8-bit Icon Watch

Remember that aggravating 8-bit pixeled watch icon that used to replace your mouse cursor whenever your Apple computer was ‘taking time’ to finish a task? Displaying a wristwatch to show your computer was busy always felt like an odd metaphor – likewise for the sand clock icon on Microsoft computers – yet once it was replaced by the animated rainbow warp, people immediately missed it.

Luckily for all you pixel-nostalgics out there, the icon watch now boomeranged into the physical world. To be worn as a wrist clock for 8-bit retro time telling. Get yours and keep this lost symbol of the pixel era alive. Pass it on to your children!

To order your Icon Watch, please visit our store.

The Icon watch is made of an ABS and stainless steel body with a polyurethane band. Designed by & Design. Size: Case: 1.25h x 1.25″w; Band: .75″w.

Nano Supermarket – Call for Products

Nanotechnology is an important emerging technology of our time – it radically intervenes with our sense of what is natural – yet most people are still relatively unaware of its consequences. Hence, this autumn 2010 the Next Nature NANO Supermarket will be presented in Eindhoven (NL): a physical supermarket featuring debate–provoking visions on possible nanotech products expected to hit the shelves between today and 2020.

Self–cleaning windows, contact lenses with a display, smart medicines that are delivered exactly on the spot, molecular printed food, blush–reducing make-up, self–healing anti scratch surfaces, nano-particle tagging spray that may identify your possessions when stolen, cyborg insects, breathing textiles, tooth phones, organic jewelry, implantable microprocessors and whatever you may think of.

We call upon designers, technologists and artists to submit their speculative nanotech products for the NANO supermarket. A selection of the projects will be presented in the Nano Supermarket and the accompanying publication. The best submission is awarded with a € 2500 price

Event website: http://nextnature.net/events/nano-supermarket/

The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan

A candid conversation with the high priest of popcult and metaphysician of media.

From “The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan”, Playboy Magazine, March 1969. © Playboy

In 1961, the name of Marshall McLuhan was unknown to everyone but his English students at the University of Toronto — and a coterie of academic admirers who followed his abstruse articles in small-circulation quarterlies. But then came two remarkable books — The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964) — and the graying professor from Canada’s western hinterlands soon found himself characterized by the San Francisco Chronicle as “the hottest academic property around.” He has since won a world-wide following for his brilliant — and frequently baffling — theories about the impact of the media on man; and his name has entered the French language as mucluhanisme, a synonym for the world of pop culture.

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Nature Transformer – Microwave Festival 2009

If you happen to be in the neighborhood, you may want to attend that inspirational Next Nature lecture Dr. Van Mensvoort will be throwing this Sunday 15-11-2009 at the Microwave International New Media Arts Festival in Hong Kong.

The festival is highly resonating on the nature caused by people. They will also screen parts of the Next Nature DVD and reprint the Real Nature is not Green essay. Nature transforms along with us!

Next Nature DVD

A DVD with over twenty visions of artists, scientists, designers, filmmakers and thinkers who present their powerful imagery, radical ideas and visionary statements on how we can design, build and live in the nature caused by people.

Filmed during the Biggest Visual Power Shows at Paradiso, Amsterdam (NL), Zeche Zolverein (DE) and the Million Dollar Theater in Los Angeles (USA). The DVD box contains a booklet including the essay Real Nature is not Green. Among the presenters are Floris Kaayk, Kevin Kelly, Tobie Kerridge, Jack van Wijk, Sunny Bergman, Hendrik-Jan Grievink, Karl Grandin, Casey Alt, Amir Admoni, Jos de Mul, Tracy Metz, Henk Oosterling and many more.

Real Nature is Not Green can now be purchased at our store.

