There's the mousetrap coffee table. By placing crumbs on top, perhaps left there during a canape-laden soiree, mice are attracted to climb up the hole in its over size leg. When sensors detect that a mouse is standing on the trapdoor in the center, this door opens. The unfortunate critter then falls into a microbial fuel cell housed underneath, where it gets digested and converted into energy to power the table's electronic parts.
Two kinds of infestation battling it out here: conspicuous consumption and vermins. And since there might be hundreds of rats hiding behind the walls, we really shouldn't feel sorry for the rats decomposing in the table's innards.
Meanwhile, there's also the fly-paper clock, which is powered by insects captured on its flypaper roller and digested by its own microbial fuel cell.
Another one is the fly stealing objet d'art, which you could hang on that central space on your wall reserved for an LCD jumbotron or a flea market-bought watercolor. Like the rest, this, too, is powered by a microbial fuel cell, which churns up dead flies picked up from a web spun by its resident spiders.
One wonders if, rather than bringing spiders to it, you could just bring it to the spiders, at whichever corner of the house they may be. In other words, you'll have an excuse to rearrange or even refurnish your entire living room to match the relocated mobile. Domestic boredom feeding on itself.
One also wonders about trapping larger preys that intrude on the domestic sphere, like wildcats and alligators that regularly stumble into the backyard of houses abutting their home range. In such cases, one could turn swimming pools into carnivorous pitcher plants. When a coyote climbs down to drink from its shallow water, it closes its tarp cover and drains the water along with the animal down to its microbial fuel cell. While this pool provide a similar form of dark entertainment as its interior counterparts, it ensures a more basic domestic need: a bubble of habitability amid the wilderness. It'd be perfect for a jungle homestead.
As protection against the feral, augmented trees snatch avian flu-infected birds using their cyborg branches.
A quick quote from a PBS two-part documentary first broadcast in 2008 and based on the “definitive” book on cold, Tom Shachtman's Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold. The scientist quoted is Seth Lloyd, of MIT:
Getting to absolute zero is tough. Nobody's actually been there at absolute 0.000000, with an infinite number of zeros. That last little tiny bit of heat becomes harder and harder to get out. And, in particular, the timescales for getting it out get longer and longer and longer, the smaller and smaller the amounts of energy involved. So eventually, if you're talking about extracting an amount of energy that's sufficiently small, it would indeed take the age of the universe to do it. Also you, actually you'd need an apparatus the size of the universe to do it, but that's another story.
Beneath the city is the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, interlocking or in tangents with the next dozen on the list of the highest-energy accelerators.
Everyday they collide particles to produce a steady supply of Higgs bosons, which are stabilized, concentrated and routed as a beam to one of the many gantries located throughout the city. Able to rotate 360º, each three-story gantry can shoot the subatomic particle beam in the correct angle at the cancer patient lying inside its treatment chamber. Precisely calibrated, the Higgs bosons decay the moment they hit the tumor, and in the process of decaying or escaping into other dimensions, they degrade the mutant cells.
This super-machine, then, is one giant medical device, the most expensive in the history of medicine. It's also the most costliest to use. A second under its therapeutic beam can bankrupt a small nation. In the aftermath of the repeal of health care reform acts, treatment regimes have leapfrogged into mindboggling territory.
Practically everyone in the metropolitan area is employed to support these machines, either as administrators, research scientists, the army of engineers who maintain and repair the thousands of complex parts strewn throughout the city, the security staff who police the miles of tunnels and profile saboteurs, or the cooks who feed them all.
The infrastructure to generate their massive energy requirements might as well be another city, complete with its own support staff.
An urban legend most likely but it is often said that so powerful and so many are the magnets used in the machines that Chicago is slightly out of phased with the space-time continuum of the rest of the country.
What isn't an urban legend though are the rocks levitating in some neighborhoods.
Last week, government and commercial websites in South Korea and the U.S. were targeted with denial-of-service attacks. In the U.S., “[the websites] of the Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department were all affected at some point over the weekend and into this week.” And in South Korea, “at least 11 major sites have slowed or crashed since Tuesday [July 7], including those of the presidential Blue House, the Defense Ministry, the National Assembly, Shinhan Bank, the mass-circulation newspaper Chosun Ilbo and the top Internet portal Naver.com.”
There is evidence to suggest that the cyberattacks were instigated by North Korea, though a link to the rogue state may never be proven definitively.
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From rogue states or not, from Russia or China, from the domestic front or not, cyberattacks like those of last week are real and significant threats to America's computer network systems. To develop defenses against such online attacks, the U.S. Defense Department has been creating specialized forces. For the Army, there is Army Network Warfare Battalion, which was activated last year. For the Air Force, there is 57th Information Aggressor Squadron, whose hackers “spend their days and nights probing the military’s vast computer networks for weaknesses to exploit” in “a series of inconspicuous trailers” at Nellis Air Force Base. Meanwhile, at West Point and the other federal military academies, cadets can now choose to receive training in cyberwarfare.
“There is hardly an American military unit or headquarters that has not been ordered to analyze the risk of cyberattacks to its mission — and to train to counter them,” wrote the New York Times. “If the hackers were to succeed, they could change information on the network and cripple Internet communications.”
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Also last week, New Scientistreported that the first node in space of the interplanetary internet went online. This newly installed system aboard the [International Space Station] could one day make communication automatic and less prone to data loses between earthbound networks and spacecrafts and astronauts orbiting the earth or in deeper space.
