Subway Beach
What would a caveman make of this optical illusion? He might simply conclude we are living in a Society of Simulations. Peculiar image of the week.
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 ‘Society of Simulations’
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Next Nature TEDx Talk in Budapest
Indulge in the updated Next Nature lecture Koert van Mensvoort gave at the TEDxDanubai event in Budapest. Want more? Get our iPad appzine or book.
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Out of Network
When we type “Flickr” or “Facebook” or “YouTube” into a browser, we seek to enter social networks and enjoy secure communication and interaction with a vast number of online users from around the world. Most of us take for granted that these words are understood by others in the same way. But what if rather than type these words on a keyboard we paint them on the walls of slums in Mali, Cambodia or Vietnam. Their meanings would certainly change.
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A €1,174 Chicken Coop for the Bourgeois Farmer
Long for farm-fresh eggs on the table? Dream about going to bed each night worrying about racoons, rats and foxes? Like the feeling of scraping chicken shit off your hands? For the low price of €1,174, upscale cooking supplier Williams-Sonoma will furnish you with a rustic chicken coop for your backyard flock.
Like children’s playhouses, the complete line of Williams-Sonoma chicken coops enable suburbanites and weekend warriors to enact deeply emotional fantasies – except here, they’re not fantasies of princely wealth or futuristic space exploration, but of preindustrial simplicity. Most fantasies are aggrandizing. The bourgeois farmer’s fantasy is one of humility, of dirt and labor. And as with all fantasies, this one is only loosely grounded in fact.
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Browsing the Technological Sublime
In God’s Browser, Geert Mul uses scores of images pulled from the internet as the frames in an abstract film. Using specially developed image recognition software, Mul creates the illusion of motion between unrelated images. The same software also generates musical notes that vary with the speed and type of the image being displayed.
The result is a hypnotic experience that blends pictures of nature, culture, sunsets, skeletons and supermodels into a portrait of humanity’s collective visual consciousness. The visual power of God’s Browser emphasizes that, in an image-saturated society, the simulation can become just as valuable and meaningful as the “authentic” object. Mul’s work looks, and sounds, like the creation of a virtual world, where God could only connect to the universe from the internet.
Geert Mul will be presenting God’s Brower at the Next Nature Power Show in collaboration with philosopher Jos de Mul. Jos de Mul has previously been featured on Next Nature with his essay The Technological Sublime.
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The Hollywood Megamercial
Baudrillard wrote that, “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas Los Angeles [is] no longer real, but belongs to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation.” (Simulacra & Simulation, 1994).
This movieclip of the shoe brand DC is like the Disneyland for adolescent males and takes the whole idea of a commercial to another level. A new genre is presented here, situated in the Simulacra County of Universal Studios: the Megamercial.
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Essay: Next Nature Services
Intentionality separates culture from nature. A dog is intentional, a fox is not; a park is intentional, a forest is not. Since trash, ruined buildings, and automated computer programs are unintentional, they are also a type of nature. Nature provides human society with valuable ‘ecosystem services’ such as water purification or erosion control. Next nature provides ecosystem services of its own, although they might not be what we expect.
BY BAS HARING
2010 was the International Year of Biodiversity. The United Nations introduced the concept as a way to draw attention to the decline of nature. Advocating on nature’s behalf, a relatively new argument emerged, ‘ecosystem services’: useful things nature does, unbeknownst to us. Forests filter dust from the air, scrub prevents erosion, and insects pollinate our crops. Incidentally, nature provides us with services that would otherwise have cost a fortune. Leaving aside the question of where they could be purchased. Is it conceivable that one day there will be next nature services, delivered in passing and unintentionally by new, future ecologies?
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Michael Najjar – High Altitude
The rock formations in the High Altitude photo series don’t exist physically, yet they are very present in our society of simulations. The photos visualize the development of the leading global stock market indices over the past 20-30 years.
Each stock market index, such as the Dow Jones (shown above), Nikkei, Nasdaq or the more specific Lehman Brothers stock quote downfall, corresponds to a impeccably rendered unique mountain range. Photographer Michael Najjar used the images captured during his trek to Mount Aconcagua (6,962m) as the basis of the high altitude data visualizations.
Lehman 92-08
