Microbic Landscapes
Beautiful Google Maps shots of housing projects in southwest Florida. Probably designed to look and feel more natural than your average straight street neighborhood, they remind me of microbes under a microscope.
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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 ‘manufactured-landscapes’
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A Clear Sky
Remember the beginning of 2010, when the Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupted, throwing huge amounts of ash into the air, thousands of flights have been canceled across Europe due to fears that ash could turn into molten glass within a hot jet engine, crippling the aircraft. This picture was taken during and after the flight ban at the same location. Via
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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 Landscapes
Quoted in a recent interview about his work, Landscapes without Memory, artist Joan Fontcuberta asked, “Could a natural nature exist? The answer is no, or at least, not anymore: man’s presence makes nature artificial.”
Often concerned with the ambiguity of truth, reality and virtuality Fontcuberta’s latest exhibition at photogallery Foam in Amsterdam consists of an expansive series of dramatic 3D landscapes. On first glance the images resemble something like eerie, almost empty Lord of the Rings stills. These aren’t photos but rather images produced by Fontcuberta using software developed for the U.S Air Force.
Originally cartographical data was fed into the programme to produce 3D landscape images, Fontcuberta however, fed the programme visual data – images from great masters like Gauguin, Van Gogh, Cezanne and Turner – producing entirely unique 3D landscapes. (The image above was originally a Pollock). “The representation of nature no longer depends on the direct experience of reality, but on the interpretation of previous images, on representations that already exist. Reality does not precede our experience, but instead it results from intellectual construction.”
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Next Nature Movie #3: Koyaanisqatsi
Koyaanisqatsi (1982) is a film with no actors, no storyline, and no dialogue. The only things we see are landscapes, images of cities, and people going about their regular lives. The film opens on ancient native American cave drawings, while the soundtrack chants “Koyaanisqatsi” which is a Hopi indian term for “life out of balance”.
Koyaanisqatsi uses extensive time lapse and slow motion photography. In one of the first scenes, we see cloud formations moving (speeded up) intercut with a montage of ocean waves (slowed down) and in such a way we are able to see the similarities of movement between these natural forces. It is not long before the pristine images are replaced by nuclear power plants, highways, skyscrapers, rubble, fire and ash, and hoards of ant-like beings (humans, of course) scurrying through modern urbanity. The portrayed humans are making their way through the cities in a manner that seems more conditioned than voluntary.
By cramming together so many images of people behaving more like lab rats than higher, thinking beings, Koyaanisqatsi invites us to consider just how mechanized, depersonalized, and out-of-control many aspects of our modern lives are.
Although many critics have interpreted the film as a tirade and a call to action, it is better understood as a demand for awareness on the human position on our planet as catalysts of evolution. If we get better attuned to our job description in the larger scheme of things, we can perhaps moderate Koyaanisqatsi and obtain a finer balance between the old nature we originate from, and the next nature we are causing.
Passed: Baraka (1992), Manufactured Landscapes (2006)
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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).
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Next Nature Movie #6: The Matrix
In the last few decades there have been numerous films that take the struggle between mankind and its increasingly intelligent and autonomous technology as a leitmotif. Ranging from Stanley Kubriks magnificent artwork Space Oddysee 2001 (1968), which is better defined as a posthuman than a nextnature film, to Disney’s cartoonish Tron (1982), to the Terminator series (1984, 1991, 2003).
The notion of technology becoming competitive with the people who created it, is clearly a thankful movie subject. Pity though, the issue is always projected in the future – at distance from our everyday lives – as this limits the opportunity to reflect upon the co-evolutionary state people and technology have been caught up for a long time already.
Apparently this is a movie law difficult to get around, and one that directors Andy and Larry Wachowski willingly accept. Yet they do something brilliant. They have a philosophical idea that they want to get out, but they are aware their idea is difficult to sell. If they had made it too explicit their movie would have been an art house film, or a giant flop. So they took their idea and wrapped it up in a sci-fi story, in an action packed blockbuster.
The subtle premises of The Matrix (1999), is that the people subjected by the machines aren’t aware of the artificial intelligence that is ruling their lives. Like the prisoners in Plato’s Cave they’re blind to the simulation drawn before their eyes – a situation only stirred up with the arrival of the manga style dressed Christ–like savior Thomas Anderson, aka Neo, aka The One, played by a perfectly casted Keanu Reeves. Postmodernity in the overdrive? That’s not giving enough credit.
Through their syncretic cocktail of ingredients from western and non-western philosophy (*), art and religion, the Wachowski brothers manage to achieve exactly what they want. Like a Trojan horse, they’ve planted something into your mind, the seed of doubt, even if you have no idea it’s there, yet it’s there. That voice in the back of your mind that something is wrong. That feeling you got left with after seeing the movie that it wasn’t just about computers and artificial intelligence but about something else, something more important, something you’re familiar with but just can’t put your finger on.
The Matrix is a philosophical film that has cut through an entire generation, which now thinks differently about the technology in their surroundings than any generation before them. They’re aware that there may never be a day that technology awakes, becomes conscious and – politely or impolitely – introduces itself to us. They’re aware that this doesn’t withstand that technology is a strong all-pervasive force in our lives: A force that is not only driven by us, but in turn, also drives us. What is the Matrix, you ask? Something closer to reality than you think.
