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Ecomedia
How the Natural World is Transforming the Nature of Media.
This weblog is not the usual blog of daily events. It contains a series of notes/thoughts designed to make connections between science and media art.
Sometimes these ideas are tied in with current events, but most of the time this blog is not in any particular order. It serves as a central area for a detailed examination of ideas first published in a 1999 Leonardo Journal article entitled 'Active Vision' that I hope to develop into a book that will discuss some of the current developments in science, ecology, media and society and how they inform and are informed by new technologies. The book will be written for artists working with digital media and anyone who is interested in future directions of the medium.
http://www.andreapolli.com
last modified Sep 7, 2006 at 13:00
Imagine standing in the produce section of the grocery store, taking an inexpensive wireless device the size of a cell phone out of your pocket and scanning a head of lettuce for a genetic barcode telling you not only the species but the details of any genetic modification.
Imagine taking a walk through the Brooklyn botanic garden, the Bronx Zoo or your neighborhood with the same device, and once receiving a species name, being able to surf the web for detailed information about the background of the particular plant or creature.
Biologists Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs are working to make this imaginary device a reality in the next 10-20 years. The process will require not only building the device hardware, but finding a small sequence of identifying genetic code that the device will focus on. They have already identified this gene in a groups of butterfly species, called cytochrome c oxidase 1 or CO1.
Janzen and Hallwachs believe that widespread public access to dna barcoding will promote biological literacy and promote conservation. They believe that when people know the name, in this case a species name, of a plant or animal, a connection is formed that fosters appreciation and preservation.
For this reason, a third element must be developed for dna barcoding to be effective, a vast database of identifying genes and species information that can be accessible with the system. The scientists imagine a small piece of media, a species 'chip' that might be put in the device when identifying various species, one might have an 'ant chip' for example, or the botanical garden might provide its own special seasonal chips.
This kind of democratic information database could be built by users, similar to wikipedia or the way the work of non-professional observers have contributed to astronomical understanding. Like amateur observers watch for and report comets, amateur biological observers could report species sightings to the dna barcode database and this informnation could then be verified and distributed.
The dna barcode could also become essential for tracking and responding to epidemics, with medical personnel able to quickly identify and isolate dengerous viruses.
From Holloway, Marguerite. "Democratizing Taxonomy" Conservation Magazine April-June 2006 Vol. 7 No. 2
"Therefore, O Painter, make your smaller figures merely indicated and not highly finished, otherwise you will produce effects opposite to nature, your supreme guide. The object is small by reason of the great distance between it and the eye; this great distance is filled with air, that mass of air forms a dense body which intervenes and prevents the eye from seeing the minute details of the objects". Leonardo da Vinci, "Six Books on Light and Shade."
Particles in the air affect our health, and also affect our ability to see distances. When light hits tiny particles in the air, the result is haze. Sunlight is partially absorbed by the particles partially scattered away, creating light reflections like a series of tiny mirrors and reducing visibility.
Haze is caused by particles from electric utilities and industrial fuel burning (coal, for example), manufacturing, and vehicles. Forest fires and dust also contribute to haze.
The worst haze is on the East coast of the United States and is primarily caused by power plants and other industries.
Due to haze caused by human factors, visibility in scenic areas has been substantially reduced. In the East, average visual range has decreased from 90 miles to 15-25 miles. In the West, visual range has decreased from 140 miles to 35-90 miles.
http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange1/current/lectures/samson/aerosols/
Heart disease is currently the leading cause of death for both men and women in the United States.
8 million American women are currently living with heart disease. 435,000 women have heart attacks each year, and 267,000 women die from those attacks. 43% of deaths in American women, or nearly 500,000, are caused by heart disease and stroke each year.
The age-adjusted rate of heart disease for African American women is 72% higher than for white women, while African American women ages 55-64 are twice as likely as white women to have a heart attack.
38% of women and 25% of men will die within one year of a first recognized heart attack. More women than men die of heart disease each year, but women also comprise only 25% of participants in all heart-related research studies.
