You could think of it as a hydraulic computer. Water flows through a series of clear pipes, mimicking the way that money flows through the empire. It lets you see (literally) what would happen if you lower the price of bread or increase the construction of palaces or whatever; just open a valve here or pull a lever there and the machine in the garden sloshes away, showing in real time how the water levels rise and fall in various tanks representing colonial trade supplies, food riots, and so on.

Attached to the measuring tube is a series of fountains that gurgles the solution to the equation.

(Jean-Baptiste Martin, Vue du château de Versailles depuis le Bassin du Dragon et de Neptune, 1700. Source.)

Gardeners and their patrons would then walk around marking the fluctuating levels of these fountains on graphic paper. From fountain to fountain, they follow a set of programmed perambulations, gathering data at relevant nodal points, along the way not just picking up the solutions to the problem being computed but also gaining a greater understanding of the complexities of the natural and social worlds.

With these gardens as crypto-water-computers, they were taking measurements of the universe.

(See also La Machine de Marly.)

The Provisional, Improvisational, Guerrilla, Unsolicited, Tactical, Temporary, Informal, DIY, Unplanned, Participatory, Open-Source Pavilion

2012-01-16T20:53:00.007-06:00

(Guerrilla grafters turn non-fruiting street trees into fruit-bearing ones. Via @nicolatwilley.)

Here's your chance to have your work be included in the U.S. Pavilion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale. The theme is “Spontaneous Interventions: design actions for the common good.”

This year's curators, from the New York-based Institute for Urban Design, are looking for projects that are “[p]rovisional, improvisational, guerrilla, unsolicited, tactical, temporary, informal, DIY, unplanned, participatory, [or] open-source.” If at least one of those words describes your project, and additionally meets the following criteria, then consider submitting it.

1. project was initiated by the architect/artist/planner/landscape architect/hacker/activist/citizen (in other words, no one asked for it), OR was initiated by an alternative client, for example, a non-profit or a community group

2. project is publicly accessible and serves the common good

3. project improves a problematic condition (solves a problem by making a place more accessible, inclusive, sustainable, beautiful, etc.)

4. project is located in an urban context or tackles urban issues in the United States

5. project is participatory in nature, or open access, and serves an underserved or overlooked constituency

6. project is realized, deployed, in action or use (not theoretical)

7. project may be a physical intervention in an urban context, or an information, communication or digital project that improves people’s comprehension, navigation and access to a city

The deadline is 30 January 2012.

(Via @loudpaper.)

Guerrilla Depaving

2012-01-13T21:07:00.007-06:00

(Viva la hidrología!)

Guerrilla depaving is an illicit form of urbanism wherein impermeable hard surfaces are wholly removed or perforated to reveal the underlying soil bed. This site preparation precedes the introduction of agriculture, ornamental gardens, cryptoforests and other pata-artisinal land-uses, which alleviate the urban heat island effect. However, the primary goal is to mitigate urban stormwater runoff by facilitating soil infiltration and seepage.

Pickaxes, sledghammers and elbow grease are the usual tools of the guerilla depaver, but these are being gradually replaced by robotics as fast as DARPA can declassify its research. A popular depaver is the BigDog, as it is cheaply available, easily programmable and configurable, and can traverse rough terrain en route to its target asphalt or while escaping. In the video above, a very early prototype can be seen tippy tapping on a parking lot, somewhat auguring its future reuse.

So far, guerrilla depaving activities are concentrated on medium-sized municipalities suffering from depressed tax revenues and minimal federal aid. These twin crises have left them unable to provide basic infrastructural services. Faced with the prospect of failed sewers, stagnant pools and destructive flooding, the guerrilla depaver works to knit an alternative urban hydrology.

Dispatches from the Sousveillance Zoo

2012-01-12T22:00:00.006-06:00

(Near-future geiger monkeys. Original photo by Koji Sasahara/AP. Source.)

As reported by CNN and other venues, Japanese scientists apparently want to recruit wild monkeys to measure radiation levels in Fukushima Prefecture, specifically in a mountainous area of the city of Minamisoma. Each animal will be outfitted with a collar containing a small radiation meter and a GPS transmitter. While aircrafts and satellites are survey the terrain from above, these living geiger counters will be reading the landscape from the ground.

