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Mitchell Joachim Has a Posse

Dressed in architect black and sporting dreadlocks, Mitchell Joachim isn’t your average Whole Foods envirogeek. For one thing, he speaks in an intense staccato punctuated with words like peristaltic and epiphetic. And don’t get him started on sustainability. “I don’t like the term,” he says. “It’s not evocative enough. You don’t want your marriage to be sustainable. You want to be evolving, nurturing, learning.” Efficiency doesn’t cut it, either: “It just means less bad.” Even zero emissions falls short. “This table does zero damage,” he says, thumping the one in his office. “No VOCs, no carbons. Whatever. It doesn’t do anything positive.”

New Design Researcher: Eric Tan

Eric is a student still entering his final year of architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. Currently, he is researching and developing a proposal for the fabrication and genetic manipulation of a flesh based architecture - combining inVitro processes and tissue engineering with Cad/Cam prototyping. He is excited in utilizing this research as a tool to generate not only discourse but to aid in its realization.

Gang of Green: DigitALL Magazine Heroes

TERREFORM, THE ECOLOGICAL RESEARCH AND ARCHITECTURE FIRM OF MICHAEL SORKIN AND MITCHELL JOACHIM, IS RIPPING UP THE PAVEMENT OF URBANPLANNING “…the ecological research, urban planning, and architecture firm of Michael Sorkin and Mitchell Joachim. These two architects’ work is full of epic ambitions and fantastical ideas, including city plans based on total urban self-sufficiency, houses made of growing trees, and soft, sheep-like cars that scrub the atmosphere clean with every drive. Of course, most architects have drawers full of unrealized blueprints. But Terreform’s architecture of ecological engagement sacrifices any pretense of pragmatism in order to reach for a realm of unbridled, futuristic innovation…”
Craig Bromberg, Samsung, p. 10/48 Fall 2007.
http://www.samsung.com/Features/BrandMagazine/magazinedigitall/2007_fall/heroes_02.htm

Rapid Re(f)use: New Project at Terreform 1

New York City is disposing of 38,000 tons of waste per day. Most of this discarded material ended up in Fresh Kills landfill before it closed. The Rapid Re(f)use project supposes an extended New York reconstituted from its own landfill material. Our concept remakes the city by utilizing the trash at Fresh Kills. With our method, we can remake seven entirely new Manhattan islands at full scale. Automated robot 3d printers are modified to process trash and complete this task within decades. These robots are based on existing techniques commonly found in industrial waste compaction devices. Instead of machines that crush objects into cubes, these devices have jaws that make simple shape grammars for assembly. Different materials serve specified purposes; plastic for fenestration, organic compounds for temporary scaffolds, metals for primary structures, and etc. Eventually, the future city makes no distinction between waste and supply.

Credits: Mitchell Joachim, Emily Johnson, Maria Aiolova, Niloufar Karimzadegan.

Positioned at the confluence of art and science, we are a tightly knit group of designers, artists and scientists who seek to develop new forms of biological products and designs using biotechnology. The skills and ideas each of us bring to this project will, we predict, synergize to produce radical new designs.

The time has finally arrived when the costs of biotechnology have diminished to make it financially practical for these tools to be applied by small groups of skilled and motivated individuals. In
essence, our endeavor harkens back to an earlier era of small craft workshops, albeit utilizing state-of-the-art techniques and resources.

Ever since the advent of novel forms of genetically engineered micro-organisms containing human and other genes, originally utilized as “protein-factories” if you will, coupled with the established
technologies of tissue culturing, we seek to develop not just new organisms, but synthetic ecosystems as well.

Until just recently, the application of these revolutionary biological technologies have been used almost exclusively by big-pharma and other large scale for-profit consortiums. It is seen in pharmaceutical companies carrying out massively parallel robotically guided screens for small drug molecules to the equally massive shot-gun screening of the human genome at the dawn of the new century.

This is contrasted with the relatively much smaller scale of cutting edge development carried out by academia, whose fruits of scientific labor are all too often co-opted by corporations. 
We aim to change this condition.