Why do more women than men suffer from heart disease? Why is there such a disparity among women of different races? Results of a major study released this month linking particle pollution with heart disease in women may be part of the reason.
According to a rigorous University of Washington study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, women living in areas with higher levels of air pollution have a much greater risk of developing heart disease and dying from cardiovascular causes.
The most dramatic effect was seen with an increase in particulate pollution, tiny particles smaller than 2.5 microns (also known as PM2.5), many times smaller than the width of a human hair.
The risk posed by PM2.5 to women is much greater than previously believed, each increase of 10 micrograms per cubic meter there was a 24-percent increase in the risk of a cardiovascular event among the study subjects and a 76-percent rise in the risk of death.
The study showed, for example, that a woman living Birmingham, Ala., one of the smoggiest cities, would have roughly a 76% increased risk of dying from cardiovascular causes than someone living in Tucson, Ariz., which was among the cities with the cleanest air.
Prolonged exposure is a factor in reducing overall life expectancy by a few years and even short-term exposure is associated with increased risk of death caused by a heart attack or heartbeat irregularity.
Speculation as to why women seem to be more sensitive to these particles has to do with women having smaller blood vessels on average than men, making particles more likely to become trapped in the lungs or bloodstream.
Environmental racism may now explain why African American women are such greater risk of heart disease.
Resources
The national coalition for women with heart disease:
http://www.womenheart.org/information/women_and_heart_disease_fact_sheet.asp
Miller KA, Siscovick DS, Sheppard L, Shepherd K, Sullivan JH, Anderson GL, Kaufman JD. N Engl J Med 2007; 356:447-458. Available online: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/356/5/447?ijkey=2eeac663fe9da62089808800aa30cad1a3dfdac6
Dockery DW, Stone PH. Cardiovascular Risks from Fine Particulate Air Pollution. N Engl J Med 2007; 356:511-513. Available online: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/356/5/511
http://www.cleanairstandards.org/article/2007/02/717
http://www.netscape.com/viewstory/2007/02/01/study-claims-link-between-pollution-heart-disease/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.chron.com%2Fdisp%2Fstory.mpl%2Ffront%2F4516714.html&frame=true
http://130.80.29.3/disp/story.mpl/health/4516714.html
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/healthnews.php?newsid=62058
Scientists at the University of Rochester store an image of the college's logo on a photon. If true, it will completely revolutionize computing.
Read this:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9008999&intsrc=news_ts_head
and
http://www.techworld.com/storage/news/index.cfm?NewsID=7842
Found this on the Discovery Channel:
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2006/12/19/musicmap_tec.html?category=technology
Promoting a commercial use of the idea of 'soundmaps' where listeners navigate through their music collection (and presumably shared music collections too like limewire) using a joystick and flight simulator model.
Shane Brennan, an independent curator working with Rhizome has asked me to participate in an online exhibition called New Climates, I think he has an interesting methodology related to the ideas on this blog so I thought I would post a quote from one of his emails here:
"..The project entitled New Climates and will be an online exhibition of video art that addresses the topic of global climate change. It will draw together original artworks, research and conversations on the relationship between art, environmental issues and networked culture. This curatorial project, launching in the spring of 2007, will take the form of a dynamic video weblog.
..artists will be selected to create short web-videos responding to the pervasive discourse and images surrounding the climate change crisis. The original works may include animations, documentaries, personal testimonials, appropriations, text or image slideshows, or other techniques...
As a video weblog – which will hopefully reach a broad, heterogeneous audience of art- and non-art-world individuals – the exhibition will be distributed across both space and time: It may be accessed anywhere across the globe, and it will grow organically through a series of syndicated (RSS) posts over the course of several months. In this way, the theme of global climate change will intersect with the technology and language of global media. Just as the climate change debate is constantly shifting and evolving, this exhibition will remain transitive, flexible and open-ended."