I'm immediately reminded here of a couple of things. First, the “video naturalist, landscape architect, museumologist” Sam Easterson has been strapping video cameras on to animals, enabling them “to guide us around their world; what they look at, what catches their attention, how they move through space, and how they relate to one another.”

(“On the Farm” exhibit at the CLUI, Los Angeles. Photo by CLUI. Source.)

When I posted about these four-legged cineastes some years ago—speculating, among other things, about techno-lupine vigilantes being released into national parks, where they'll sniff and snuff out invasive species mercilessly to preserve ecological purity—in the comments, Bryan Finoki went awesomely unhinged, writing:

These could be the new surveillance weapons of the future refugee, the Dr. Dolittle border-crosser, Africa's desperate asylum seekers, whom all need extra eyes in the field to watch out for those pesky minutemen and other not-so-nice clansmen and militias out hunting migrants for the sport of it. Cattle ranchers along the border could rig their roaming bulls with little cams to keep vigil and let border-crossers know when it is safe. Armadillo watch dogs.

Then again, this Sousveillance Zoo might not be deployed as countermeasures but rather used to augment weaponized geotextiles carpeting border hinterlands, demilitarized zones, involuntary parks and the perimeter parklands of gated communities. Whenever an aberrant activity is detected, butterflies will flutter forth aeolian alarms while wolves upload images to central command.

Perhaps a less malign critter from this cyborg bestiary is Liam Young's Electric Aurora.

(Light painting wifi with cybernetic fireflies. From Liam Young's Specimen of Unnatural History. Image by the artist.)

This “flickering swarm of cybernetic fireflies play above the rooftops. As a mobile network infrastructure, the flock broadcasts its signal in a luminescent cloud, fading in and out over the city. Following the intensity of the electromagnetic spectrum, they map network strength across the sky.”

So at night, when you're out trawling for free wifi to check your Twitter timeline, or maybe to upload sensational videos of your protest camp being violently decamped by security forces, who are now trying to track you down on the burning streets, you simply look up and follow an iridescent trail to the nearest and most secure shimmering aurora.

Spill

2012-01-11T22:47:00.001-06:00

(Can anyone tell me who took this quite astonishing photograph, and perhaps the story behind it as well? I seem to recall seeing it in Colors Magazine, in one of their mid-90s issues. Unfortunately, I have no access to their back catalog at the moment. This particular image file came from a Tumbler site, which I've long since forgotten. It was one of those with a cavalier attitude towards proper citation. Hence this public appeal for information.)

Hacking the Super Robo-Farm

2012-01-10T15:57:00.005-06:00

(An orange tree scanner, by Vision Robotics.)

Japan is looking to turn some of the land devastated by the 2011 tsunami into a “robot-run super farm,” reports Wired UK via AFP. There, unmanned tractors will grow crops like rice, wheat, soybeans, fruit and vegetables. Once harvested, other agrobots will ready the produce for shipment.

Cue parallel world.

Long before the end of the six-year project, agrobots developed down on that farm were sent off to work on other farms and then to the farm next door. Soon fields after fields became overrun with them. Not even the small organic allotments were immune to the infestation.

(Down at the growBot Garden. Photo by Laura Fries.)

Imported to other wealthy countries experiencing similar labor problems brought on by an aging population, xenophobic immigration policies, and a highly educated younger generation unwilling to do dirty, backbreaking, monotonous work, a huge swathe of the world's agricultural sector achieved near total automation.

Apart from the mechanics needed for small repairs and one lonely operator hermetically sealed in a control room lit ablaze by the wall-to-wall cinematics of data streamed down by remote sensing satellites and drones, it's just the agrobots out there, busy tilling the soil, pruning the orchards and corralling the livestock.

(An apple tree scanner, by Vision Robotics.)

Out on the periphery, meanwhile, an entire generation of young people has been squeezed out of the urban labor market, shoved down into poverty by high living costs. And the one industry that could now be providing them with much needed employment has also shut them out, somewhat ironic considering their former disdain for farm labor helped bring about their own obsolescence.

