Candlelight Switch
Created for the niche target group of nostalgic button freaks, by Aram Bartholl.
What is Next Nature?
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.
Posts Tagged ‘Fake-nature’
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Seashells are becoming Unnecessary
At the beach, I’m always on the look-out for seashells big enough to hold against my ear to hear the sound of the sea. This child-like behavior still resonates with me. But I got really puzzled when I saw this movie on wired.co.uk.
How it it possible that I can look at an installation, created by Nils Völker using 108 plastic bags, two CPU cooling fans. MDF, relays, countless screws and an Arduino controller and all I can think of is the sea?
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Cows as superior species
Let’s slightly move back to the NextNature theme with an amusing video by Cyriak.
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Downriver in the Lowlands
The Netherlands is known for its outright flat landscape – its even part of the name. How come the Dutch Womans Youth Rafting Team just won the World Cup in the category ‘Downriver’? Lucky?
Must be, cause how could the four of them get proper training without rivers running wild, without speeding downhill? Just by a little floating on a Dutch lake? And how come last year a Dutch girl won a gold medal at the Olympics in snowboarding, lucky as well? Must be, as the Dutch don’t have any mountains nor enough snow.
I once read a quote saying “The best rapper in the world is white (Eminem) and the best golfer in the world is black (Tiger Woods), what’s happening?”. I have this feeling when I see these Dutchies winning prizes in their unnatural habitat. I’m already hoping for a Jamaican to win at Fierljeppen (a typical traditional Dutch sport).
But in fact something much bigger causes these strange successes. Since the last two or three decades the Dutch have been stealing environments. If we like what we elsewhere we just copy it. Instead of trying to conquer it as we used to, we now take a close look and rebuilt it. Today you can ski on snow mountains, climb rocks, raft wild rivers, go to China (town) or on a Safari without crossing the border. We reshape our nation to entertain ourselves and that’s not typical Dutch. Japan made a copy of Amsterdam, Vegas did Venice and Disneyland is everywhere.
Globalization doesn’t stop with a bit of networking and outsourcing, we even shift our physical world, exchanging complete cities and landscapes. And as we had brought the Zambezi River – famous for rafting – to Zoeterwoude (photo) we could as well easily organize the World Cup Rafting.
So the success of the Dutch Womans Youth Rafting team might be due to the event was held in our own land, on a wild – but man made – river. I wander what’s next? Indoor surfing in Ghana, outdoor ice skating in Dubai or curling at the Himalayas? It will at least make some extra ordinary champions.
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Dutch start Hunting again thanks to Supermarket Soccer Mascotte
In Holland people go crazy for soccer, especially now that the national team has reached the World Cup final. We gather everything that’s orange – our shirt color – as the ultimate solidarity to our players. Companies know this, and start handing out all kinds of stupid gifts to draw attention to the customers. Cause if it’s orange, we wanna have it, how useless or dumb, orange at soccer days is like gold.
Dutch Supermarket Albert Heijn is one of the main players in the field of funny orange trumpery. For every 15 euro you spend at the store you receive a ‘Beessie’ mascotte (see photo). But nothing you could do with it till now. Anglers found out it’s very usefull to catch fish. On several websites people are showing their catch with the ‘Beessies’ from the supermarket. There are competitions to catch the biggest, the most. And more important it’s addictive! Everybody wants to try cathing fish with Beessies.
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So thats where Phones come from
Really? I never knew. Biomimicmarketing strategies are getting crazier by the day.
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Artificial Shrub Observatories
Justin Shull investigates the born and the made by mixing them up in mobile installations like the “Terrestrial Shrub Rover” and the “Porta Hedge”. His designs consist of several eco-conscious design features including recycled Christmas trees on the exterior, wood finishing on the interior, and the relaxing sound of birdsong audio on the interior and exterior. These vehicles are made to observe and explore both terrestrial and social environments.
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Blob architecture 1.400 AD
Blob architecture 1.400 AD in the emperor’s garden in the Forbidden City, Beijing. Peculiar image, from China with love.
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Castle Duivenvoorde
That Next Nature is nothing new can be proven in a walk around Castle Duivenvoorde. The castle dates back from the 11th century, while the gardens date from 1631. In a time where wild and old nature was still widespread, the noble family Van Duivenvoorde created a vast terrain of gardens and ponds.
Ironically, the terrain is now enclosed by two highways and a railway. The inhabitants of the castle try to live of the land and have a cradle-to-cradle philosophy on the preservation of the complex.
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Unlimited Urban Woods
What to do when you have a small city with limited space, and you rather turn available space into parking lots instead of parks? You turn to DUS Architects for an unlimited forrest. The Unlimited Urban Woods lets you disappear into an endless forrest that just takes a few square meters.
By placing a real tree into a cubic space of mirrors, the tree gets repeated endlessly, creating the feeling of a forrest. Personally, I would be interested in an endless parking space in the forrest too.
Images by Pieter Kers.
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To Milk the Cows, Click here
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’.
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Under the Beach lies the Pavement
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.