Art, environmental issues and networked culture...you can be sure I'll be following developments on this project!
Here are some notes on other presentations:
Presentation by Charlotte Scott, who was inspired by the idea of acoustic community from Barry Truax and Raymond Williams' book 'The Country and the City' and did a study of the sound environment of Toronto Island, an archepelago of islands one kilometer from the city of Toronto and the effect of a nightclub 'The Docks' that was built on the island about ten years ago and just recently closed down.
Presentation by Kumi Kato about the soundscape experience of diving women of Japan, who for at least 1000 years have worked diving for abalone in the ocean.
Presentation by Lisa Gasior from Montreal speaking about recording the past in the neighborhood of Griffintown, an Anglophone/Irish community in Montreal. She's working on a recorded listening guide to the neighborhood, attempting to create a sound based guide that emphasizes listening to the actual environment rather than masking these sounds through the recordings. She talked about the idea of audio tourism and gave the example of Soundwalk audioguide for tourism that has been created for several neighborhoods in New York City.
Jim Barbour spoke of his experience as a child in Adelaide Australia listening to birds on the metal roof of his childhood home and how he had been fascinated with overhead sound ever since. It reminded me of being in the Sydney National Park, an incredible, huge park that at the time I was visiting was having some problems with flying foxes. Their name makes them seem much more benign, to me they were giant bats and there were hundreds of them taking over the trees in the park. They terrified me, in particular listening to their chatter and fluttering high overhead. Barbour gave an example of a cathedral with its huge, elevated ceilings and talked about his own preference for high ceilinged rooms.
Charles Fox presented an artist's approach to multi-channel recording and the art of immersive soundscapes, a project in Regina Canada. See http://www.uregina.ca/soundscapes for the call for next summer's project. He talked about his work with ambisonic microphone arrays or soundfield microphone arrays. He uses 6 omni-directional microphones in an array, facing out in a circle on tripods about 3 meters across, or a single tripod with 6 microphones mounted going into 3 DAT recorded, created a modular microphone array, 17cm across, approx the diameter of a human head. He also spoke about his interest in using new technologies to explore how animals communicate and about how important it is to be aware of the possibility of anthropomorphizing animal communication when making analyses. One of his projects, Speechless (2000), included a rich soundscape of animal sounds.
The Soundscape Association of Japan produced an important project called 100 Soundscapes of Japan and SAJ representative Keiki Torigoe. Torigoe talked about how for hundreds of years in Japan a popular tourist activity is going to particular places to listen to the soundscape. She showed several Japanese woodblock prints showing people engaged in this activity, including listening to crickets or the wind through pine trees in certain areas and listening to the sounds of different seasons, for example falling leaves in autumn.
She spoke about the importance of design in Japanese culture and how the field of design is transforming so that it is not only making something new but also preserving.
One very interesting example of a historical designed soundscape n Japan is called the Nightengale floor. This floor was created by a Japanese Lord who wanted to catch trespassers on his property. He designed a special floor made of wood with a series of hidden hinges and pulleys that would be impossible for anyone to walk on without making a sound. The sound the floor makes is like similar to the sound of a Nightengale, and even flexing one toe muscle creates a sharp chirping sound.
Dr. Michael Fowler talking about his project with Lawrence Harvey TEIMU, The Garden of Dreams, the aurality and acoustics of Japanese gardens. They visited a series of gardens in Tokyo and recorded using a multi-chanel microphone array. One garden in particular they visited was a rock garden or zen garden in Kyoto and was a garden that John Cage had visited and found very influential many years before. This garden is very quiet, almost silent, and Cage created a score based on the arrangements of the stones.
Like the composed nature of the visual, Fowler found that the soundscapes of these Japanese gardens are also very composed and wanted to study them to see if the composition of the soundscape of the gardens might inform architectural soundscape design.
