Image-Consumption « NextNature.net

Posts Tagged ‘Image-Consumption’

Next Nature Movie #5: American Beauty

During the selection of the top ten of next nature movies we’ve doubted quite a bit between the Truman Show (1998) and American Beauty (1999). The Truman Show tells the story of a man whose life is completely fake. The place he lives in is in fact one big studio with hidden cameras everywhere, and all his friends and people around him, are actors.

While the Truman Show is an iconic film that invites us to reflect on our media-choked environment, American Beauty goes one level deeper: similar to Truman, the characters in American Beauty are born inside a completely molded environment: Suburban Utopia. And although this setting, with its agreeable houses, cars, gardens and people, is designed to provide for every human need, something is somehow missing. American Beauty portrays a life too organized, too molded, too artificial, too plastic… and the nature within people that resists.

The main protagonist is Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a man in his mid-life crisis, whose life is turned upside down by a superficial crush on one of his teenage daughters friends. His wife Caroline (Annette Bening) has an obsession of her own; her public appearance. While their daughter Jane is rebelling against the hypocritical Ken en Barbie appearance of her parents.

Only Ricky Fits, the drug-dealing boy next door, is able to look beyond conventional notions of attractiveness and find beauty in non-promiscuous, solemn girls as well as in plastic bags floating in the wind. When many criticize the movie, they say, “Where’s the beauty in a plastic bag?” And that’s the point. Look closer.

American Beauty is a profound portrait of some of the issues many people in today’s Western world are struggling with: appearance, success, self-fulfillment, and the chances of getting to know your loved ones on a deeper level. It not only entertains while you’re watching it but also drops subtle questions in your head about the nature of human behavior, the effort we put in molding and improving our lives, the things we win, the things we loose. How our natural environment has been replaced by a designed environment. How Nature likes to hide itself.

Passed: Truman Show (1998), Fight Club (1999), Magnolia (1999).
Koert van Mensvoort
on 26/12/10 Comments »
Tags
- Hyperreality | Image-Consumption | Manufactured-Bodies | manufactured-landscapes | Suburban Utopia
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Next Nature Movie #7 – Grizzly Man

The sad story of Timothy Treadwell is the ultimate example of the drama a naive notion of nature can bring about. Grizzly Man (2005) opens with the facts surrounding Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard’s death. These facts remain inside you, as the story of Timothy Treadwell is gently disassembled. Failed actor? Inveterate liar? Misguided Mercenary? Disappointed and misanthropic about the world of people, Timothy Treadwell trades urban life for the companionship of a group of Grizzly bears, with whom he lives for thirteen summers.

Did he watch too much Disney movies? Was he merely playing out the part of some great Discovery Channel episode in his head? We watch and listen as a lonely Timothy walks and talks into his only companion, a MiniDV camera, about his female problems, drug problems, memories and most importantly his love of animals.

He tells the camera you must be firm with the bears, and he says he knows how to handle them, even though he also repeatedly says he knows he may die in their claws. Director Werner Herzog notes that Treadwell sought to disregard nature’s cruelty, and any time it was in his face – as when the bears were starving in a dry spell and began eating their own young – he sought to manipulate nature to eliminate the ugliness. He faults not the bears but the rain gods.

Timothy Treadwell crossed a line between wild animals and humans that should never be crossed. This is a line so many other touchy-feely ‘nature’ and ‘wildlife’ films cross – see The March of the Penguins and you’ll have a prime example. As such, Grizzly Man isn’t about grizzlies, but about people who cross that line – who naively or willfully misunderstand nature for their own misguided reasons, to serve their own dysfunctional needs.

Passed: King Kong (1933), Jurrasic Park (1993).
Koert van Mensvoort
on 24/12/10 Comments »
Tags
- Anthropomorphobia | Image-Consumption | manufactured-landscapes | Recreation | Suburban Utopia
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Nature is an Agreement

Nature is an agreement. Just like the nude beach. Here you keep your breasts and your crotch covered, There you drop everything and act like it is the most ordinary thing in the world that everyone is suddenly walking around naked. That is also how we deal with nature nowadays. We make an agreement with each other that this or that piece of the country is ‘nature’, and put a sign next to it and a fence around it.

