Pruned

Where is Alloura Zion?

2012-01-27T18:08:00.005-06:00

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

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Gravity Base Stations

2012-01-26T23:53:00.025-06:00

(Possibly outdated data sheet for a gravity base station in JFK International Airport.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

2012-01-24T21:30:00.018-06:00

(Steampunk terraformers draining a swamp. Image courtesy of Walkerton Are 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 Are 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

2012-01-23T20:52:00.015-06:00

(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 take 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 could.

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 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

2012-01-10T15:57:00.004-06:00

(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 have 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.)

LAGINYC

2011-12-29T13:51:00.005-06:00

(Flowers and field grass growing on the thin epidermal soil of Fresh Kills. Photo by Jessika Creedon.)

The Landscape Art Generator Initiative has chosen Freshkills Park as the site for the next edition of its design ideas competition. In 2010, artists, designers, scientists and engineers alike were challenged to design a land art sculpture that was also a power plant capable of generating clean energy for thousands of homes. The brief for 2012 is basically the same, except of course you will be plopping down your installation not on the sands of the United Arab Emirates but on a park reclaimed from what was once the world's largest landfill, Fresh Kills (N.B. two words for the dump, one word for the park).

If you're not familiar with Freshkills Park, here's some information taken from its blog (every park should have a blog, or at least a Twitter account!):

At 2,200 acres, Freshkills Park will be almost three times the size of Central Park and the largest park developed in New York City in over 100 years. The transformation of what was formerly the world’s largest landfill into a productive and beautiful cultural destination will make the park a symbol of renewal and an expression of how our society can restore balance to its landscape.

In addition to providing a wide range of recreational opportunities, including many uncommon in the city, the park’s design, ecological restoration and cultural and educational programming will emphasize environmental sustainability and a renewed public concern for our human impact on the earth.

In case you're eager to start your creative process now, we suggest reading John May's essay on Fresh Kills, published in the boogazine Verb: Crisis, 2008. Here's one of the closing passages:

Fresh Kills is our generation’s A-Bomb: we express dignified shame at the fact of its existence to mask our delight in knowing that it belongs to us. It may be a disturbing thing, but it also seems somehow extraordinary, and in either case, it is our disturbing-extraordinary thing. We secretly love it. We like to know that it’s there. Its location with respect to Manhattan is indicative of a preferential derision; near enough to be seen, to enjoy the peace of mind provided by the power implicit in its existence, but too far away to be smelled, too distant to impose on our comfort. It is material evidence that the American Way of Life is still very much expanding, that our morality is still dominant, still at work in the corners of life. The size of the pile—taller than the Statue of Liberty across the bay—is evidence in support of our belief in American strength and control. Fresh Kills is the literal, substantive embodiment of the consumptive-moral technologies of flexible accumulation, of a late twentieth-century, Neoliberal American economy; a testament to the fecundity of its principal metropolitan region, its most prominent image of a free-market. Trash and waste are central elements in our morality; they demonstrate our power, and allow us to sleep well.

Now how can one resist adding a bit more seductive, soporific images on top of that tenuous veil separating us from our monstrous anus.

(Methane meters almost hidden in the vegetation. Photo by Jessika Creedon.)

Full details will be released on 1 January 2012, and you have until 1 July 2012 to submit your proposals.

In the Archives:
Flutter Field

(Im)possible Chicago #30

2011-12-07T15:16:00.002-06:00

The Chicago where the United Nations Secretariat is now headquartered. Every September, when world leaders gather together for the annual opening session of the General Assembly, also hosted by the city, the very much alive Muammar Gaddafi pitches his sprawling tent city in Grant Park, south of the Buckingham Charbagh.

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

Swimmable Berlin

2011-12-06T16:28:00.008-06:00

(An outdoor swimming pool in the heart of Berlin. Image by realities:united.)

