Huggable Vending Machine
Finally a vending machine that doesn’t want you money, it wants hugs. Embrace it to get a free can of coke. Might give you rushes of anthropomorphobia too though.
Via The Pop-Up City. Thanks Teun.
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 ‘Corporature’
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The Evolutionary History of Office Chairs
On the shortlist for the year’s strangest book title, Jonathan Olivares’ A Taxonomy of Office Chairs charts the “evolution” of chairs from the 1840s to the present day. The author explicitly uses the language of biological classification, opening with a quote from Baudrillard that describes consumer objects as reproducing species. Olivares notes that “I find it ironic and unnerving that our society cherishes, studies and documents the natural world, but keeps little track of the products that make up our predominant reality.”
In his analysis, Olivares discovered that the individual components of chairs – bases, backs, and armrests – evolved independently. The gradual changes in the design of a chair don’t mirror, for instance, the logical sequence of horse evolution, but more like something along the lines of bacterial conjugation, when whole genetic sequences can be swapped in and out. It’s arguable whether the conceit is more than a useful metaphor, but it may be that chairs can join razors, phones and corporate logos as objects that appear to evolve like organisms.
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Search Where the Sun don’t Shine
You’re spending too much of your time in the sewers of the internet, planning to pigeon-rank your toilet visits or you’re simply feeling lucky? This peculiar shanzhai’d toilet paper might be for you. Made out of 100% virgin pulp, so no trees have died to whipe your behind.
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Who Needs Real Humans? Not H&M
Clothing giant H&M no longer uses real humans in its online catalog. The company has admitted that it pastes real models’ heads on computer-generated bodies. At least there’s a “racially diverse” example thrown in with the caucasian cyborgs. CGI humanity: For when even Photoshop can’t invent a perfect body.
Thanks to Stefan. Story and image via Jezebel.
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Beyond Recognition @ Sameheads Gallery, Berlin
Coming saturday, your faithful Next Nature editor/designer Hendrik-Jan Grievink will perform Beyond Recognition – a corporate poem about the image of words, at Sameheads Gallery in Berlin. It would be nice to see you there, if you happen to be in Berlin…
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Essay: The Story of our Food
Every time we eat a piece of food, we take a bite out of the world. All these small bites tell a dozen stories. A carton of eggs presents the story of contented hens, a bottle of olive oil the tale of Italian grandmothers. Yet these pastoral scenes barely hide the realities of a food system that leaves one billion people starving and another billion overweight. Moving beyond food-based fictions, how should we react to the truth?
By Maartje Somers
It happened in a trendy restaurant. A breadbasket and a small bowl of olives had just been brought to the table. Our hands reached out to take some, when the waitress stopped us. “Wait,” she interrupted, “I have to explain the bread.” Explain the bread? Yes, that one variety of bread had been baked with hard durum wheat from a village just south of Tuscany, the other one came from a bakery slightly north of Amsterdam. The olives were kalamata olives, imported from Thessaloniki, and olivas violadas (olives ‘raped’ by an almond) from Basque Country in Spain. It took the waitress about five minutes to finish her lecture. Then, finally we could dig in.
All our food comes with a story to tell, and usually it is the story we want to hear. In the supermarket the story is about the price of the food, in a restaurant it is about the taste and the origin.
These days all our food comes with a story to tell. Usually it is the story we want to hear. In the supermarket the story is about the price of food, in a restaurant or delicatessen it is about taste and origin. Very often stories about food focus on authenticity. That is the way food would like to be – authentic and natural – like in the old days when people harvested their own crops. And this is exactly what we want to believe. The jam in my fridge has ‘a natural taste’ and the milk is ‘pure and honest.’ Eat colour, it says on the posters in the street, displaying juicy red peppers. And these shiny vegetables almost jump from the page in the cookbooks by Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson, bestsellers the world over. But at the same time we are buying more and more ready-made meals.
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Human Augmentation™
As a gamer, I come across many visions of possible futures. But this trailer from the upcoming video game Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the third part in the Deus Ex series shocked me with its convincing message.
Prosthetic limbs have been perfected, and in this world people are exchanging their completely functional limbs for better and improved parts. But what are the dangers of doing this? Except for the many ethical questions it proposes, it also lays our humanity in the hands of corporations. What if, just as the trailer suggests, we need to take drugs to keep our bodies from rejecting the augmentations? Will we start to despise those who give up their organic ‘parts’ for better ones? Or look up to them?
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We are all born in a World…
…that has been designed already.
Peculiar baby of the week. Source: Adbusters, via: Masters of Rietveld.
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Fata Morgana
Finally… A gas station in the ocean! If we all rigorously continue filling up our tanks, this fiction can become a reality one day.
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Next Nature Movie #4: Blade Runner
Look around you and try to find the most natural thing in the room you are in now. It is you. Now, you wouldn’t be so sure in the apocalyptic Los Angeles of 2019 depicted in Blade Runner (1982), where a Craig Venter–like entrepreneur called Eldon Tyrell, and his Tyrell Corporation create human clones, called replicants, used as servants to do work unfitted for humans.