The theme of the conference is 'The West meets the East: Physical, Spiritual and Post Colonial Perspectives'. One speaker brought up the question of a conference about post-colonialism being conducted in English, and expanding on that idea, Schafer talked about the symphony orchestra. He talked about how the materials of the instruments of the symphony are made of ivory, ebony, hard woods, gold and other materials obtained from conquered colonies, and that the music of the symphony is a demonstration of and celebration of the power and plundering of the West.
He spoke about how acoustic music brings life from death. Instruments are made from organic materials, like the bamboo flute that was played at the start the conference, or the wooden violin or animal skin drum. He lamented the loss of this organic quality in electronic music, and interestingly his statement was challenged by a member of the audience who said that when she plays the electric guitar in her studio, she is very aware of the electricity that she is using to create the sound, which comes directly from a hydroelectric plant near her home.
Schafer talked about how sound is 'sweetened' by distance and the pleasure of listening to sounds in the distance and how in urban areas both distant listening and distant viewing has become more rare. He quoted George Elliott who wrote of 'The roar on the other side of silence.' He believed she was talking about the new technologies of the time that were bringing unheard sounds to the forefront, for example the stethoscope. But Schafer wanted us to also consider the roar on the other side of silence as the noise that is harming our societies, both unintentionally and intentionally as in the case of noise used in the Iraq war to intentionally frighten and demoralize people.
Schafer talked about how it was necessary to develop a methodology of soundscape research as the years went by. He developed a series of terms with which to describe aspects of the soundscape. One of the most well-known terms is the 'keynote.' The keynote, like the key in music, is the sound that grounds all other sounds, but the keynote can be a sounds that is not consciously heard. He used the sound of electricity as an example and then paused for a minute. The audience because aware of hum of the stage lights, that was actually quite loud but not noticeable before Schafer brought it to our attention.
Schafer said that 'every sound commits suicide' meaning that every sound appears and then disappears. He spoke of the need for museums of sounds that have become extinct in our world. He talked about the limitations of the recording medium and 'impossible sounds' or sounds that cannot be recorded. One example he gave was the sound of a fire.
He also spoke about soundscape as an immersive phenomenon, without a center, or more accurately that the listener is always at the center of a soundscape, as opposed to a landscape that is seen from the outside.
A part of his talk I questioned was the idea of the 'phenomenological' recording, or a recording made without the presence of the recordist. He seemed to be saying that it was possible to create an objective recording, but I disagree. This prompted a discussion at lunch about Heidegger and soundwalks which highlight the presence of the body.
Two days ago I listened to R. Murray Schafer's keynote at the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology conference in Hirosaki Japan. Schafer is considered the father of the Acoustic Ecology movement, having started the World Soundscape project in the 1970's in Vancouver.
Schafer spoke about how in the 1960's he sent letters to all the most famous composers of the time, Stockhausen, Cage, etc. asking them one question: 'What is Music?' The only reply he received was from Cage, who told him that music is sound and recommended Schafer read Thoreau's Walden. There is one chapter in Walden devoted to sound that was very important to Schafer in the development of his ideas about the soundscape.
When he started thinking about soundscape research as a field of study, the sound of jet aircraft had just started and the mention of the term 'noise pollution' would draw laughter. At the time, the sound was considered what Schafer terms a 'sacred noise', in other words, a sound that is so dominant culturally that it is almost untouchable. In the middle ages the sacred sound was the sound of the church, which dominated the medieval soundscape. The church was so powerful both economically and politically that it was unthinkable to consider the sounds of the church as noise pollution. During the industrial revolution the sacred noise was the sound of factories, and in the 60's, according to Schafer, the sacred noise was the sound of technological progress, symbolised by the jet engine.
Today commercial sound, the sound of pop music and advertising that is ubiquitous in public spaces could be defined as a sacred noise in our corporate-dominated society.
One of my students, Heidi Boisvert, has put together a curriculum of Ecomedia for teens at the Bronx River Art Center. Classes are media arts projects related to the Bronx River Habitat and are doing Documentary Video, Game Design, Photography and Sound (sound taught by another student, Ricardo Arias). It looks like a great integration of media with the environment and is particularly interesting around the Bronx River habitat as a natural environment that is thriving despite its urban industrial surroundings.
