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.
The comparison graphics are a bit dull after a while, but I think this video illustrates how people deal with the forces of Next Nature; If we want to understand why managers, directors, institutes and corporations exist, probably a good old–nature safari will be able to teach us: to protect what is yours and survival of the fittest. The corporate world is only the next wild system.
Managers nor directors were hurt during the making of this film.
Humans have domesticated animals for thousands of years. The earliest known evidence of a domesticated dog is a jawbone found in a cave in Iraq and dated to about 12,000 years ago (it differs from a wolf in that it has been bred to have a smaller jaw and teeth).
Through history cats and dogs have been living together with people for mutual benefit; dogs helped hunting pray or guard the domains and cats were held as a form of pest control. In return humans offered shelter and in terms of survival, many species that have developed a relationship with man have far outstripped their wild cousins.
Now there is an interesting biomimicmarketing technique we had not seen before. For their new marketing campaign internet security company Messagelabs worked with digital artist Alex Dragulescu to graphically show what cyber threats actually look like. The images are generated from the actual code from each of the threats.
Second Skin takes an intimate look at computer gamers whose lives have been transformed by the emerging genre of Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs). World of Warcraft, Second Life, and Everquest allow millions of users to simultaneously interact in virtual spaces. Second Skin introduces us to couples who have fallen in love without meeting, disabled players who have found new purpose, addicts, Chinese gold-farming sweatshop workers, wealthy online entrepreneurs and legendary guild leaders – all living in a world that doesn’t quite exist.
Lecture this Friday on Next Nature by Mieke Gerritzen at Lift conference in Geneva, Switzerland. Expect wild trees, wild beaches, wild animals, wild implants and wild corporations.
Now that we’ve recognized the internet as a living entity, we can begin to wonder what the internet is thinking of. Would it be possible to communicate? Ask questions? Read its thoughts?
Suddenly I found my self wondering what presidential elect the internet has in mind and decided to conduct some research. The statistics above show the web traffic on the sites of the various president elects in the last two months. It is quite striking that the websites of the two democratic candidates generate much more web traffic than the republicans sites and that Barack Obama alone generates more traffic than all the other candidates together.
Surely, this is no guarantee that mister Obama will become the next president of the United States; the data only shows that the Internet has ‘Barack on its mind’. The whole thing is a bit like the ancient Greek oracles. Luckily it is almost Super Tuesday.
View the detailed graph at Alexa.
No, this isn’t the newest picture of some star system or nebula taken by Hubble telescope in deep space. This is a map of the internet. It might not be of much use since it is already quite old. It was taken on 15 January 2006 and the internet has grown and changed dramatically since that date -I guess it wants to live and grow and be happy just like you?
In 2008, for the first time in history, more than half of the world’s population will be living in towns and cities. By 2030 this number will swell to almost 5 billion, with urban growth concentrated in Africa and Asia.Nobuo Takahashi’s video “Musashino Plateau” shows how Japan’s landscape changed during the postwar period of rapid economic growth. The animations begin slowly with the early postwar recovery years, but the pace quickens to a frenzy as explosive growth during the bubble years (late-80s/early-90s) transforms the cityscape into a chaotic, tightly packed jumble of single-family homes, large apartment complexes and high-rise buildings. In the end, development grinds to a halt with the collapse of the bubble. Via Pinktentacle.
Somehow next nature seems to reveal itself through furniture. Earlier we’ve featured the treetrunk bench, the bone chair, the folding chair, sketch furniture and how to grow a chair.
While the masses are still satisfied with a table made of some old oak or a tree from the rain forest, some people just want something more refined. Especially for those style freaks; here is a table created out of 150 bonsai trees. All trees are hand-cut and assembled by wood-on-wood connections. Only the finest cultivated wood is used in this table created by Amsterdam based designer Anke Weiss.
A peer-to-peer conduit? Now thats a peculiar image! See also: Google Manhole.
By ALEX WRIGHT, Published in NY Times December 2, 2007
The growing popularity of social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Second Life has thrust many of us into a new world where we make “friends” with people we barely know, scrawl messages on each other’s walls and project our identities using totem-like visual symbols.
We’re making up the rules as we go. But is this world as new as it seems?
Academic researchers are starting to examine that question by taking an unusual tack: exploring the parallels between online social networks and tribal societies. In the collective patter of profile-surfing, messaging and “friending,” they see the resurgence of ancient patterns of oral communication.
“Orality is the base of all human experience,” says Lance Strate, a communications professor at Fordham University and devoted MySpace user. He says he is convinced that the popularity of social networks stems from their appeal to deep-seated, prehistoric patterns of human communication. “We evolved with speech,” he says. “We didn’t evolve with writing.”
What you are looking at, is the logo of perhaps the (in idea) biggest competitor on the search-engine market. It is beta-testing right now, but its demo video looks promising. Why this post at NextNature? Because website-technology will in future come to “feel” more natural, or at least grow to be more humane. This is one of those steps.
trueknowledge.com | Related posts: Brain-computer interface | Big-Ass Browser | Surfing the marble
New media technology from South Korea: a gigantic human displaycompiled from supporters cheering their soccer teams. One pixel per supporter.
See also: Skyscreen, A4 e-paper.
First we had the internet. We stored all our texts and images in databases. Then came search engines to locate the data. Now is the time to interconnect it all; to share knowledge and make deep content accessible in blinks of an eye. Even your daily weblog and flickr-photoalbum will not be safe from this monster of content. It is said to be screen-independent, without pop-ups, just zooms.
“Metaverse” is one database of collective memory. It is made possible in the M*soft project: Seadragon, combining Photosynth-technology and Deepfish-zoom. Seadragon is to be launched in February 2008.
My guess: When this exploring-software becomes integrated with live experience, all it takes is one Timeline to browse the Metaverse history. And when that happens, predicting the future should be piece of pie! (the url already seems to be incorporated)
TED Talk by Blaise Aguera | labs.live.com | Related posts: Surface Computing Parody | The world is not a desktop
In the 1960s, Dr. Peter Witt gave drugs to spiders and observed their effects on web building. Meet the cocaine, LSD, and the crack spider. Corny Alert!