Co-Founders: Oliver Medvedik, Ph.D. and Mitchell Joachim, Ph.D.
Bioworks Institute
info@bioworks1.com

New Design Researchers: Ben Shepard & Patrick Collins

Ben Shepard studies Philosophy and Visual Art at The University of Chicago. He’s a founder of the Chicago-based experimental-culture collective Ex-Lab, and currently researches food systems, untapped desires and the possibility of socialism in the 21st century.

Patrick R. Collins was born in the farmlands of Iowa, one man’s young dreams of becoming a cowboy popped as the realization that times were a-changing and a livlihood rounding up steer just wouldn’t make it in this day and age. New York City’s air quality was one area in which he could make a difference. He is producing an outline of resources which could help our city further reduce air pollution emissions.

Mitchell Joachim: Location is everything. It’s a little too nebulous to say that, ‘here’s a ton of money — please give me a city from scratch.’ A lot of it is based on where it is.

Human Ecosystems: Building

Human Ecosystems: Abandoned

Human Ecosystems: Corridors

Human Ecosystems: Commons

My Perfect Future on a Friday Afternoon

What makes a dream so distinctly dreamlike?  How can strange situations be so familiar?  Most of all, how can we re-create the open, playful nature of our best dreams in our waking lives in waking communities?  I would like more dream architecture in my waking world.

Architecture is ready to join music in a post-everything, omni-culture zone that incorporates the best of everything and ignores all traditions equally.  It’s an obligation to the species and future generations: build beautiful space.

And don’t be afraid to install the weirdness on other people’s property — the Universe will thank you for it.

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Also, way more co-habitation with animals.  I’m interested in starting a Free Animal City, where all mammals are afforded equal rights at all levels of city structure, from transportation right-of-way to police protection.

#mandalaOS Human Sensory Modality + Neural Network

or…

IN THE FUTURE, WE BETTER NOT BE BORING

OmnivateLLC Chief Visionary Tim sez:

Also found this: Anthropogenic Biomes, A Framework for Ecology & Earth Science in the 21st Century. This all feels like a convergence with the resilient communities of John Robb and the Urbanates as organizational units within the North American Technate. Which is neither here nor there. It’s just a confluence of a bunch of different sources saying basically the same thing: that we’re heading towards some kind of social redefinition on the geographic level, the level of a people’s relationship to the land itself, which we’ve in the West been largely ignoring, but which we’re learning to re-connect with through the Living Interface Systems of OmnivateLLC.

ANALYSIS. I’m thinkin #digitalswitchover meets #projectbluebeam meets #wagthedog meets #economicfailure && #greentechnocracy && #microLOCALISM, set against the imaginal backdrop of augmented reality, ambient intelligence, sudden drop in cost of microprocessors and collapse of most non-corporate currencies: PREDICTION. complete world paradigm shift within 1 year. Happy ending. Non zero sum games.

INSTRUCTIONS TO FOLLOW

TMBCHR: Polling the Psychic Internet

AND FURTHERMORE:

Mandala OS is the name for an ad hoc collaborative creative conversation committee spontaneously formed around the discussion, contemplation and experimentation of this paradigm as a platform for governing the meaning of what it is to be a Human Being specifically, and what it means - more universally - to be a thinking, feeling, perceiving sentient being.

SOURCE: Ubiquitous Spiritual Computing

The main focus on human computer interface, I think, should be on the power of ritual as a method of interacting with both the visible and invisible worlds. This is a major factor of why I’ve become so interested in a sort of intuitive urban revival of shamanic practices: little rituals I carry out in my room using magic rocks, burning leaves, and whatever other types of objects I can press into service to achieve my creative ends.

I see absolutely no reason why we can’t have a massively popular technology which teaches people to solve problems creatively, how to access the wonders of their intuition and subconscious, and how to tap into Fundamental Universal Laws & Patterns Known to the Ancients™

The Mandala OS is the ideal breeding ground for the post-computer post-scarcity shaman, the roving troubadour, the bard, the actor, the comedian, the tragedian. It should reward you for goofing off, and encourage exactly the types of behaviors we need so badly to see to instantiate a Global Renaissance!