As we stepped off the airtrain into terminal 1 at JFK airport we were met by two US military personnel in full uniform including M-16 rifles held across their bodies at a 45 degree angle. More were at the check in area, standing at attention next to TSA officials at a desk in front of a makeshift barrier restricting entrance to the security line. Next to them was a large trash can and sign indicating the ban on liquids and gels on the plane. As we walked past the desk, an agent was rattling off the restricted items "shampoo, hair spray, hair gel, mascara, lipgloss..." Chuck turned his head back "Chapstick?" "No, sticks are OK" I said and the agent repeated "sticks are fine" and waved us along.
In the Incheon airport in Seoul, it was surprising to find fewer security checks, we weren't staying in Korea, just making a transfer to Northern Japan, and there were no customs requirements or passport checks upon leaving the plane. We arrived at around 5 in the morning to an empty airport with nothing but a single coffee and sweet shop open, and we had several hours before our flight, so I started taking photos. The sun was just rising creating a grey blue mist outside the high sloping windows of the airport. The terminal was spotless and new modernist industrial with giant exposed pipes and granite tiled walls. The effect was of being under the belly of a giant blue whale skeleton, ribcage arching and sloping upwards away from the main corridor of food courts and shops. As I became more and more involved in taking photographs: the sloping ceilings, a pair of guards watching a soccer match on a flat screen television, blue mist on small hills behind a baby blue Korean Air jet, one of the sports fan guards came up to me gesturing and pointing. "No photographs?" I said. I had read recently about aggressive restrictions against photographs in North Korea, but didn't think it would be an issue in Seoul. I packed up, relieved that at least he hadn't asked for the memory card or camera.
As I stood on the moving sidewalk that cut down the corridor of gates and shops in the silence of the early morning airport, light streamed in from a long skylight above and cut in from the glass walls of the gate seating areas. Lavendar seats on granite blocks flanked tall sloping glass giving passengers a view of the runway and distant terminals. I stood gliding slowly listening to a soothing recorded voice intended to alert moving walkway passengers in three languages but at the moment lulling us into a kind of hypnotic calm, amplified by the vibrating hum of the machine walkway, massaging the bottoms of our feet and the palms of our hands. Looking up at the sloping ribbed ceiling, I thought of a Gothic cathedral, the majesty of elevation diverting attention to the heavens and wondered if the architect was trying to direct the attention of passengers in much the same way. I thought of visiting the Church of Santa Maria de Guadalupe in Mexico City, built on the exact spot at which Juan Diego received a visit from the Virgin. She provided him with proof of the visit in the form of an armful of flowers (some legends say roses). He wrapped them in his cloak, and when he presented the roses to the bishop, he was both amazed to see the flowers in the wrong season, and surprised to find an image of the virgin burned into the cloak that held them. Upon closer investigation, the image was found to be so detailed that the face of Juan Diego could be seen reflected in the eye of the saint.
The cloak has been preserved (to be honest, looking to me a lot like a mediocre painting) and is framed and placed in the basement of the most contemporary church of Guadalupe on the site. You see, the site itself turned out to not be an ideal site for building a large piece of architecture, and two previously built churches to Guadalupe have been sinking. The third and newest houses the miracle cloak, hanging above a modern altar. There is an hole in the floor behind the altar so visitors to the church can go into the church basement and look up at the framed image of the saint. Because there are so many visitors, the church put in a moving walkway in the basement, so as you pray, you glide along in a line of devoted followers.
Bioacoustics pioneer Bernie Krause spoke at The Ear to the Earth Festival a few weeks ago and presented a classification of the soundscape:
Geophony: The part of a soundscape formed by geographical features. Water (waterfalls, rain, mist), mountains (foehn winds, santa ana), desert (singing sand), tall buildings, all make up the Geophony of an area. Could be compared with Schafer's 'keynote'.