(*) Prior to the start of the filming the Wachowski brothers required the principal actors of the film to read three books: ‘Simulacra and Simulations’, by Jean Baudrillard, ‘Out of Control’ by Kevin Kelly, and ‘Introducing Evolutionary Psychology’ by Dylan Evans.
Passed: Alphaville (1965), Space Oddysee 2001 (1968), Tron (1982), Tetsuo the Iron Man (1989), Terminator 2 (1991), Ghost in the Shell (1995), Technocalyps (2006).
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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).
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Next Nature Movie #8: Avatar
At first sight James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar (2009) is no more than a spectacularly rendered version of the classical Pocahontas story. We could criticize its keenly calculated ambition to please everyone, the hammy dialogs, its thinly veiled ecological message, or the somewhat bizarre spirituality in its second half. But we choose not to. Avatar is an important film and there is more than meets the eye through the 3D goggles.
To begin with, the film familiarizes us with the beauty of hypernatural landscape even the most advanced geneticist wouldn’t dare to dream of. Similar to the landscape painters of the 17th century that taught us to appreciate an untainted landscape, Avatar presents us with flora and fauna that shine with the bioluminescence of a thousand deep sea critters, interactive plants and trees that dwarf the Empire State Building. Fantasy? Escapism? Sure, but it nonetheless mentally prepares us for some of the things scientists are working on today.
Avatar is the kind of movie that, in retrospect, could become an icon of a shifting zeitgeist. Since Avatar, people will not instantly think you’ve lost your mind when you’re speaking about the interconnectedness of trees & plants in a forest as a sort of biological Internet – thus leveling the biosphere with the noosphere.
EMANCIPATION OF THE VIRTIVIDUAL
More importantly, Avatar puts the emancipation of the virtividual on the societal agenda. Its main character is Jake Sully, is an ex-marine, bound to a wheel chair, who seeks to make a fresh start on the moon Pandora. The moon has a military run mining colony – humans are playing the role of the aliens for a change – and Sully is asked to go under cover as a member of the local Na’vi species, to learn their secrets and give the humans an advantage. If successful, Sully will get his legs back.
Admitted, the technological premises of the film is altogether unfeasible and many have criticized Cameron’s blockbuster for the lacking of a sound description of the virtual technology employed to transfer the handicapped Sully onto a healthy Na’vi donor body. Yet, this is beside the point: which is that – although less sophisticated – we are living in a society where people are constantly creating avatars for themselves to participate in games, online platforms and social networks and that, so this movie shows us, the use of avatars has radical implications for our sense of identity, community and moral judgment. As Sully becomes part of the Na’vi community and embodies their sensibilities he soon starts to feel differently about his assignment. Lesson learned: Avatars aren’t neutral.
Presumably, our society has still a long way to go before the emancipation of the virtividual is complete. When will we cease to think in terms of borders between the virtual and the real? Will the virtividual one day claim its basic rights? Will society be forced to grant rights to someone’s virtual identity? And will we look back at Avatar as an important film that forecasted this situation? Perhaps.
Passed: eXistenZ (1999). Thanks to Tom Kniesmeijer.
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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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Tree Hugger
While driving on the highway, I saw a tree. Our peculiar image of the week was spotted by Arnoud van den Heuvel using the Next Nature Spotter iPhone app.
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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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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’.
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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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Floating City – Shimizu’s Dream
This speculative self-sufficient, carbon-negative floating city design by the Japanese Shimizu Coorporation immediately reminded me of the post-apocalyptic science fiction film Water World.
At first sight I couldn’t place its glamorous slickness, but then again, lets not forget this is just a rendering. If this structure is ever build, I anticipate it will look a lot rougher than the renderings. More like Water World or Mad Max. Just think of the unanticipated algae plagues and you’ll get my drift.
What we are looking at here, I believe, is the maakbaarheid utopia of 20th century modernism in a 21th century rendering sauce. Yet perhaps I am being too rough on Shimizu’s Dream, as there is one thing that must be applauded in the proposal. Its quality is not so much its climate neutral character, as much as its independence towards climate change: If the sea level rises, the city just floats along with it.
Hence, rather than fighting or stopping climate change the floating city proposal argues we should build habitats for ourselves that are flexible towards any climate changes that may occur. A wise approach, because after all, change happens.
Via DigiInfo.tv. Thanks Nils Egil Lie.
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Palmtree Drilling Platform
In our ‘under the beach lies the pavement’ series. Already in 1973, Steven M. Johnson drew cartoons of oil drilling platforms disguised to look like palm trees, in an attempt by oil companies to persuade the public they would bring no harm to the environment.
Now this cartoons show us three things: 1) How we like to recreate our environment according to our image of nature. 2) How truly sophisticated technology becomes invisible, as it fluently integrates into the fabric of our environment. 3) That oil drilling technology isn’t very sophisticated.
Luckily the palmtree drilling platform is just a cartoon, just like these hilarious cell phone antenna trees… no wait, they are real.
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Medicinal All-Salt
Do you suffer from small health inconveniences and do you like to put salt on your morning egg? Why not combine the two? Medicinal All-Salt provides a low-dosage solution for things like headaches, depression and low libido. You refuse to pay insane amounts for birth control pills? Just season your dinner with the hand-harvested and sun dried salt. Or make it yourself for that matter. Via the site of All-Salt you can find a small guide that will help you to create your own medicinal salt out of the waste-water of your local water treatment plant.
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Constellation
No this is not some stellar system far away. What is it then? Lets make another picture, this time with the flashlight on…
