Car Skin
Our peculiar image of the week was created by artist Olaf Mooij. Seen at Discovery Festivals Cabinet of Curiosities.
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 ‘Designed-by-Evolution’
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The Great Cleaving
We usually just click ‘Ok’ on every update request, but perhaps the one proposed in this religiously uncanny video by Doctor AlexXross needs a bit more contemplation?
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ECO Currency – Explanation Video
Earlier we have discussed the ECO currency, now here is an explanation video.
The ECO currency is an alternative currency to express environmental value. People who conduct labor in support of the environment receive ECO’s from a global fund, which is financed via a micro bank tax on global financial transactions.
The idea for the ECO currency originates from the hypothesis that an important factor in our environmental crisis is the disconnect between the economic ecology and the environmental ecology: Environmental values are easily destroyed because they go unnoticed within the economical system. The aim of the ECO currency is to make environmental value explicit in economical terms. Would the rain forest still be destroyed if we could pay people to let the trees stand?
If you want to stay up to date on the project, there is always a Facebook page.
The video was made by Marcel van Heist, Jop Japenga and Billy Schonenberg. Voice: Sean Lynch, Music: Armand Amar. Coaching by Koert van Mensvoort & Luna Maurer.
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Ars Electronica 2010: Artists Adressing NextNature
Sind wir noch zu retten? That was the slogan of this year’s Ars Electronica festival in Linz (Austria). Titled ‘REPAIR’, the media art festival urged to leave our scepticism and lethargy behind and turn to artists, designers, scientists and engineers to search a way out. What do these pioneers tell us? How can we reach an alternative future? And what’s living like in NextNature? Read more »
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Next Nature intro by Bruce Sterling
This project is about Nature’s brand image. One might surmise that “Nature,” being 100 percent all-natural, can’t have any brand image. The facts suggest otherwise. Try it for yourself: tell a friend that something seemingly 100 percent natural is actually “96 percent natural.” Not a great difference, apparently, yet a profound unease arises. That unease is the subject of the many provocative essays and remarkable graphics on NextNature.net
by BRUCE STERLING
The project is a study in why we feel uneasiness when the Nature brand is violated. It’s also about the exciting new-and-improved varieties of unnatural unease that have come to exist quite recently. It explains why this sensibility is spreading, and what that implies for who we are, and how we live with Nature.
Now, when Nature is slightly artificialized — say, by installing a park bench under a tree — we rarely get any dark suspicious frisson about that. The uncanny can only strike us when our ideological constructs about Nature are dented. We’re especially guarded about our most pious, sentimentalized notions of Nature. Nature as a nurturing entity that is harmonious, calm, peaceful, inherently rightful and all-around “good-for-you.”
This vaguely politicized attitude about Nature never came from Nature. It was culturally generated. Nature didn’t get her all-natural identity-branding until the Industrial Revolution broke out. Then poets and philosophers were allowed to live in dense, well-supplied cities, where they could recast Nature from some intellectual distance. Before that huge effusion of organized artifice, people lived much closer to the soil.
These farmers rarely spoke of “Nature” in the abstract. They were too deeply involved in a lifelong subsistence struggle with natural events, such as inclement weather, bad harvests, weeds, pests, and blights. They certainly never mistook their existing state of affairs for the Biblical Eden: their theological utopia in which Nature was always harmonious, calm, peaceful and good-for-you.
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The Stray Shopping Cart Project
“…Until now, the major obstacle that has prevented people from thinking critically about stray shopping carts has been that we have not had any formalized language to differentiate one shopping cart from another. In order to encourage a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon, I have worked for the past six years to develop a system of identification for stray shopping carts. Unlike a Linaean taxonomy, which is based on the shared physical characteristics of living things, this system works by defining the various states and situations in which stray shopping carts can be found. The categories of classification were arrived at by observing shopping carts in different situations and considering the conditions and human motives that have placed carts in specific situations and the potential for a cart to transition from one situation to another.” – Julian Montague.
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ISEA 2010: Artists addressing NextNature
At ISEA 2010, the International Symposium on Electronic Arts, media artists and media researchers from all over the world present their work in Dortmund (Germany). This year, many projects focus on the relationship between man and nature and man and technology. An overview of contemporary artistic practices of NextNature at ISEA 2010.
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iBookshelf: Simulation before Extinction
As technology progresses we constantly have to adapt ourselves to an ever changing media landscape. Designers try to smooth the changes with a ‘progressive nostalgic‘ strategy: linking newfangled technologies with familiar phenomena.