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Ars Electronica Festival goes Next Nature

This years edition of the Ars Electronica festival, which has been hangout for international experts from the arts and sciences for almost three decades, focuses on the nature caused by people:

Human Nature: The Reinvention of Nature

We are entering a new age here on Earth: the Anthropocene. An age definitively characterized by humankind’s massive and irreversible influences on our home planet. Population explosion, climate change, the poisoning of the environment and our venturing into outer space have been the most striking symbols of this development so far.

But to a much more enormous extent, the achievements of genetic engineering and biotechnology are the truly indicative markers of this transition to a new epoch. Now, we’re not only changing our environment; we’re revising the fundamentals of life itself—even our own human life.

Among the works on display are the Cloned robot professor, Flesh nike, Living doll, Cloned beef, human body farming and conductive bodypaint.

Ars Electronica 2009: Human Nature is organized from September 3rd – 8th in Linz, Austria.

Fake for Real Memory Game

The Fake for Real Memory Game consists of 60 cards that playfully visualize the classical theme of Fake vs Real. Is everything that was once directly experienced in our media society now replaced by simulations? Or are reproduction and imitation naturally part of life? Can you tell the fake from the real? See for yourself. Fake For Real!

The Fake for Real Memory Game can now be purchased at our store.

Design: Hendrik Jan-Grievink. Text: Koert van Mensvoort. Editorial team: Koert van Mensvoort, Hendrick-Jan Grievink, Mieke Gerritzen, Arnoud van den Heuvel, Rolf Coppens, and Edwin Degenhart.  Produced by ALLMEDIA @ 2008.

Webby Awards

How sweet. Nextnature.net is a Webby Awards honoree.

‘As a result of the superior quantity and quality of sites entered, the 13th Annual Webby Awards recognized sites and teams that demonstrated a standard of excellence.’

A Future Love Story

By MARCEL VAN DER DRIFT.

Ten years from now, a cell phone gently sinks to the bottom of the river. It’s one of the latest models. The clever design, trendy colours and nifty features make our cell phones look ancient. Everything about it is new. Cell phone isn’t even the right name for it. It’s hard to describe exactly what it is. So I won’t.

Anyway, this phone, for lack of a better word, belongs to Steve, who is on the bridge, feeling generally depressed, but for the moment happy to be rid of his phone. It was a powerful gesture.

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Nextnature pocket outdated – buy it cheap

Remember the Next Nature pocket, featuring a 140 page trip of visions and statements from thinkers from around the globe on their explorations in next nature?

We now consider that funky little booklet officially outdated. There will be no future reprints and the current leftovers are on sale for the giveaway price of € 5,00 through the website of Bis Publishers (shipping not included), or you can get it for $7,00 at Amazon.

We are working on a new bigger and better publication on Next Nature, to be released in 2010.

Ecology – A New Opium for the Masses

Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek discusses the ‘naturalization’ of capitalism and how ecology became a new field of capitalist investment. He also argues that the ultimate consequence of recent developments in biogenetics will be the ‘end of nature’ – anyone cares to introduce the good man into nextnature thinking? According to Žižek ecological apartheid will divide our urban society. Capitalism is not in control of nature and due to techno-scientific interventions the essence of the ecological order will be lost.

Written by Slavoj Žižek, Via Lacan.com, via Volume.

Marco Cicala, a Leftist Italian journalist, told me about his recent weird experience: when, in an article, he once used the word “capitalism,” the editor asked him if the use of this term is really necessary – could he not replace it by a synonymous one, like “economy”? What better proof of the total triumph of capitalism than the virtual disappearance of the very term in the last 2 or 3 decades? No one, with the exception of a few allegedly archaic Marxists, refers to capitalism any longer. The term was simply struck from the vocabulary of politicians, trade unionists, writers and journalists – even of social scientists… But what about the upsurge of the anti-globalization movement in the last years? Does it not clearly contradict this diagnostic? No: a close look quickly shows how this movement also succumbs to “the temptation to transform a critique of capitalism itself (centered on economic mechanisms, forms of work organization, and profit extraction) into a critique of ‘imperialism’.” In this way, when one talks about “globalization and its agents,” the enemy is externalized (usually in the form of vulgar anti-Americanism). From this perspective, where the main task today is to fight “the American empire,” any ally is good if it is anti-American, and so the unbridled Chinese “Communist” capitalism, violent Islamic anti-modernists, as well as the obscene Lukashenko regime in Belarus may appear as progressive anti-globalist comrades-in-arms… What we have here is thus another version of the ill-famed notion of “alternate modernity”: instead of the critique of capitalism as such, of confronting its basic mechanism, we get the critique of the imperialist “excess,” with the (silent) notion of mobilizing capitalist mechanisms within another, more “progressive,” frame.

