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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
According to an August 16th article in Business Week, the US Military has been experimenting with training bees to detect land mines.
Bees can be trained in a matter of days to associate chemicals used in explosives with food and as more bees gather around the source of this smell, military personnel use lidar, a kind of laser-based radar, to map the positions of the bees. The tiny hairs lining the bodies of the bees coupled with ingesting particles allow bees to detect very small traces of explosives (with 97% accuracy).
This summer on the rooftop garden has been a great learning experience for me. While trying to create a tiny oasis, a micro-ecosystem, I have unintentionally learned about the differences between soils and the importance of using a rich soil, the differences in the ways certain plants respond to the weather and how fragile some plants can be to slight fluctuations in temperature and railfall. I have learned how plants can combine to help eachother to grow, small trees and plants with large leaves providing shade to plants below.
I've learned first hand the truth of what eco artists like Meg Webster and George Gessert have said about the importance of 'wildness.' Seeds that I have bought and tried to cultivate on the roof have fared much worse than plants that have just 'appeared', seeds sent by the wind from the plants that thrive in the cracks in the sidewalks. Some of these flowering grasses have grown huge in poor soil and the scorching hot, dry conditions of many days this summer. Artist Bob Braine whose work in the Bronx is on display at the Wave Hill Cultural Center and Public Garden this summer illustrates this beautifully with his infra-red aerial photographs of a vacant lot in the Bronx. You can see several distinct regtangular patches of land, some a dull brown and some a brilliant red on the unnaturally colored infrared photographs. The dull brown, Bob explains, are lots that are owned and cultivated with non-native flowers and plants, that dull color indicates unhealthy plants. The brilliant red, indicating robust plant life, is seen only in the uncultivated lots, those plots of land left alone to return to a more wild state. On that lot, hundreds of what we might call 'weeds' are thriving and removing dangerous metals from the ground and removing CO2 and returning oxygen to the air.
I just started reading a book called 'Biomimicry' by Janine Benyus published in 1997. She starts by talking about work being done at the Land Institute in which researchers are trying to look at the natural ecosystem of the prairie in order to develop farming systems that not only offer high yeilding crops, but maintain themselves year after year, reducing or eliminating the need for pesticides and fertilizers. By what might be called a process of reverse genetic engineering, plants are being coaxed back into a more 'wild' state that renews itself each season.
'The Week' Magazine August 5th, 2005 printed an excerpt from 'Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human' a book by Michael Chorost in which he talks about learning to hear after receiving a cochlear implant. The implant stimulates auditory nerves with electrical signals received from an external microphone. The signals are sent to the implant via radio waves.
The stimulation from the electrodes is a stream of data and only remotely like stimulation from actual hearing, and the electrode array only penetrated partway into the cochlea, not stimulating nerve endings that detect low-frequency sound. So, at first Chorost explains that spoken language (even his own voice) sounded like 'a rusty train wheel squeaking through mud.' Within a few hours, however, his brain was able to adapt to the new stimulation and he started to perceive hearing normally within a few days.
How might impants (or exterior haptic devices) augment perception? Without the radical surgery required for implants, might it be possible to create an augmented reality system by stimulating the tip of the tongue (the most concentrated nerve endings on the surface of the body) with electrical signals, a system in which the user's brain converts these signals into visual or aural perceptions? Would it be possible to augment hearing with signals outside the audible spectrum in this way? Or to augment vision with signals outside the visible spectrum? Medical personnel might be able to use such a system to view ultrasound directly on the body, for example.
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London just opened an exhibition called 'Hearwear: The Future of Hearing' that explores radical new designs that not only provide fashionable assistance to the hearing impaired, but enhance normal hearing. Some of the designs block noise (conversations in a crowded bar for example) others enhance sounds or record and playback snippets of conversations.
http://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/future_exhibs/hear_wear/index.html
Images from the exhibition here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/05/technology_hearwear/html/1.stm
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