Flipping through the bookshelf on your iPad, provides the owner with the familiar feeling of having an easily accessible library of books. The nostalgic reference to a wooden bookshelf makes the modern notion of a digital book collection graspable. At the same time, the digital storage of books is expected to have a huge impact on the publishing industry and the actual use of books: similar to the first cars that were designed as ‘horseless carriages’ and the ‘envelope’ icon you click to open your email application, which acceptance caused an drastic decrease in the use of actual envelopes, the digital book cabinet is a first sign of extinction for the physical book cabinets it so elegantly simulates.
A technology that already became extinct is simulated in the iRetroPhone rotary dialer application for those who want to dial grandma’s style. -
The Crossing of Species
Designer Bob de Graaf takes pleasure in collecting and combining objects from old nature & next nature in search for similarities. Surely a traditional biologist would not create a collection like this anytime soon, but then again, an extraterrestrial alien scientists who’s observations wouldn’t be burdened by established notions of nature and culture, might have. Peculiar image of the week. -
A Whole New Species of Television is Born
So you thought the Razorius Gilletus essay was farsighted? Interestingly enough, Samsung is advertising its latest TV-set as a whole new species. Despite the obvious biomimicmarketing, could there be some coincidental evolutionary truth in that commercial?
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Technostalgia
In Next Nature, not only old nature is being idealized. Because of the rapidness of new emerging technologies, we have a tendency to dwell on earlier prototypes. To recall memories, or to give that ‘real’ experience. We call this bittersweet longing for past technologies technostalgia. Technostalgia shapes our memories, our past and thus our present. -
Here Comes the iPhone Virus
By analyzing billions of phone calls, researchers at Scandinavian telecom company Telenor, mapped how social connections between people – measured partly by how often they called each other – correlated with the spread of Apple’s iPhone after its 2007 debut.
The diagram above shows the evolution of the largest network of Telenor iPhone users over time. Each node represents one subscriber, and its color indicates the model used. In this case, red equals 2G, green means 3G, and yellow means 3GS.
Researchers learned that its owners helped spread the iPhone virus spread rapidly throughout their social network. A person with just one iPhone-carrying friend was three times more likely to own one themselves than a person whose friends had no iPhones. People with two friends who had iPhones were more than five times as likely to have sprung for the Apple device. Apparently the iPhone virus was highly contagious.
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Matt Ridley – When Ideas have Sex
At TEDGlobal 2010, author Matt Ridley argues how, throughout history, the engine of human progress has been the meeting and mating of ideas to make new ideas. According to Ridley, it is not important how clever individuals are, what really matters is how smart the collective brain is. Resistance is futile.
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BioPong
Techno-artists love insects. Especially their unpredictable behaviour. Eindhoven (NL) based design studio Ehdv used tracking software and connected some camera’to a bunch of wood lice, to create graphic design and even chairs.
Insects can also become living pixels. Austrian artist Gordan Savicic re-creates a famous Aracade-video game, using a new ‘organic algorithm’: the AI of his BioPong is performed by a cockroach which carries a neon-green pixel on its shoulder. Players can control their sticks but are not able to foresee the movement of the CI (cockroach intelligence). Feeding the pixel is not allowed!
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Learning to build Superman’s House
Superman already knew it: Steered growth is the future of architecture.
The lower picture was taken at the Industrias Peñoles nano-chrystal architecture lab in Chihuahuan, Mexico where researchers are growing giant crystals. No seriously, the Cave of Crystals isn’t man made. It was discovered by Industrias Peñoles miners a thousand feet (300 meters) below Naica mountain in the Chihuahuan Desert.
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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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The Anthropocene Debate: Marking Humanity’s Impact
Via Yale Environment 360, by Elizabeth Kolbert
Is human activity altering the planet on a scale comparable to major geological events of the past? Scientists are now considering whether to officially designate a new geological epoch to reflect the changes that homo sapiens have wrought: the Anthropocene.
The Holocene — or “wholly recent” epoch — is what geologists call the 11,000 years or so since the end of the last ice age. As epochs go, the Holocene is barely out of diapers; its immediate predecessor, the Pleistocene, lasted more than two million years, while many earlier epochs, like the Eocene, went on for more than 20 million years. Still, the Holocene may be done for. People have become such a driving force on the planet that many geologists argue a new epoch — informally dubbed the Anthropocene — has begun.
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Grow-a-NanoRaptor
Now here is an example of the fusion between the made and the born, most kids would crave for. Much better than the robotic dino toy. Designed by evolution!
Hopefully this genetic surprise doesn’t grow genetically wild and eats its owner. Luckily it is just an imaginative product – so far.