SOURCE: Bardic Ritual Interface

#mandalaOS - Living Interface or SymbioticA eXistenZ

This is a response to Tim’s Permaculture Software, Noogenics, Living Natural Organic Interface.

MINIATURE EARS? REALLY? REALLY?

Tissue culture and tissue engineering represent a new area for artistic engagement. These branches of biomedical research have a major influence on perceptions of body, self and medical thinking. Tissue engineering enable researchers to grow three dimensional living tissues constructs of varying sizes, shapes and tissue types. This half-day hands on intensive workshop will introduce artists and other interested people to basic principals of animal tissue culture and tissue engineering, including its history and the different artistic projects working with TC and TE. The workshop will involve a demonstration for how to extract and cultivate stem cells from bones bought at the butcher. These advanced techniques can be done with homemade equipment and kitchen gear.

I wonder what the first words of the future manmade intelligent godthing will be.  Will we recognize the sanity and self-awareness of something that’s screaming in pain? I wonder.

CRONENBERG DID IT FIRST

BIOTEKNICA began as a media studies and interventionist art project, which projected its’ viewers into a future where designer organisms are generated on demand.  The organisms produced by BIOTEKNICA are modeled on the Teratoma, an unusual cancerous growth containing multiple tissues like hair, skin, and nervous systems.  Monstrous as this may seem, scientists today see the Teratoma as an instance of spontaneous cloning, and are conducting research on the Teratoma with the goal of developing future technologies. BIOTEKNICA both embraces and critiques biotechnology, considering the contradictions and deep underlying complexities that these technologies offer the future of humanity.

—Jennifer Willet

Is it just me or does “Teratoma” translate to “monster growth” or somesuch similar?

POSSIBLE ORGANISMS FOR BIOLOGICAL/INTERNET SENSORY INTERFACE

THE DIY BIOTECH HANDS ON EXPERIENCE

Harvesting bone marrow cells for a workshop — a lot to be learned at this wonderfully detailed Flickr gallery from teworkshop2007. For a dangerously chronovoric brainfood overdose, check out their Subtle Technologies Reading List.

Cymatics Bonus: the caption for the following photo is “dispersing cells into the construct using irregular vibrations,” dig:

One weird and disturbing little detail — a random picture of what they claim are “skinless chickens” — definitely creepy and so far, impossible to verify.

And the leather jacket that grows itself didn’t turn out very well:

The artists, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, say the work which was fed nutrients by tube, expanded too quickly and clogged its own incubation system just five weeks after the show opened … Paola Antonelli, head of MoMA’s architecture and design department and curator of the show, says she had to make the decision to turn off the life-support system for the work, basically “killing” it.

Ms Antonelli says the jacket “started growing, growing, growing until it became too big. And [the artists] were back in Australia, so I had to make the decision to kill it. And you know what? I felt I could not make that decision. I’ve always been pro-choice and all of a sudden I’m here not sleeping at night about killing a coat…That thing was never alive before it was grown.”

Source: i09 baby

#mandalaOS - Nature as Interface

“R&D = Research and Duplicate.”

Note: “nature as interface” doesn’t turn up very many results in El Goog — only one, in fact.  Time to change that and own the phrase, nay?  This is the new SEO, refuting the zero-sum logic of PPC competition. If you can push this meme harder, good. Do so.

“A clue to this function may be found in the circumstance that such magicians rarely dwell at the heart of their village; rather, their dwellings are commonly at the spatial periphery of the community amid the surrounding rice fields, at the edge of the forest, or among a cluster of boulders. For the magician’s intelligence is not circumscribed within the society–its place is at the edge, mediating between the human community and the larger community of beings upon which the village depends for its nourishment and sustenance.”

—The Dwelling Places of Magicians

I’m working on a more bacterial angle. Have you seen Existenz, the Cronenberg sci-fi flick? I think that the “pods” in that film — a VERY remarkably techno-prescient #codechant invokation of iPods before they happened — anyways, that’s the future of tech to my mind. Biotech. Engineered electrical interfaces. I think there’s going to be methods of weaving permaculture, cymatic/electromagnetic effects, and geometry to create a living interface. Best of all - a living interface that can do all sorts of tricks Teh Internets are unprepared for, in addition to accessing/remixing/pre-sorting digital data.