However, to stave off malnutrition, they've begun to use their high-tech skills to hack the system. That is, they've reprogrammed the packing agrobots to divert some of the produce to their homes, via processing centers bought from the US Postal Service by a consortium of Tor network operators. It's a sort of agro-torrenting.

The most leet among them will not just jerry rig the distribution infrastructure but also partition a patch—say, a small grove within a much larger orchard, one greenhouse out of thousands, a hen house in a huge poultry concern—which is tended to by a zombie agrobotnet. Out there in all that intercontinental acreage are Megaupload accounts in which you do your clandestine gardening remotely. To the satellites and drones hovering above, they are just dark spots on the landscape.

At the start of each week, you send out encrypted commands to have produce picked for you, and at the end of the week, you make ratatouille.

(Via @nicolatwilley. See also Hacking the American Agricultural Landscape and Hyperculture.)

Live Bunker

2012-01-09T23:58:00.008-06:00

(“Feel. See. Survive.")

For 25 EUR, you can treat yourself to a 3-hour performance that begins with a roadside ambush en route to the event site: a former Soviet bunker in Vilnius, Lithuania. Once there, you'll be lined-up, blindfolded, handcuffed and put behind bars. You'll also be interrogated and placed on trial. Now and then, a gruff man in a Red Army uniform will bark orders at you. That's in addition to the dogs.

This “Back to USSR drama” is geared towards “those who want to get as close to real experiences from old Soviet as you can get without being forced to do something you do not want to do.” But some limits will be pushed.

“If you want to fully enjoy daylight, you have to get into the dark for a while,” explains event creator Rūta Vanagaite in an interview by Vice Magazine. “If you want to fully enjoy your dinner, stay hungry for a while. If you want to fully enjoy democracy and freedom, come to our bunker and become a Soviet citizen for two hours.”

You can book your ticket through Baltic Adventures.

(See also the KGB Hotel and the Cold War National Park.)

Bracket 3

2012-01-06T21:11:00.003-06:00

In case you need reminding, Bracket 3 is looking for critical articles and unpublished design projects that explore “architecture, infrastructure and technology [operating] in conditions of imbalance, negotiate tipping points and test limit states. In such conditions, the status quo is no longer possible; systems must extend performance and accommodate unpredictability. As new protocols emerge, new opportunities present themselves. Bracket [at Extremes] seeks innovative contributions interrogating extreme processes (technologies, operations) and extreme contexts (cultural, climatic). What is the breaking point of architecture at extremes?”

The deadline is 20 February 2012.

Also be on the lookout for Bracket [goes soft], scheduled to be available this month from Actar. Some of the projects in this second almanac sound like they also belong in the new one.

Detecting Neutrinos with Ice Shelves

2012-01-05T23:53:00.011-06:00

(A prototype neutrino station on the Ross Ice Shelf. Photo by Spencer Klein/LBNL.)

I'm desperately hoping that someone out there has been cataloging examples of landscapes wholly transformed into a scientific instrument — from the ancient to the cutting-edge, from National Science Foundation proposals to the indulgently speculative, from the merely giant to the crazily monumental. It's an index that may have been retroactively instigated by BLDGBLOG's recent look into arctic sea ice “instrumentalized” into floating earthquake sensors. Perhaps the IceCube neutrino detector?

If there's no such archive yet, let me help out whoever wants to start it by suggesting, in addition to the aforementioned examples, that the ARIANNA neutrino detector array be included in the list.

(The edge of iceberg B-15a, which broke off of iceberg B-15, which itself broke off of the Ross Ice Shelf. Photo by Emily Stone/Antarctic Photo Library. Source.)

ARIANNA stands for Antarctic Ross Ice Shelf Antenna Neutrino Array. As its full name indicate, ARIANNA's array of monitor stations will be spread out across the Ross Ice Shelf. If the planned 10,000 stations are deployed, they will cover a 900-square-kilometer expanse of ice.

Unlike the IceCube, ARIANNA will be looking for a different kind of neutrino signal. Here's a diagram explaining how that signal is produced, and why the ice shelf is ideal for monitoring it (which has something to do with the reflective quality of the ice-water interface).

