American Power
Amos coal powerplant in Raymond, West Virginia. Taken from the series “American Power” by Mitch Epstein.
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.
Archive for the ‘Nature becomes culture’ Category
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Monitoring your computer’s activity like a frog pond
Multi-touch designer and developer Richard Monson-Haefel considers sound as an important part of our user interfaces. As an application of “Calm Technology” which revolves around giving feedback about the running state of a system in the ‘periphery’ of our consciousness – a concept introduced by ubiquitous computing pioneers Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown – he proposes to attach a sound to every process running on your computer: an unique croak, chirp or trill – the sounds of frogs, crickets, and cicadas of a small pond at dusk. Resulting in an ambient environmental murmur people should be able to interpret.
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Medicinal Blueberries
As our scientific knowledge of nutritious food increases, will healthy foods be progressively designed to look like medicines? This blueberry blister packaging created by Chinese designer Daizi Zheng certainly points in that direction.
Although utterly over-designed and unsustainably over-packaged, this might well be a product patients suffering from the healthy eating disease Orthorexia Nervosa would crave for.
Via Core77. Related post: Fresh from the Pharm, Orthorexia Nervosa, Food design in the 21th century, Organic Coca Cola, Nano Care Blueberry Paste Wax. Thanks Ehsan.
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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://www.nextnature.net/events/nano-supermarket/
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Dubai Globe: Sea versus Economy
Above: artist impression 2003 | below: Nasa January 2010
When developers launched the globe project just off Dubai’s coast in 2003, they hoped that the rich and famous would land there to populate the 300 islands.
Within five years Nakheel Properties leveled up 11 billion cubic feet of sand and 47 million tons of rock. However, a year ago (2009) the work stopped and now it looks like the project will never be completed. While officially the project has just been delayed, the obvious conclusion would be that it is the economic recession causing the islands to gradually wash back into the sea. -
Half Life
Meet the next species. Director David Lea’s wondrous fantasy of remixed biodiversity after nuclear meltdown. Made for Greenpeace.
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Oil Diet: Recipes for Disaster
Do you know how much oil you use per day? Neither did director John Webster. In 2005 he decided to make a documentary about oil from his own families perspective. How would it be to live a life without fossile-based products? John put a ban on things packaged in plastic like food, makeup, shampoo, toothpaste and kids’ toys in order to reduce their carbon footprint. “Recipes for disaster” (2008) is the result of a one year oil-detox.
From the director’s statement:
“(…) The first concern of every film maker is how to make the subject matter visible. One of the difficulties of this subject, and the great tragedy of the world, is that greenhouse gasses are invisible. So too, is the 31 billion barrels (1 barrel = 159 litres) of oil the world consumes every year. When that oil is burnt, it releases as much carbon as a forest fire four times the size of France. If France was burnt to cinder every three months, we would be aware of it, but somehow the oil we use (and mostly burn) fails to catch our attention.” -
Nano Care™ Blueberry Paste Wax
Surely we are quite attuned to some unexpected flavors in these quarters, but this Nano Care™ Blueberry Paste Wax wins our syncretic mash-up award for combining technorethoric with biomimicmarketing.
Who wouldn’t fall for the prospect of giving your car an all-natural-hi-tech massage with a Nanotech Blueberry wax? The creators of the car wax must have wanted to make sure they would reach all imaginable target groups with their product.
“This easy to use formula uses nano-technology based polishing agents and waxes for enhanced surface penetration, durability and gloss. Nano Care Blueberry Paste Wax is made with pure Carnauba and Nano waxes and contains no abrasives. Because it contains a special non-swirl agent Blueberry Paste Wax is especially effective on dark or bright colored cars.”
Sometimes it seems the surrealists were telling the truth after all. Peculiar product of the week.
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How to grow an Organ
Buckle up for the state of the art in the fusion of the made & the born. Anthony Atala of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine presented footage of his bio-engineers growing human organs at TEDMED – from muscles to blood vessels to bladders, and more. Thanks Michèle.
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Digital Gastronomy
The food printer seems to be one of those lustrous concepts that continues to pop-up in the fantasy of techno-connoisseurs. Some years ago James King already proposed a printed designers steak after being inspired by the disembodied cuisine project. Since then we have seen inktjet printed sushi, the candy printer and the Philips molecular food printer.
While some are already dreaming of printing human organs, we are still waiting for an affordable food printer to arrive in our kitchen. Perhaps the folks from the MIT fluid interfaces group can take bake the cake with their Cornucopia Food printer concept.
“Cornucopia is a concept design for a personal food factory that brings the versatility of the digital world to the realm of cooking. In essence, it is a three dimensional printer for food, which works by storing, precisely mixing, depositing and cooking layers of ingredients.”
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Lowtech Plastic Surgery
So this is what you get when artists Lucyandbart practice their low-tech plastic surgery techniques on visitors of the MU gallery in Eindhoven. We are clueless on whether it was actually their objective to end up in the blend between tribal Africa & Beverly Hills. Peculiar image of the week.
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3D Bioprinter promises tissue on demand
Behold “the world’s first production model 3D bio-printer.” A machine capable of arranging human cells and artificial scaffolds into complex three-dimensional structures, which result in such wonderful things as printed design meat, replacement organ tissue, or perhaps artificially grown teeth.
“Scientists and engineers can use the 3D bio printers to enable placing cells of almost any type into a desired pattern in 3D,” says Keith Murphy, CEO of Organovo – the San Diego based company who will supply the devices institutions investigating human tissue repair and organ replacement.
“Researchers can place liver cells on a preformed scaffold, support kidney cells with a co-printed scaffold, or form adjacent layers of epithelial and stromal soft tissue that grow into a mature tooth. Ultimately the idea would be for surgeons to have tissue on demand for various uses, and the best way to do that is get a number of bio-printers into the hands of researchers and give them the ability to make three dimensional tissues on demand.”
Building human organs cell-by-cell was considered science fiction not that long ago, but now rapidly becomes science faction. Yet another step in the blending of the ‘made’ and the ‘born’.
Via: Livescience.com.