By TRACY METZ

Nature itself must of course stick to this agreement – no thorns, please, no bites and certainly no flooding! – and it must stick to the budget. After all, we have invested a lot of time and money in making nature.

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Tracy Metz
on 08/12/10 Comments »
Tags
- Biomimicmarketing | Image-Consumption | manufactured-landscapes | Recreation | Suburban Utopia
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Onion Pill

Since the intake of medicines has become a mundane ritual nowadays, why not naturalize the interface? French artist Mathieu Lehanneur is rethinking the pill-person interface in daring new ways.

The idea of his Onion Pill medication, is to remove leaves off the product in the same way as one would peel an onion. The patient consumes one layer per day, starting with the darkest and progressing to the lightest until he arrives at the center where the final “recovery” capsule is found.” “Hooray!” says this design. “You’ve made it.”
Koert van Mensvoort
on 07/12/10 1 Comment »
Tags
- Humane-Technology | Hypernature | Image-Consumption | Suburban Utopia
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<a href="http://www.vimeo.com/17131671">http://www.vimeo.com/17131671</a>
Polar ice gone in two days

You have only two days left to purchase your own piece of history at the MyPolarIce store in Amsterdam and express the value the polar caps have for you – in real money. €24,95 to be exactly (approx. $33 for our american readers). Bring the heated debate back home and let your unique chunk of polar ice hybernate in your freezer, to pass it on to future generations.
Hendrik-Jan Grievink
on 04/12/10 1 Comment »
Tags
- Biomimicmarketing | Biopolitics | Global-Image-Economy | Image-Consumption | Made-to-debate
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Lets grow an Avatar Forest

After making the successful and popular movie Avatar (2009), James Cameron started the Avatar Home Tree Initiative. This initiative consists of building “Avatar” forests on 17 places on Earth in collaboration with local organizations. Among these places are the USA, Sweden, Brazil, Spain, The Netherlands and the UK. Totally there will be 1 million trees planted.

With this initiative the line between nature and fiction becomes increasingly vague. Of course we aren’t new to the recreation of nature. Like in the Dutch Oostvaardersplassen, where we recreated a 3000 year old landscape. But rather than recreating an ecology we believe existed some thousand years ago, the Avatar woods are about creating an environment after images rendered in a science fiction movie.

In The Netherlands the initiative is an collaboration between Twentieth Century Fox, the Dutch National Forestry Commission and the foundation wAarde (Worth Earth). The main objective of this particular project is to give nature back to today’s youth, as otherwise it wouldn’t be part of their lives anymore, except through video games and movies like Avatar. In the Avatar forests, the youth will experience nature as they know it from the movie and might be tangled by it. It will be a strange paradox of reality.

Of course the idea of creating new forests to create a more healthy environment is never a bad idea, and by using a popular movie to get attention for it, is just logical. But what will be next? Maybe Blizzard Entertainment could start creating World of Warcraft like area’s, to get their players to go outside and experience ‘nature’.
Ruben Daas
on 29/11/10 Comments »
Tags
- Hypernature | Image-Consumption | manufactured-landscapes | Recreation | Suburban Utopia
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Polar Ice for sale

Original pieces of polar ice will be sold in a shop in Amsterdam from this Friday the 25th. MyPolarIce is a venture led by Coralie Vogelaar and Teun Castelein. They went to the northern part of Greenland to harvest some of the finest polar ice still available. The pieces of ice were extracted from the Sermeq Kujalleg glacier, and were put on transport to Amsterdam

Starting from November 26th till December 5th your are invited to get your piece. It is the chance of a lifetime to obtain a frozen relic from the last ice age.
A piece of polar ice will cost 24.95 euros, but if the stock rapidly diminish prices may rise. A fixed amount of 1000 pieces is for sale, each numbered and a certificate of authenticity is attached. The pieces are packed in special capsule-shaped containers. This packaging ensures that the ice remains frozen up to three hours outside a freezer.

The goal of MyPolarIce is to sell the pieces to people that cherish and preserve it, to let the ice hybernate in the freezer for better times to come. Like a piece of Berlin Wall reminds of a past era in history, would a piece of polar ice in your fridge remind you – in some future – of the period in the geological history of the earth, when we still had the ice caps? This project leaves room for the argument that we maybe should update our five strategies of biomimicmarketing with a sixth strategy: the presentation and exploitation of nature as a scarce commodity.