Biophony: The part of a soundscape formed by non-human animals. Crickets, birds (geese, loons, songbirds), coyotes, etc.
Anthrophony: Soundscape elements created by humans. This category is so large I might suggest the addition of a sub-category: Technophony, soundscape elements created by human technology, with a wide range of sounds from the subway in Taipei to JFK airport.
Dr. Krause also spoke about the 'density' of natural soundscapes and how sound density is an important indicator of the health of a natural environment, particularly in the case of the biophony. He said that animal species populate the sound spectrum of an environment in much the same way they populate its geography. When in an environment, animals thrive when they can position themselves in different bands of the sonic spectrum than other animals. When a particular frequency band is open, this provides an opportunity for an animal to come into an environment without sonic competition. Animals have difficulty surviving in areas where their particular frequency band is already occupied. Dr. Krause and other bioacousticians record the soundscape of a natural environment and analyze the sound density. This analysis can give a very good indication of the age and health of the natural community.
My collaborator on N,. Joe Gilmore, spoke at Ear to the Earth about the difficulties of finding pure randomness. Most of the time when computers generate randomness they are not creating true randomness (this is sometimes called 'pseudo-random'). The computer will use the seconds on the system clock for example. Sometimes casinos use atmospheric air pressure readings to determine random numbers, another reason I suppose there is such aggressive climate control on casino floors. The rate at which radiation decays is what is commonly considered a true random number. Joe used a geiger counter as a number generator for one of his sound works exploring true randomness.
New Zealand based sound artist Phil Dadson presented his work i n the Dry Valleys of Antarctica for Ear to the Earth and spoke about the valleys as the dryest place on Earth populated by microscopic 'extremophiles', a kind of algae that if lost could take over 50 years to re-generate. The strange geography of one part of the area has earned it the nickname 'Gaudi Valley.'
Interesting images of coffins from the Ga tribe designed to represent an aspect of a person's life:
http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/photo.day.php?ID=52081
Swiss artist Roman Keller has been working on a project called 'A Moral Equivalent of War' after a phrase used in a speech by former US president Jimmy Carter about a movement towards alternative energies. Keller and his associates are driving a panel from the famous solar panels Carter installed on the White House (located in Maine), across the US to Georgia. Along the way they are interviewing various people who were involved in the project, hoping to end with an interview with Carter himself.
http://www.moralequivalent.info/
A new 'Mother of the Forest' has been identified in a remote California forest. The redwood, named Hyperion, is now known as world’s tallest tree at 379.1 feet tall. Reported in the NYT today.
In the 1999 'Headmap Manifesto", Ben Russell described the future:
"Location aware, networked mobile devices make possible invisible notes attached to spaces, places, people and things.
Computer games move outside and get subversive.
Sex and love are easier to find.
Real space can be marked and demarcated invisibly.
What was once the sole preserve of builders, architects and engineers falls into the hands of everyone: the ability to shape and organize the real world and real space.
Real borders, boundaries and space become plastic and malleable, statehood becomes fragmented and global.
Geography gets interesting.
Cell phones become internet enabled and location aware, everything in the real world gets tracked, tagged, barcoded and mapped.
Overlaying everything is a whole new invisible layer of annotation. Textual, visual and audible information is available as you get close, as contxt dictates or when you ask."
http://www.headmap.org/book/get/headmap-manifesto.PDF
While looking at the skyline last night, lit at dusk (and happily the necklace lights on the bridge are back on!), I got to thinking about the origin of the materials that make up the buildings and provide their power. Limestone and other stone, formed by the buildup of calcium from the bones of millions of generations of vertebrates. Oil, the material that powers the city's illumination, was created from millions of years of plant and animal decomposition. The city has not only been built on top of millions of years of living things, but has been built out of the bones and bodies of these living organisms.