(Image by Scott Brown/The OC Register. Source.)

Given my limited knowledge of astrophysics, I'm left here imagining a National Science Foundation paying for the installations of hundreds of thousands of neutrinio monitors over the entire Ross Ice Shelf, thus turning it into an astronomical observatory nearly the size of France. Now and then, it breaks off a tiny piece, birthing a satellite detector. When the planet heats up, then one detector turns into hundreds or maybe thousands, all swirling about in the Southern Oceanic gyre.

Fuck Yeah Delta!

2012-01-04T14:36:00.007-06:00

(The Yukon Delta in southwestern Alaska. A sort of companion piece to this. Original image courtesy of NASA. Source.)

Earth TV

2012-01-03T23:58:00.006-06:00

Here's a small favor. Please gather for me a dozen or so of those tablets PCs that have been pushed past their hilariously short half-lives by shinier models during the holidays just ended. Using your mad DIY skills, clamp them to my wall, lined up vertically. Then using your even madder hacker skills, turn the whole installation into a dedicated EarthNow! Landsat Image Viewer, a sort of earth TV from the US Geological Survey that displays, in real-time, images being gathered by the Landsat 5 and 7 satellites when they pass over the United States. So instead of simply visiting the website, I have a digital mural broadcasting the data for me live, scrolling strips of earth like a stock ticker tape. It switches on when the satellites are about to pass over, and goes dark after the last continental slice. Ideally, both times should be marked with a delightful chime.

If you've got time, how about attaching a 3D printer that will spit out an endless conveyor belt of topography?

Simulant Waves

2012-01-02T16:49:00.005-06:00

(David Bowen's Tele-Present Water at The National Museum in Wroclaw, Poland, 2010.)

Given my penchant for art installations that spatially actuate remote geographic data in (near) real-time—such as torch fountains that broadcast antipodean sunlight, plazas that quiver earthquakes half a continent away, and quaint water features on city centers that mimic the fluctuating water levels of peripheral reservoirs—I couldn't help but quickly add David Bowen's Tele-Present Water to the archives.

In that new piece, seen in the video above installed at The National Museum in Wroclaw, Poland, a mechanical grid structure is turned into a facsimile of a tiny patch of the Pacific Ocean, specifically the area around NOAA's data buoy Station 46246 at 49°59’7″ N 145°5’20″ W. As goes the patch, so goes the grid. It's a mixing of here and there that I can't resist likening to the instantaneous detection and conversion of catastrophic natural disasters, from tsunamis to volcanic eruptions to floods, into globally televised events.

In any case, why not also reverse the scenario? As museum visitors play around with the grid, the distant buoy simultaneously warps and heaves the surrounding water accordingly, for an audience of about zero.

(Earlier: David Bowen's Swarm. Via @160B.)

Sunrise

2012-01-01T00:02:00.004-06:00

(We've ended the past three years with a Martian sunset, so why not also usher in each new year with a Martian sunrise? We'll start with this one captured by the Viking 2 Lander on June 14, 1978, at its Utopia Planitia landing site. Happy New Year! Image courtesy of NASA/JPL. Source.)

Another Sunset

2011-12-31T12:47:00.002-06:00

(Another Martian sunset to close out another year. This one, topped off with a plumed coronet of scattered light, was captured in 1997 by the Pathfinder lander on Sol 24. Silhouetting the horizon on the left are the two hills nicknamed Twin Peaks. Source.)

Links for 2011-03-13 [del.icio.us]

2011-03-14T01:00:00-07:00

In Tsunami, Japan’s Seawalls Were No Security
[NYT] At least 40 percent of Japan’s 22,000-mile coastline is lined with concrete seawalls, breakwaters or other structures meant to protect the country against high waves, typhoons or even tsunamis. They are as much a part of Japan’s coastal scenery as beaches or fishing boats, especially in areas where the government estimates the possibility of a major earthquake occurring in the next three decades at more than 90 percent, like the northern stretch that was devastated by Friday’s earthquake and tsunami. /// But while experts have praised Japan’s rigorous building codes and quake-resistant buildings for limiting the number of casualties from Friday’s earthquake, the devastation in coastal areas and a final death toll predicted to exceed 10,000 could push Japan to redesign its seawalls — or reconsider its heavy reliance on them altogether.