MyPolarIce store
From 27 November till 5 December.
Museum square, next to the pond
Opening 26 November at 17:00
www.mypolarice.com
Rolf Coppens
on 26/11/10 2 Comments »
Tags
- Biomimicmarketing | Green Blues | Hypernature | Image-Consumption
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<a href="http://www.vimeo.com/16113717">http://www.vimeo.com/16113717</a>
In Pursuit of Artificial Flavoring

Following in the footsteps of a Marco Polo-esque spice trade, next nature explorers Jon Cohrs and Ryan Van Luit travel by canoe past massive cargo ships and factories in search of the numerous artificial flavoring factories of New Jersey, the flavoring capital of the U.S. During a two-week industrial wilderness trip, they interview factory employees, document our campsites and adventures, and cook with various artificial flavors in an attempt to bridge our understanding of the natural and artificial.

More at www.thespicetradeexpedition.com. Thanks Jon Moolaem.
Koert van Mensvoort
on 14/11/10 1 Comment »
Tags
- Biomimicmarketing | Food Technology | Hypernature | Hyperreality | Image-Consumption | Suburban Utopia | Supermarket
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Milk comes from Bottles

Milk is good for you and we all should drink lots of it. Common knowledge so far, but do you actually know where milk comes from? Supermarket? Factories? Luckily this milk packaging provides you with the correct answer: Milk comes from Bottles. Peculiar image of the week (Sorry for the crappy image quality).

Via SuperdeBoer. Thanks Mark, Dennis.
Koert van Mensvoort
on 13/11/10 Comments »
Tags
- Image-Consumption | Progressive Nostalgia | Suburban Utopia | Supermarket
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Essay: From Main Street to the Mansion: Disney, Playboy and the Next Nature of Sex and Death

Nature demanded that we make a choice between immortality and sex, but the Next Nature of the 21st century may not. For help, we can look back to the 20th Century, which had many storytellers playing with the parameters of the sex equals death equation. None were more successful than two young men from the Midwest who ended up here in Southern California, making their dreams in to reality which Los Angeles always promises, but rarely delivers. Walt Disney and Hugh Hefner, who seem miles apart, are in fact two sides of the same coin, flipping to decide what the Next Nature of sex and death will be.

By PETER LUNENFELD

Life itself had a choice to make early on. Would life choose unchanging immortality, or infinite mutability punctuated by death and rebirth? Though single-celled organisms are still around, life in its wisdom abandoned self-replication and embraced sex, the intertwining of individuals to produce different offspring, which adapt to their environments, and grow into their own sexual maturity to repeat the process. In other words, life would rather fuck and evolve than endure the stasis of immortality. Life traded sex for death, and we are all the better for it.

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Peter Lunenfeld
on 08/11/10 2 Comments »
Tags
- Anthropomorphobia | Designed-by-Evolution | Hypernature | Image-Consumption | Manufactured-Bodies | Suburban Utopia
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Manko & The Invitation [#3]

Last month we discussed how the vacuum played a big role in Manko’s life since he lost his right leg. Soon he developed this idea further, beyond the mere notion of extensions into more abstract notions of what a vacuum is, as we saw in the earlier discussed works ‘Zebra2′ and his later work ‘KM3′. The copyright issues made Manko feel betrayed by the old art regime that did not seem to know how to deal with virtual artworks. There would not be a lot of time to make art while dealing with the various pending court cases.

Then, one rainy day in November, Manko received an invitation at his Paris apartment from a mysterious person simply called ‘O’. The invitation was printed on an ultra-thin sheet of paper that felt like it would crumble in his hands yet proved rather strong. At the top of it was an embossed red geometrical ‘O’ and it had a watermark on it of something that looked like a molecular structure. The invitation read as follows: “Dear Mr. Manko, Your artistic work has come to our attention and we would like you to consider joining our laboratory to work on an innovative project with us. We think you have the relevant mindset we need to complete our team. If you accept this invitation, please flush it down your toilet and we’ll be in touch with you soon. Yours sincerely, ‘O’.”

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Aston Revola
on 31/10/10 1 Comment »
Tags
- Hyperreality | Image-Consumption | Manko | virtual-for-real
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Augmented Reality Maps

Since a few years the internet in combination with mobile phone technology brought us something that we refer to as augmented reality: A digital projection that is placed over imagery of the existing environment to create a whole new world on the screen.