The buildings reach out into the sky, touching the clouds, looking as if they are striving to become a part of the atmosphere. But what is the atmosphere but another extension of the history of life on the planet? The composition of the atmosphere has been formed by the chemical and energy output of life on the planet over millions of years. The thin shell that sustains life, is actually an extension of life, a natural consequence of life co-dependent on it.
I just completed Gillian Fuller and Ross Hartley's fascinating and inspiring book 'Aviopolis: A Book About Airports' and wanted to post some initial responses:
First, ironically, while finishing the last couple of pages on the rooftop, I kept being distracted by a low flying helicopter. Since we are near the East River, a major artery for seaplanes and helicopters, and one of the bridge, a major artery for traffic that attracts traffic helicopters, it's not uncommon to see helicopters flying by, but this one was particularly annoying, in a stationary holding pattern above my head. I thought perhaps the pilot was reading the pages with high powered binoculars over my shoulder!
The most striking part of the book was the research outlining the growth of airports and air travel over the past 40 and 20 years. The current conflicts related to airport security versus individual freedoms seem to be necessary growing pains, trying to determine how to manage the movement of people on a vast scale. One proposed airpoprt in China is expected to serve approximately 80 million travelers per year.
Airports are defined in the book as 'metastable' entities, that is places that are constantly changing, where a constant state of instability is what is stable about the space. The authors chose to not define airports as static 'architecture' or geometry, but instead to compare them to dances, forms created by movement.
Significant space towards the end of the book is devoted oto the idea that airports transform space 'terraforming' land for a specific purpose. Several examples where land is actually created in a bay for the airport were cited including images of two runways in the Sydney airport, an airport in Japan and the new Schiphol airport planned in Amsterdam. The land created is compared to a miasma, a space that is neither land, ocean or sky but a space between all three.
Travelers are defined in a number of different ways, one of my favorite is identity through information: passport number, baggage allowance, departure time, etc. Instead of INdividuals, these segmented identities are called 'dividuals.
I just completed Gillian Fuller and Ross Hartley's fascinating and inspiring book 'Aviopolis: A Book About Airports' and wanted to post some initial responses:
First, ironically, while finishing the last couple of pages on the rooftop, I kept being distracted by a low flying helicopter. Since we are near the East River, a major artery for seaplanes and helicopters, and one of the bridge, a major artery for traffic that attracts traffic helicopters, it's not uncommon to see helicopters flying by, but this one was particularly annoying, in a stationary holding pattern above my head. I thought perhaps the pilot was reading the pages with high powered binoculars over my shoulder!
The most striking part of the book was the research outlining the growth of airports and air travel over the past 40 and 20 years. The current conflicts related to airport security versus individual freedoms seem to be necessary growing pains, trying to determine how to manage the movement of people on a vast scale. One proposed airpoprt in China is expected to serve approximately 80 million travelers per year.
Airports are defined in the book as 'metastable' entities, that is places that are constantly changing, where a constant state of instability is what is stable about the space. The authors chose to not define airports as static 'architecture' or geometry, but instead to compare them to dances, forms created by movement.
Significant space towards the end of the book is devoted oto the idea that airports transform space 'terraforming' land for a specific purpose. Several examples where land is actually created in a bay for the airport were cited including images of two runways in the Sydney airport, an airport in Japan and the new Schipol airport planned in Amsterdam. The land created is compared to a miasma, a space that is neither land, ocean or sky but a space between all three.
Travelers are defined in a number of different ways, one of my favorite is identity through information: passport number, baggage allowance, departure time, etc. Instead of INdividuals, these segmented identities are called 'dividuals.
More research related to The Strange Journey of PM2.5 project in an article in Forbes:
http://www.forbes.com/technology/feeds/ap/2006/07/28/ap2912077.html
A couple of quotes from the article:
"Most air pollution in U.S. cities is generated locally, but that could change if citizens in China, India and other developing nations adopt American-style consumption patterns... 'If they started driving cars and using electricity at the rate in the developed world, the amount of pollution they generate will increase many, many times,' said Tony Van Curen, a UC Davis researcher. "
Dan Jaffe, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington, said "There ultimately is no 'away.' There is no place where you can put away your pollution anymore."