Given our hopes of one day being able to swim the full length of the Chicago River and its appendages—and yes, that includes the portion where it flows by the world's largest water treatment plant—without suffering dysentery afterwards, we were instantly smitten by realities:united's proposal to transform part of Berlin's Spree River into a natural swimming pool.

(The lido in the morning. Image by realities:united.)

Located right on the heart of the city, this urban lido would be the equivalent of 17 Olympic swimming pools, fed by river water flowing through a 780-meter-long reed bed filtration system. Access would be through “generous stairs.” Alternatively, you can simply jump off one of the bridges.

This project, explain the designers, “aims to diminish the mental division between ‘everyday Berlin’ and the public Berlin belonging exclusively to tourists and federal agencies. It will provide a badly needed recreational facility in this part of the city and return some ‘authentic life’ to Berlin’s museum island, one of Berlin’s most heavily-trafficked tourist destinations with over a million visitors a year. At the same time, Flussbad puts an end to the economic nonsense of a completely unused waterway—the Kupfergraben—transforming the river itself into a strong argument for the quality of living in the inner city again.”

(Images by realities:united.)

Of course, an even more marvelous Flussbad would be to include the rest of the Spree that runs through Berlin, requiring not just more natural filtration systems but a monumental reconfiguring of the city's stormwater and wastewater infrastructure. Ships may still pass through but on restricted lanes. The rest of the river will be turned over to frolic and merriment.

Meanwhile, check out a similar initiative to make the Spree River more swimmable, the SPREE2011 project.

(Elsewhere: the S.W.I.M. Coalition of New York.)

The Yogyakarta in which bikers wear special designed helmets, weighty and beautiful, stuffed with soil and planted with a tree

2011-12-05T17:21:00.010-06:00

(Image courtesy of Sara Nuytemans and Arya Pandjalu.)

For Treebute to Yogya, Sara Nuytemans and Arya Pandjalu sent a gang of motorbikers through the streets of Yogyakarta, Indonesia, wearing helmets doubling as plant containers. “The performance is meant as a hommage to this very green city and also a wink to the idea for direct carbon dioxide compensation,” says a statement on the Szpilman Award website.

(Image courtesy of Sara Nuytemans and Arya Pandjalu.)

Cue parallel world.

The young men start gathering just before noon, on alleyways, back lanes and courtyards around Yogyakarta. Some attend to their motorbikes, making sure there's enough petrol in the tank, washing the dirt off the tires and polishing the chrome. Others water and prune their saplings on their helmet.

Then, when the last of their bike gang has arrived, they spill out into the city amid a sonic cloud of revving engines and rustling leaves. At designated strips, they meet up with other gangs whereupon one biker from each gang race one another. Weaving through the narrow, vacillating spaces in the traffic, they cock up their preening canopies, generating enough wind to show off their lushness. Along the route, other bikers sound their horns in appreciation. It's not who crosses the finish line first that decides the outcome but rather how one presents their organic coiffures to the city. Drag racing meets flower and garden show.

When these competitions began, just your garden variety houseplants were used. But as with all young men in other parts of the world, they sought out ever increasing thrills, a bigger adrenaline rush than their last race. So they started using larger and larger plants, making the races even more dangerous. And deadly. It seems like everyday you hear of a racer snapping his neck and killing motorists and spectators in the resulting crash.

(Image courtesy of Sara Nuytemans and Arya Pandjalu.)

However deadly these races may have become, the young men are still drawn to them. In a city blanketed by smoke produced by slash-and-burn agriculture, a permanent haze that traps them in mind-numbing indoor lifestyles, these reckless botanical races are their collective scream of environmental frustration, an outlet for green activism amid the suffocating smog.

(Image courtesy of Sara Nuytemans and Arya Pandjalu.)

Perhaps not surprisingly, many will become eco-terrorists, transforming their restless behaviors on the streets of Yogyakarta into acts of sabotage carried out on the palm oil plantations of Borneo. They will polish their guerilla skills in jungle hideouts, and when they've turned Borneo into the Afghanistan of green militancy, they will import their eco-jihadism to the rest of the world.