Earlier this year Microsoft Bing-Maps architect Blaise Aguera y Arcas showed how augmented reality features can be added to digital world maps. Including streaming video. This means that when you switch to the streetview mode you get to watch live video streams, at least when someone is broadcasting there at that moment. It’s also possible to see older footage that has been put in place with geographic photography techniques so ‘video time travel’ becomes an option.

As many mobile devices already support photo and video, we can anticipate digital maps to become “live” within some years. This reminds us of the ultimate sonar system from ‘Batman: The Dark Knight’. And like the sonar system from the movie we can ponder on the ethical implications of a system that records half of the world. Will it add a whole new perspective or simply turn every camera phone into a potential security camera? The Big Augmented Reality Maps Brother is watching you!
Michael Kluver
on 30/09/10 Comments »
Tags
- Digital-Presence | Image-Consumption | Organized-Networks | Suburban Utopia | Technorhetoric | Wild-systems
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Bad Panda

Biomimicmarketing wars: While the WWF has worked for years to market the Panda as a vulnerable, cute and cuddly animal, the Egyptian cheese brand Panda needs only five commercials to turn the image of the panda into that of a crude, violent, intolerable beast.

We would call the readers of this blog with first hand experiences of Panda’s, to report which ‘Panda image’ is the correct one, however we anticipate not many readers ever encountered a panda in real life, no? Zoo’s don’t count!
Koert van Mensvoort
on 28/09/10 3 Comments »
Tags
- Biomimicmarketing | Image-Consumption | Manufactured Animals
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Glamor & Oil

In response to the latest oil spill famed photographer Steven Meisel made a shoot for the Italian Vogue (the only fashion magazine in the world worth reading, really) that replaces the tragically accustomed oil-soaked birds with a top model Kristen McMenamy withering away wearing black feathered outfits. Poor girls birds.

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Koert van Mensvoort
on 24/09/10 Comments »
Tags
- Anthropomorphobia | Biomimicmarketing | Image-Consumption | Manufactured Animals | Manufactured-Bodies | manufactured-landscapes | Suburban Utopia
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Nature Preservation: The Literal Version

* warning: high doses of irony detected in this article *

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Minke Kampman
on 10/09/10 Comments »
Tags
- Biomimicmarketing | Fake-nature | Image-Consumption | Recreation
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Spot of the Month: Arbor Artificialis Naturalis

Our first spot of the month was made by Tijn Kooijmans, who pinpointed the first Dutch Arbor Artificialis Naturalis planted in 1999 by telecom provider Libertel.

You too can share your favorite and most peculiar nextnature spots in your surroundings via our nextnature spotter for iPhone. Who knows your submission will be the spot of the month someday which means fame & goodies. Congratulations Tijn, T-shirt and DVD are coming your way.
NextNature.net
on 06/09/10 1 Comment »
Tags
- Biomimicmarketing | Image-Consumption | manufactured-landscapes | Officegarden | Recreation | Technorhetoric
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MANKO & Plagiarism [#1]

In this first review of the works of Manko, we’ll discuss the complex sorts of plagiarism in Augmented Reality art that are typical for our contemporary art scene. This introduces a relevant clue to the later demise of Manko.

By ASTON REVOLA, Paris 21-08-20, for NextNature.net

Last year, in May, Manko released an artistic Augmented Reality (AR) application that showed what the missing arms, legs and even heads of some of the most famous sculptures in art history were supposed to look like. Based on artist sketchbooks he remodeled them in 3D and with the use of the new contact lenses of the museum, visitors could now see the whole picture. It was a huge success and soon enough Manko licensed others to remix these virtual body parts he designed. One of the best remixes was actually done by Manko himself, where he transposed the arms of Milo’s Venus onto Dali’s version, making the arms move and search all the drawers in her chest, frantically and endlessly.

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Aston Revola
on 21/08/10 2 Comments »
Tags
- Hyperreality | Image-Consumption | Manko | transparant-interfaces | virtual-for-real
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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.

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Koert van Mensvoort
on 15/08/10 1 Comment »
Tags
- Designed-by-Evolution | Hyperreality | Image-Consumption | Officegarden | Progressive Nostalgia | virtual-for-real
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