With our attempts to cultivate nature, humankind causes the rising of a next nature, which is wild and unpredictable as ever. Wild systems, genetic surprises, autonomous machinery and splendidly beautiful black flowers. Nature changes along with us.
So you thought the Razorius Gilletus essay was farsighted? Interestingly enough, Samsung is advertising its latest TV-set as a whole new species. Despite the obvious biomimicmarketing, could there be some coincidental evolutionary truth in that commercial?
Once upon a time there were two global soft drink brands. One old brand and another, slightly younger. The older one positioned itself as The Real Thing as it entered the market first, and the younger suffered a lot from that. How can you compete with something that is… REAL?
The more the younger brand tried to be just like The Real Thing, the more it was being perceived as… the Fake Thing! This became even worse because The Real Thing did not make the slightest effort to become even a little bit like The Fake Thing – it just stayed its authentic self over the course of 125 years. The younger brand became very sad and tried to move away from the Real Thing. ‘Puh!’ it said, ‘they may be old and real, but we’re fresh and new!’. They used all kinds of slogans to position themselves as a choice for a new generation of consumers, and borrowed from some ancient Asian symbolism to create a fresh image – but if that was such a lucky choice?
In the older days, people had to cross natural barriers like mountains for survival purposes. Grains from one side of the mountain was traded with cloth from the other side, for example. Today, we trade images and visual information overload has taken the place of the the mountain.
One can imagine this trading trips our ancestors made could be tough endeavors. Dangerous slopes and treacherous wheather conditions can take their toll, up in the mountains. Not to speak of the physical challenge of to climbing a mountain, packed with trading goods. New technologies like tunnels, cars and helicopters made it possible to skip the long climbs that take a strain on your body and mountain climbing as a bare necessity died out, to make place for mountain climbing as a recreational activity.
Finally a piece of biomimicmarketing (= using images of nature to market a product) that portrays nature as aggressive and destructive, rather than the idealizing and romanticizing campaigns we have seen so many of.
The Motorola Brute is designed to ‘beat’ nature (anthropomorphized as “mother”) by being able to withstand “extreme temperatures, blowing rain, dust, shock, vibration, pressure and humidity…” Only Motorola can slap somebody they call mother. Quite a contrast with the AT&T interpretation of cellphones.
Via Sociological Images.
Though I did not eat as many crayons as PiPi growing up, I’m sure we all remember the first day we tasted wax. How can something *look* so tasty, yet be totally bland. But I digress. Due to the sissy-fication of America, Crayon colour’s names have been slowly but surely changed over the years in order to be more politically correct. For example, in 1962 the crayon colour “flesh” was renamed to “peach”. A travesty of justice in my opinion. The replacement name should have been more suited to represent both the actual colour AND the history of the crayon’s original name. I would have named it “honkey-hued-hei-ren-hanging-honeydew”. Having said that, let me present the Sinocidal Chinese CrayonColours. Peculiar image.
Via mylaowai.com, thanks to Mónica Carriço
Really? I never knew. Biomimicmarketing strategies are getting crazier by the day.
In millions of offices and homes around the world, people are hard at work planting crops, feeding cattle and tilling their land. Welcome to Farmville, the digital rural world where the sun always shines, where beans take two days to grow, where pink cows produce strawberry milk, where farming is leisure.
Farmville has become a viral Internet trend since its launch as a Facebook application in 2007. According to Zynga, the company that brought FarmVille into the world, it has rapidly grown to over 70 million users – compare that to the one million traditional farmers active in the USA.
Players sign up and get fields, infrastructure, and cash. Their task is to create bigger, better, and richer farms. The game starts off with a given piece of land and seeds that can be planted, harvested and sold for online coins. As you make money, you can buy things, from basics like pumpkin seeds and chicken to the truly superfluous, like elephants and hot-air balloons. Impatient players can use credit cards or a PayPal account to buy more assets, although purists tend to disapprove on the practice and constrain themselves to developing their farm through simple ‘labor’.
