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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
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/
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