The August 11th oil spill disaster dumped at least 50,000 gallons to oil into the sea near central Philippines, and it could be worse than the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989
Photographs and the statement that most of the prisoners have agreed to 'donate' their hair. How can prison inmates make a free choice to donate anything? The image of the pile of hair is especially disturbing.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14584306/
The first hemispherical, three-dimensional optical systems to integrate microlens arrays - thousands of tiny lenses packed side by side - have been created by Berkeley bioengineers inspired by the structure of compound insect eyes.
Press release with an amazing electron microscope image
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2006/04/27_compoundeye.shtml
and more images on the project page:
http://biopoems.berkeley.edu/projects/projects-jeong-ACE.html
An interesting article from May 12th in the Science Journal of the Wall Street Journal answers this question. In the Heat and the Heartbeat of the City and Queensbridge Wind Power project videos, Dr. Rosenzweig talks about 'forcings', those factors, both natural and man-made that contribute to climate change. She talks about volcanos having a cooling effect and greenhouse gasses having a warming effect, but how do they know?
The WSJ article quotes climatologist Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore Nation Lab in California talking about 'signatures' of forcings. For example, data shows that the upper atmosphere (stratosphere) has cooled over the past several decades while the lower atmosphere (the troposphere) has warmed. This is contrary to what would happen if, for example, the sun's energy output increased, but is consistent with what would happen from an increase of greenhouse gas.
Another example outlined in the article is warming in the oceans, that have seen an overall increase of 1 degree F over the past 40 years. Warming in the Arctic has been attributed to a normal oscillation, called the Arctic Oscillation, that happens every 10-30 years. However, Arctic and other natural oscillations combine warming in some oceans with a balance of cooling in others, keeping the overall energy of the oceans consistent. The warming being seen in the world's oceans presently is actually an overall increase, indicating that heat energy has been added to the system.
If this heat was being added to the system through an increase in natural geothermal heat, the warming would be greated on the ocean floor, but this is not the case.
The article goes on to point out several other areas where increases are either too great or too unusual to have been caused by natural oscillation. It uses the poker analogy of a 'stacked deck' where zillions of hands are analysed and a consistent anomaly that contradicts mathematical probabilty is found. The numbers suggest something other than a fair deal.
Begley, Sharon. 'Scientists Explain How They Attribute Climate-Change Data' WSJ Science Journal, May 12, 2006
In July 2001, a strange blood-red colored liquid rained over the Kerala district in Western India. First thought to be water filled with red dust from central Asian dust storms, samples were later identified to be filled with a biological material very similar to mammalian blood cells.
There have been rare occurrences of rain storms containing small frogs or fish transported from the sea through unusual circumstances. Could a large amount of mammals (bats, perhaps or sea mammals) have died and could their blood, without any other material, have been transported by rain clouds, finally pouring rain with living blood cells?
Seems fantastic, but the leading hypothesis is even more fantastic. Physicist Godfrey Louis believes that the biological material came from a passing comet, and is, in fact, extraterrestrial. Louis claims that the cells contain no DNA (mammalian blood cells do not, but fungus and bacteria do), reproduces in an unusual fashion, and can live through incredibly extreme low and high temperatures like those in space.
Proponents of the Panspermia hypothesis, that life on Earth was 'seeded' from outer space and actually originated in another location in the Universe, view Louis' work as more evidence of towards their cause. Panspermia cites the presence of 'extremeophiles' on Earth, or bacteria and other organisms that, like Louis' alleged red rain samples, can live through the extreme conditions of space.
Although the scientific community has been understandably very skeptical of Louis' theory, there is not yet a definitive explanation or identification of the material. The most current information I could find identifies the material as an unidentified kind of fungus.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1723913,00.html
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