During the riots of 1968, as students in Paris ripped up paving stones and threw them at the police, one of the rallying cries was “sous le pave: la plage” (under the pavement: the beach). The beach – the incarnation of a natural, undesignated and non-utilitarian space – was the opposite of the street, a historic relic of a designated, oppressive environment based on private property.
Since May 1968, policymakers have learned to better comply with the needs of the public. At various cities in the worlds every summer a temporarily artificial beach is created on the pavement. Last year alone, in Mexico City the local government created 10 artificial beaches, mostly in poorer parts of the city.
In general, the camouflaging of infrastructure with ‘natural imagery’ has proven a successful strategy to provide the public with a seemingly more friendly and acceptable living environment. This, of course, doesn’t withstand that order has to be maintained: Parisian sunbathers that go nude or wear g-strings on the capital’s artificial beaches risk a 38 euro fine if they are caught baring their breasts or buttocks. Under the beach – the pavement.
Image: ‘Paris Plage’ (Paris Beach) along banks of the River Seine in Paris.
So you’ve seen the peak of the Mount Everest on tour? Descended the bobsled ride of the Matterhorn in a Disneyland? Think you’ve seen it all? Now come and see The Berg in Berlin!
German architect Jakob Tigges explores the outskirts of megalomania with his proposed a plan to construct a 1000-meter tall mountain at the site of the recently closed Tempelhof airport in Berlin, which was originally constructed by the Nazi’s as part of their megalomaniac Germania plan.
If realized, ‘The Berg’ would be the largest man-made icon. A tourist attraction unlike any city has ever served, providing Berliners and (more importantly) tourists with a convenient location to enjoy a range of activities including hiking, hang-gliding, rock climbing and even skiing, as the mountain would collect snow on its peak from September to March offering the perfect skiing climate in the otherwise slope-less city.
Nature conservation organizations – like the WWF and Greenpeace – typically present nature as a commodity that has become increasingly scarce and will be used up altogether if we don’t act quickly.
Although this depiction intuitively makes sense, it seems to conflict with the idea of nature as pristine & untouched, which is promoted by the same organizations: How is it possible to perceive nature as untouched and consumed at the same time?
Presumably, the ‘do not consume nature’ campaigns should be interpreted as a critique on individuals and corporations who use up environmental value as a commodity. From that perspective things makes sense again, however, there is more to say about the tension between nature as untouched versus nature as a commodity.
Possibly this tension lies at the very root of our current environmental crisis. Exactly the romantic desire to perceive our natural environment as pristine, untouched and undefined, makes it trouble-free (read: cheap) to consume: No ownership, no responsibility.
Should we, in order to save the environment, begin to define it as in terms of value, ownership, e.g. as a commodity?
Hippopotamus: a 2,5cm-long tablet-shaped nonliving chewable animal, member of a multi-species flock known as the Animal Parade, which tastes like fruit and is found in little pill boxes on supermarket shelves.
This definition of hippopotamus might seem exaggerated or even a bit ridiculous, and surely unnatural; but I’m afraid it is not, especially for little children. Supermarkets, pharmacies, and online ‘health’ stores are fraught with food (or energy if you prefer) supplements and their rapidly growing sub-category of specialized supplements for children, in which flora, fauna, chemistry and advertising blend together forming the strange nutritional abnormalities of the aforementioned kind.
Bacteria are traditionally perceived as infectious and unhealthy, but that is about to change. This week designer Jan van der Asdonk graduated from the Next Nature Lab at the TU/e Industrial Design Masters with a speculative yet full fledged product proposal called the FluDOC, which uses glowing bacteria to detect human influenza.
The product uses genetically modified bioluminescent bacteria which are sensitive to influenza as a detector, somewhat similar to the canaries that were once used in coalmines to detect potentially dangerous gasses.
The FluDOC consists of a casing and a small stick which the user can use to collect salivia from the mouth, after which an liquid capsule of the bioluminescent bacteria is entered. If the saliva contains an influenza virus the bacteria will die within 15 minutes and stop emitting their continuous flow of light, which the user can simply read of the display.
The personal influenza test would typically be used if you don’t feel well but are unsure if you have influenza or merely a cold. Such self diagnosis could contribute to an early detection and containment of infectious influenza viruses.
