Our Image of Nature is Naïve
A while ago I tried to make a landscape paintings as seen on the Bob Ross television show, yet thing turned out a little bit different in my wilderness.
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.
-
-
More than Fake Nature: The Surprising Sociology of Museum Taxidermy
Opened in 1942, the Akeley Hall of African Mammals in New York’s American Museum of Natural History is perhaps taxidermy’s crowning achievement. But, as an excellent essay from Lapham’s Quarterly recounts, the hall is more than mere artistry. It’s also drenched in the egos of presidents and industrialists, men who were just as eager to preserve the memory of disappearing landscapes as they were to shoot and skin the last vestiges of it. The hall is an emblem of the American attitude towards nature and conservation:
-
Paint by Numbers, then Eat It
“The Book Club”, a London-based venue, is teaming up with the company “Animal Vegetable Mineral” to create a workshop in which participants are able to create an “expression using all the senses” and then eat it. Along with chocolate model making and “sugar graffiti”, the workshop will include “edible painting-by-numbers”.
The team has created edible paint, inks and sugar-based sprays to daub onto specially designed images of “things like sandwiches and dogs”. This event presents new forms of expression and interaction with the process of preparing and eating food, and points out future directions for food culture. One day we might be seeing an eat-by-numbers based upon in-vitro meat paint. Imagine painting a charming cow out of beef paint and then chowing down on your masterpiece!
Facebook event page here.
-
Control Your Environment with Myo
In same spirit of Kinect and other movement detectors, the Canadian firm Thalmic Labs recently presented Myo, a high-tech armband able to interpret musclular contractions. Myo changes your hand into a computer mouse: Raise your hand and make the web page change, or remotely manipulate a robot or drone. The device turns the world into a giant touch-sensitive screen, without actually needing to touch anything.
Myo might seem like magic, but it uses an old technology that has been used in electromyography to control the muscle and nerve activity in patients. In addition to a basic Bluetooth connection, this technology allows Myo to foresee arm movements by a tiny fraction of a second. This amazing device will be available by the end of the year for a quite reasonable price – around $115. So, if you want to feel like the mutant Magneto, it’s already possible!
Via Futura-Sciences.
-
Cliff Swallows Are Evolving to Avoid Cars
Cliff swallows, as their name suggests, like to build nests on cliffs and other rocky outcroppings. They also like building their nests on bridges and overpasses, and sunbathe on warm roads. This puts them in the path of traffic, and adds thousands of swallows to the nearly 80 million birds killed by cars each year in the US. Swallows in the state of Nebraska, however, appear to be getting wise to the ways of the highway – or at least their genes are.
Researchers at the University of Nebraska have been collecting swallow bodies along several highways for the last thirty years. Not only have the total number of fatalities decreased over this time, but the wing length of the birds has also been decreasing. The swallows, it seems, are evolving to become more nimble. Shorter wings makes it easier to take off vertically or to quickly maneuver around vehicles. Time to add “vehicular selection” to the sub-categories of “natural” selection.
Via Smithsonian Magazine. Photo via Nebirdsplus.
-
Truly Honest Branding
For a fresh perspective on modern branding and honesty, and as a parallel to Next Nature’s own vision of the honest egg, have a look at the work of Viktor Hertz. A designer from Uppsala in Sweden, Hertz decided to follow the idea of brand honesty to its logical conclusion by visualizing a complete range of outcomes.
Companies routinely spend thousands to hundreds of thousands on logos and branding aimed at putting a positive gloss over their products. What if the downsides couldn’t be hidden in the small print or conveniently omitted, and had to be up front in the branding? Viktor calls his set “Honest Logos”.
The full set of designs after the jump…
-
Did Booze Make Us Human?