(Via where else but Edible Geography.)

The Artificial Cyrosphere of Bananas (and A Proposal for a Cooking Show)

2011-12-02T16:49:00.006-06:00

(Photo by Nicola Twilley.)

Nicola Twilley, of our Future Plural partner site Edible Geography, recently visited one of the few banana ripening facilities in New York City. She has a great write-up of her behind-the-scenes tour.

[I]n order to be a global commodity rather than a tropical treat, the banana has to be harvested and transported while completely unripe. Bananas are cut while green, hard, and immature, washed in cool water (both to begin removing field heat and to stop them from leaking their natural latex), and then held at 56 degrees — originally in a refrigerated steamship; today, in a refrigerated container — until they reach their country of consumption weeks later.

What this means is that ripening must then be artificially induced, in a specialized architecture of pressurized, temperature- and atmosphere-controlled rooms that fool the banana into thinking it is still back on the plant in tropical Ecuador. New York City’s supermarkets, grocers, coffee-shops, and food cart vendors are served by just a handful of banana ripening outfits — one in Brooklyn, one in Long Island, a small facility inside the main Hunt’s Point Terminal Market, and our field trip destination: Banana Distributors of New York, in the Bronx.

As always, it's fascinating to read about the oftentimes hidden landscapes where our foodstuffs are subjected to temporal and spatial displacements. So if you haven't read this one example of aberrant tropicality yet, go check it out.

(Photo by Nicola Twilley.)

Which leads us to an idea we have for a cooking show. Every episode would be devoted to just a single dish, which a chef would prepare just like Martha Stewart would in her syndicated daytime program, from the washing and measuring of the ingredients to their elegant presentation on the plate.

However, in between the peeling and chiffonading or while waiting for the sauce to reduce, the chef, like a news anchor, would introduce one of the show's many intrepid edible geographers who have tracked down the journey one of the dish's ingredients had (most probably) taken. These segments will not be of the historical sort. The origin of the dish will not be traced, and there will be no biographical profiles of the famous person who popularized it. Instead, they will concentrate on its constituent parts and their (more or less) recent pasts.

Say it's a pork dish. Where was that pork sourced? From an organic farm cooperative on a former bramble patch in an inner-city neighborhood devastated by foreclosures, butchered by an architect who changed career after one too many nights spent at the office, in his pop-up abattoir? Or was it clandestinely imported from China's strategic pork reserve? All the ingredients will be covered, in short or long form, and that includes the salt, in whose segment the correspondent might be shown skiing down gigantic salt mountains or interviewing a salt farmer in Vietnam.

The dish doesn't have to be fancy. It could be something as prosaic as a salad — which, of course, won't be that ordinary in this cooking program, as the vegetables might have been grown at Thanet Earth or cultivated by the salad slaves of Spain or even flown in from the prime farmlands of Ethiopia land-grabbed by Saudi Arabia.

If there's a banana in there, then Nicola Twilley will be hired.

In other words, the show will be like Julia Child crossed with Frontline.

Jinho Lim attaches a small beautiful kite to a chicken which now flies a kite

2011-12-01T01:39:00.003-06:00

(Chicken n Kite by Jinho Lim.)

(Chicken n Kite by Jinho Lim.)

When the expected environmental and social collapse have forced you and your family to take on a poultry concern as a way to supplement your now meagre income and measly diet, a stopgap measure to stave off utter destitution rather than a first step to a heroic life of self-sufficiency, surely there will be times when a bit of levity is needed to cut the drudgery of backyard pastoralism — and that's when you attach small beautiful kites to your chickens.

(Via Edible Geography.)

Pop-Up Versailles

2011-11-16T11:53:00.003-06:00

(“Stalker Humanoid” by Finnish electro duo Renaissance Man. Title of post refers back to #28. Via SHFT.)

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)