So what is the problem here? It is easy to make fun of Fukuyama’s notion of the End of History, but the majority today is “Fukuyamaian”: liberal-democratic capitalism is accepted as the finally-found formula of the best possible society, all one can do is to render it more just, tolerant, etc. The only true question today is: do we endorse this “naturalization” of capitalism, or does today’s global capitalism contain strong enough antagonisms which will prevent its indefinite reproduction? There are three (or, rather, four) such antagonisms:

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Next Nature @ Volume Magazine

The latest issue of Volume magazine aims to re-investigate sustainability after zero. Originally a wacko, hippy-esque ideology, ‘sustainability’ – aka ‘eco-friendly’ or ‘green’ – has now become globally accepted. But as what – an environmental urgency, a political issue, a technical problem, a historic destiny, a new world order? And what are the consequences of this acceptance?

The magazine features a visual essay by Koert van Mensvoort, a Pig Story by Christien Meindertsma, an Oil Story by Harriet Russell, written contributions by Arjen Oosterman, Slavoj Zizek, Amir Djalali, Thomas Daniell and the familiar corporate animal field by Karl Grandin on the cover. Thus recommended. Order here.

2008 Favorites

Some recycling this week. Nearing the end of the year we celebrate our favorite finds of 2008.

Humans Are the Sex Organs of Technology

Written by Kevin Kelly, published in The Technium. 

I claim that technology has its own agenda. What is the evidence that technology as a whole, or the technium as I call it, is autonomous? Because without autonomy, one could argue, how can something have its own agenda? I have three parts to my answer.

First, I believe that a system can have an agenda even when it depends upon another system to remain viable. Let’s take the human mind and human culture. Obviously humans are animals, and just another creature of evolution. As a mammal, we must obey the rules of biology. We are part of the trajectory of living tissue: our flesh must breathe, metabolize, mate, excrete, and eventually die. The agenda of our bodies is exactly the agenda of any other animal body.

But we also claim that we are different than animals, and our effect on the earth seems to be proof of this. We build very large structures (cities) unlike any other in scale. The skyscrapers of termites and the reefs of coral are dwarfed by the skyscrapers and concrete reefs of New York, even relative to their size. We have transformed the surface and eliminated other species at a scale way beyond other species. We mess with the climate on a scale few individual species can. And of course we have made many new objects and “organisms” – which no other creature has. It is clear that humans have their own agenda, which the rest of biology does not have.

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Sneakpreview

This week we are sneak previewing our forthcoming compilation DVD featuring the best of the Biggest Visual Power Shows at the Picnic 08 – E-art event on 24,25,26 September at Westergasfabriek, Amsterdam. Buckle up for over twenty visions on the nature caused by human culture…

Paradise by the Laptop Light

Paradise by the Laptop Light is a next nature event with short films, speedlectures, special guests and one laptop. It will be held on 12 September 2008 16:30-17:30, as the opening event of the Wereld van Witte de With Festival in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

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BVPS Next Nature in LA – Pictures!

May 17th 2008. Biggest Visual Power Show: Next Nature in LA. More pictures below.

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Today in Los Angeles…

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May 17th, 8-10 PM: BVPS Next Nature 2008, Million Dollar Theater, Downtown Los Angeles.