—Hello Tomorrow, Goodbye is Almost Gone.

HOW CAN WE PING THE GLOBAL MYCELIUM NETWORK?

Jensen: Can you give some examples of these partnerships?

Stamets: A familiar one is lichens, which are actually a fungus and an alga growing symbiotically together. Another is “sleepy grass”: Mesoamerican ranchers realized that when their horses ate a certain type of grass, the horses basically got stoned. When scientists studied sleepy grass, they found that it wasn’t the grass at all that was causing the horses to get stoned, but an endophytic fungus, meaning one that grows within a plant, in the stems and leaves.

Here’s another example: At Yellowstone’s hot springs and Lassen Volcanic Park, people noticed that some grasses could survive contact with scalding hot water — up to 160 degrees. Scientists cultured these grasses in a laboratory and saw a fungus growing on them. They thought it was a contaminant, so they separated the fungus from the grass cells and tried to regrow the grass. But without the fungus the grass died at around 110 degrees. So they reintroduced this fungus and regrew the grass, and once again it survived to 160 degrees. That particular fungus, of the genus Curvularia, conveyed heat tolerance to the grass. Scientists are now looking at the possibility of getting this Curvularia to convey heat tolerance to corn, rice, and wheat, so that these grasses could be grown under drought conditions or in extremely arid environments, expanding the grain-growing regions of the world.

Other researchers took a Curvularia fungus from cold storage at a culture bank and joined it with tomatoes, expecting that it would confer heat tolerance. But the tomatoes all died at 105 degrees. They discovered that the cold storage had killed a virus that wild Curvularia fungus carries within it — which was odd, since you’d think cold storage would keep the virus alive. When they reintroduced the virus back into the Curvularia cultures and then reassociated the fungus with tomato plants, the plants survived the heat. So this is a symbiosis of three organisms: a plant, a fungus, and a virus. Only together could they survive extreme conditions.

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. They show the intelligence of nature, how these different entities form partnerships to the benefit of all.

Source: The Sun. Is that meta or what?

WHO IS ALREADY @ WORK IN THIS PLAYGROUND?

Even freakier than it looks, this is an art installation:

The biomass of disassociated living cells and tissues can be measured
in the thousands of tons. These fragments do not fall under current
biological or cultural classifications. The notion of the Extended
Body developed by the TC&A (Tissue Culture & Art) Project can be seen as a way to define this category of life and, at the same time, an attempt to destabilize some of the rooted perceptions of the
classification of living beings.

This is a project of SymbioticA, a very eXistenZ-pretentious and fascinating Australian team. Their more academic-restrained title is the “Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts” — and if anyone is going to be growing the Pods, it’ll probably happen in their labs first.

• Tissue Engineering
SymbioticA have built a reputation as the leading laboratory that investigates the in vitro growth and manipulation of living tissue in three dimensions. The work of The Tissue Culture & Art Project, and many other subsequent projects, guided the developments of protocols and specific techniques of tissue engineering.

• Bioreactor
The development of a life sustaining device for tissue engineered art is an area of investigation that requires expertise in diverse knowledge pools from biology, through engineering and fluid dynamics to art and display strategies. Artists in SymbioticA and scientists from the School of Anatomy and Human Biology have been researching the development of an “artistic” bioreactor for the last five years.

Then there’s the fascinating wiki project @ OPEN WETWARE. Hands-on garage bioneers and university students collaborating will lead to strange wonders, new horrors and hopefully some intelligent algae-based interfaces for data aquisition online.

Masanobu Fukuoka

“…if modern agriculture continues to follow the path it’s on now, it’s finished. The food-growing situation may seem to be in good shape today, but that’s just an illusion based on the current availability of petroleum fuels. All the wheat, corn, and other crops that are produced on big American farms may be alive and growing, but they’re not products of real nature or real agriculture. They’re manufactured rather than grown. The earth isn’t producing those things … petroleum is!”

The Plowboy Interview