“More human, than human” is Tyrells motto, but when four replicants are out on the loose in a quest to expand their lifespan, which has been genetically programmed to a maximum four years – to avoid they will develop emotions of their own – Blade Runner Rick Deckard (Harrisson Ford) is assigned to ‘retire’ them.
During his detective journey Deckard finds it increasingly difficult to draw the line between people and products. He falls in love with replicant Rachel, is saved by Roy and finally even doubts whether he might be a replicant himself.
Blade runner is one of the best science fiction films ever made. It explore themes like the 1) dehumanization of people through a society shaped by technological and capitalistic excess. 2) The diminishing border between people and products. 3) The roles of creator and creation, their mutual enslavement, and their role reversal. 4) The nature of humanity itself: emotions, memory, desire, purpose, cruelty, vulnerability, self–awareness and personal identity.
Is the quest for humanity a crime? Find out for yourself.
Passed: Frankenstein (1931), Metropolis (1927), The Stepford Wives (1975), Gattaca (1997), X-Men (2000), Children of Men (2006), Surrogates (2009)
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Next Nature Movie #10 – Idiocracy
As we are nearing the end of the year, and anticipate you might have some time to watch a film, we discus our top 10 Next Nature movies.
Idiocracy (2006) is not a great film, honestly you will find it rather corny if you are older than twelve and chances are you might not make it to the end – so be warned. Yet, its basic premise is so thoroughly next nature, this flick still made our list.
The film opens with the observation that technological achievements not only result in a smarter environment, but also in dumber people – without natural predators, the evolution of the human species does not necessarily favor the quickest, smartest, and strongest people for progression of genes. Over time, the co-evolution between people and technology results in an idiocratic society in which citizens are consumers, garbage dumps have the size of skyscrapers and plants are watered with lemonade.
It’s not quite as damning a dystopia as 1984, but this movie paints an ugly future for our culture. In fact, this movie is essentially Planet of the Apes (1968), but with people who are the mental equivalent of apes. More confronting. We crave for a more sophisticated remake of Idiocracy, although its rudimentary quality is perhaps the point.
Passed: 1984 (1984), The Planet of the Apes (1968)
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Media Sunrise
Or is it a sunset? Not sure. Ubiquitous corporature either way. Image by Mieke Gerritzen.
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Brand Mutation: Beersneaker
What happens when brands have sex and make children? The Nike Dunk SB Heineken were a hit amongst sneaker-wearing-beer-drinkers, but unfortunately the child was unofficial. Heineken was more than disturbed about Nike not contacting them prior to production. The Beer company now requests for the Nike Beersneaker to be pulled when listed on eBay. Peculiar object of the week.
Via Sneakerfiles.
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Coca-Cola Vase
Coca-Cola, 2006, Vase from the Neolithic Age (5000–3000 BC), paint, 45.4 x 36 x 36 cm. Our peculiar object of the week was created by Ai Weiwei. Courtesy Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing – Lucerne. Image: Ian Hobbs.
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Kapitaal
So you thought augmented reality is something new? Guess you are so attuned to the already existing augmentation of reality that you don’t even notice it anymore. The short film Kapitaal gives you a clear impression of the enormous amount of visual stimuli that plague us every day. Due to the immense scale of the visual bombardment, the commercial effectiveness has become utterly dubious.
Created by the wondrous Studio Smack.
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Kosher Coke
Last week I opened a bag of potato crisps that read: “We know the origins of all our ingredients”. As some crisps had already disappeared down my throat, this made me suddenly aware of the situation. I realized that I was taking my daily building blocks, but knew nothing about them except for the price that I had paid in the store.
Why is it of my interest that “they” know what is currently sitting in my stomach? The short answer to this question: faith. The sentence “We know the origins of all our ingredients” implies that I should have greater trust in some distant company, than in my own tongue or brain.
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Shell logo evolution
Corporate logos constantly have to adapt in order to survive. In the case of the Shell oil company this results in an image that ironically resembles the ones we know from the biology classes.
Still one wonders how the biomimicmarketing of the seashell came into existence. The reason is rather straightforward: “The word ‘Shell’ first appeared in 1891, as the trade mark for kerosene being shipped to the Far East by Marcus Samuel and Company. This small London business dealt originally in antiques, curios and oriental seashells.”
Perhaps in due time, when all the oil is gone, the multinational could return to selling antiques, curios and oriental seashells again. No?
Via Shell History. Related posts: Razorius Gilletus, Coke Mutation, Survival of the Bankrupt companies, Fata Morgana.
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Coke Mutation
We’re unsure on the survival prospects of this oddly mutated Coca-Pepsi-Cola can. This could be the ultimate coke – if only the current species could interbreed. Peculiar image of the week. Designer unknown.