Psychiatrist Jeffrey P. Kahn believes that beer, far from being an agent of chaos, is what gave our ancestors modern civilization. Beer, he writes, triggered our leap from rule-bound hunter-gathers into the creative, complex societies we’ve been for the last 10,000 years. There’s certainly evidence to back up his claims. Grain may have been domesticated to satisfy our craving for alcohol rather than for bread. In fact, brewing does appear to predate baking by 3,000 years. There’s no doubt that dense towns and cities flourished on fermented beverages when plain water was too dangerous to drink. And, as Guinness likes to point out, beer has certain nutritional benefits, not to mention that it’s high in calories.
Kahn’s argument, however, extends far deeper than beer ‘s early role as a safe drink and easy source of calories. What Kahn identifies as humanity’s five core social tendencies – codependence on our tribe members, hierarchy, responsibility, fear of offending others, and conveniently dying when we get too old to be of use – were vital but rigid. According to Kahn, humans needed booze to shake off these instinctual strictures in order to become more expressive, creative, and experimental. No beer, no art. No wine, no democracy. But is tipple really that vital, or is something deeper at play?
-
Mutation Furniture: Your Living Room Comes Alive
Beautiful Mutation series from Belgian designer Maarten De Ceulaer show how herpes would dramatically enhance the look of your Yves Klein blue sofa. Indeed the velvety series looks more comfortable than Tokujin Yoshioka’s growing crystal chair- although it’s only a biomimicmarketing simulation rather than a truly biological or chemical process.
De Ceulaar explains,” The pieces in this series look like they weren’t made by hands, but have grown to their present form organically. They might be the result of a mutation in cells, or the result of a chemical or nuclear reaction. Perhaps it’s a virus or bacteria that has grown dramatically out of scale. The Mutation pieces make you look at furniture in a different way. Maybe one day we would be able to grow a piece of furniture like we breed or clone an animal, and manipulate its shape like a bonsai tree.”
While society is still discussing futuristic in-vitro meat scenarios, designers are already watching TV on their very own in-vitro furniture.
Story via Feeldesain. Image via De Ceulaer’s website
-
Synthetic Biology for Dummies
Arguably the most accessible synthetic biology explanation video we have seen so far. From selective breeding to genetic modification, as our understanding of biology is merging with the principles of engineering into a new discipline called synthetic biology.
Written, animated and directed by James Hutson, Bridge8.
-
“Soylent” Liquid Meals Will Save the World
Rob Rhinehart has found a way to stop eating. Tired of spending time, money and energy on preparing meals, this young American decided to find a new way to survive without actual food. He created a unique mixture called “Soylent”, which contains nothing but the elements the body needs: iron, vitamins, fat, calcium and dozens of other nutrients. This is minimalism in eating: Nothing in this beige milkshake-like beverage can be identified as coming from any recognizable food.
Rhinehart followed a strict Soylent diet for several weeks and was amazed by the results of the experiment. He felt and looked healthier, and saved money and time. You can read the whole story on his website, and even find the recipe to make your own Soylent shake.
-
3D Print Your Body in Gummy Candy
People use 3D printing for various reasons, from toys to surgery to yes, even candy-making. The FabCafé in Tokyo allows you to print a perfect copy of yourself as a gummy candy. Personally, eating something with my exact features would give me a bit of anthropomorphobia!
More pictures after the jump. Story via Fubiz
-
Filling Vacant Lots with Augmented Reality Grocery Stores
China’s biggest e-commerce website plans to virtually transform 1,500 vacant lots around the country into augmented reality supermarkets. It’s a cheap and near-instantaneous way to use dead space in cities. Each one of Yihaodian‘s AR supermarkets will take up 1,200 “real” square meters, and have about 1,000 products each. Customers will wander around using their smart phones as an interface to buy items, and get their purchases delivered at home.
Unlike Korea’s AR shopping on subway platforms, Yihaodian’s stores seem to require that shoppers go out of their way to look for items that could just as easily be purchased online. Because of this, we’re a little skeptical about the life of this idea beyond its novelty as a marketing stunt. To really draw the crowds to empty areas, AR pop-ups would have to offer something exclusive: products, art, or checkpoints in a city-wide game that sends people swarming over the streets to earn discounts.
Via Pop Up City