Links for 2010-12-27 [del.icio.us]

2010-12-28T00:00:00-08:00

The new agricultural revolution
[Wired UK] "Smartphone-controlled tractors that steer themselves via GPS. Intelligent sensors that know precisely how much fertiliser to spray. Precision agriculture lets farmers tame nature with data -- thus boosting their crops"

Links for 2010-12-23 [del.icio.us]

2010-12-24T00:00:00-08:00

The Institute for Augmented Ecology
"Basically its an exploration of the field before it actually gets to be defined and/or narrowed down by convention. For now it looks a one year research-period starting Jan 2011 investigating the possibilities which the field of AR offers for connecting people to their direct environment, trying to propose tangents to explore and perhaps prototype new practices or technologies."

Links for 2010-12-17 [del.icio.us]

2010-12-18T00:00:00-08:00

A Race to Capture a Bounty From Shipping
[NYT] "[A] breed of huge ships loaded with foreign-made iPods, furniture and other goods that will soon be able to traverse a newly widened Panama Canal will head elsewhere. And with them would go potentially billions of dollars in business."
Berms Built to Stop Oil Are Seen as Ineffective
[NYT] "A chain of sand berms built by the State of Louisiana to block and capture oil from BP’s runaway well in the Gulf of Mexico stopped a “minuscule” amount of oil and was largely a waste of money, the staff of the presidential commission investigating the spill said in a report issued on Thursday."

Links for 2010-12-15 [del.icio.us]

2010-12-16T00:00:00-08:00

The Roma of Rome: Heirs to the Ghetto System
[Places] "In Italy today, politicians have become the lead architects of a low-cost human-warehousing system designed to contain the minority Roma, or Gypsy, community. Visitors to the city remark that the visibility of the Roma — especially around train stations, restaurants and tourist sites — is lower than in past decades. What they do not realize is that this superficial change reflects a series of political actions which have profoundly reshaped the Roma’s status within the Italian state."

Links for 2010-12-06 [del.icio.us]

2010-12-07T00:00:00-08:00

List of facilities 'vital to US security' leaked
[BBC News] "In February 2009 the State Department asked all US missions abroad to list all installations whose loss could critically affect US national security."
BLDGBLOG: Probe Field
"The probes were designed to measure difference over time rather than the static characteristics of any given instance. Powered by solar energy, the probes gathered and recorded ‘micro environmental data’ over time. The probes were simultaneously and physically responsive to these changes, opening out when warm and sunny, closing down when cold and dark. Thus not only did the probes record environmental change, but they demonstrated how these changes might induce a responsive behaviour specific to a single location."
Wikileaks: site list reveals US sensitivities
[BBC News] "Of all the leaks to have emerged from this set of releases from Wikileaks, this global list of infrastructure sites which the US considers critical for its national security interest must surely count as one of the most sensitive. In its preamble, the cable from the US State Department in 2009 specifically notes it was compiled to try to protect US interests from terrorists."

Links for 2010-12-03 [del.icio.us]

2010-12-04T00:00:00-08:00

Artificial tornadoes created to test Japanese homes
[New Scientist] "In an effort to understand how extreme weather causes structural damage, four Japanese organisations – the National Institute for Land and Infrastructure Management (NILIM), the Building Research Institute, the University of Tokyo and the Disaster Prevention Research Institute at Kyoto University – have been developing a tornado simulator."
Policing Genes
[Thomas Thwaites] "Pharmaceutical companies are experimenting with pharming – genetically engineering plants to produce useful and valuable drugs. Currently undergoing field trials are tomato plants that produce a vaccine for Alzheimer’s disease and potatoes that immunise against hepatitis B. Many more plant-made-pharmaceuticals are being developed in laboratories around the world. // However, the techniques employed to insert genes into plants are within reach of the amateur…and the criminal. Policing Genes speculates that, like other technologies, genetic engineering will also find a use outside the law, with innocent-looking garden plants being modified to produce narcotics and unlicensed pharmaceuticals. // The genetics of the plants in your garden or allotment could become a police matter…" (via we make money not art)