According to a press release prepared earlier this year by Carnegie Mellon, researchers at the university assisted Astrobotic Technology Inc. in developing conceptual robots capable of preparing lunar landing sites for a future moonbase.
Specifically, these lunar bulldozers would be tasked “to build a berm around a landing site to block the sandblasting effect” of multiple landings and takeoffs. Alternatively, a fleet of “small robots could comb the lunar soil for rocks, gathering them to pave a durable grit-free landing pad.”
It is envisioned that these robots would be sent to the moon in advance of human expeditions. In other words, these telepresent digging machines would be operated from earthbound venues — and thus prone to takeovers from hackers.
Not that that would be easily done. As far as we know, the rovers Spirit and Opportunity haven't yet been commandeered by hackers and programmed to dredge arabesque parterres on the surface of Mars.
Certainly, what would be easy is fantasizing about a rogue landscape architect with previous training in cyberwarfare at the National Security Agency. Because of the financial meltdown, he is between jobs, simmering and festering in soul-draining temp jobs, constantly bombarded by the cackles of gossiping colleagues in adjacent cubicles.
Clearly in need of a creative outlet, he sets up a botnet of thousands of infected computers to try to take control of the moon rovers. He will have to wait, however, until those robots have landed and their calibrations finished to start hacking the servers of NASA and what would then be a greatly expanded interplanetary internet. But once appropriated, he will upload a different set of instructions.
He will program them to terraform a full scale, regolithic Versailles on the surface of the moon.
Disease is in the air, so we thought we'd offer up all our disorganized musings on spatializing health by way of tags. You can scan through tidbits about the politics of pollen, disease tours, subterranean pharmlands, reconfiguring the sky to combat suicides and the hilarious 2007 World Infection Tour of Andrew Speaker.
Tagging our posts is something we have always wanted to implement here but have only recently done so when we redesigned the blog's layout. In other words, there may be some stray epidemiological posts that we haven't yet labeled — in fact, there are still so many posts that need tagging — but what has already been stamped with the health tag should be enough to encapsulate our M.O. in this subject.
Meanwhile, as we are wont to do, we decorated this post with a couple of images taken from an old New York Timesarticle about a cancer therapy using proton accelerators.
The machines accelerate protons to nearly the speed of light and shoot them into tumors. Scientists say proton beams are more precise than the X-rays now typically used for radiation therapy, meaning fewer side effects from stray radiation and, possibly, a higher cure rate.
If a particle accelerator calls to mind the Large Hadron Collider, then you can imagine the sheer gargantuan size of these anti-cancer machines. One of these machines can weigh 222 tons, costs $100 million and requires “a building the size of a football field with walls up to 18-feet thick in which to house it.” In other words, it's “the world’s most expensive and complex medical device.”
One wonders how much energy it needs, and whether hospitals had simply connected it to the electrical grid or had to build a dedicated power generator. If it's the latter, did they also put up another building to house it in?
We may be overimagining the logistics here as usual, but our minds are reeling into hyperdrive as they imagine clusters of buildings connected together by arrays of electromagnets and miles of wirings, swarming with technicians and operators, buzzing with the grinding gears of three-story tall gantries, all overseen from a cavernous control room of wall-to-wall LED monitors. And the central focus in the entire sprawling complex is just a narrow beam of invisible protons.
Given the extent some people in the U.S. are willing to go through to cure their illnesses despite the costs, and how the medical industry is an all-too willing pill pusher — and of course, these proton accelerators just prove that — we can't help but wonder when we might see a new cancer treatment regimen so incredibly complex, an entire city has to be built for it. When a patient starts treatment, it draws energy from all around, even from deep inside the earth. The whole landscape shudders and contracts.
Have you seen the planet destroyer in the trailers for the new Star Trek movie? Will it be like that, though with a finer but still mindbogglingly powerful beam? Somehow we think the indescribably absurd American health care system will make it happen and beat the equally preposterous American military industry to the punch.
Largely unreported by everyone is a fringe architecture festival scheduled at the same time as the Venice Biennale; also staged in La Serenissima, this Slamdance of the star-studded exhibition is titled Not There: Architecture Beyond Building. Advanced media previews sent to the cut-and-paste cognoscenti suggest that an installation involving a milking rotary will likely be showstopper. Displaying a surprising mastery of artspeak, the Betsky-rejected farmer-artist from Des Moines, Iowa tells us that this event performance considers the current world food crisis; the grotesque beauty of technological efficiency; agriculture as a legitimate art practice; and farms as sites of experimentations and thus possible ground zero for new and alternative theories of landscape architecture. To attract attendees, carry bags will be given away.
Several memes running through this blog come wonderfully together in Gazex®, an anti-avalanche system manufactured by Technologie Alpine de Sécurité (TAS): terrestrial augments, wilderness access, urban/wild interface, disaster urbanism, climate change and (admittedly a stretch) fountains.
From a distance, they look like disembodied talons jutting out from the rockface, ready to prick at imminent disasters. With their array of remote sensors, they are constantly reading the landscape; the mountains are kept under constant surveillance, lest they want to endanger quaint Alpine hamlets and new luxury ski resort developments above Denver or lose skiers to the wintry wilds.
When an avalanche is deemed likely, it detonates a mixture of oxygen and propane gas in its explosion chamber. The resulting hot gas is then directed downwards to the zone at risk.
TAS describes their product as the best avalanche prevention mechanism, as there are “no explosives to handle and no personnel interventions in or near danger zones.” But will there be any market for it in the near future? At least in the Alps, demand may soon vanish due to “a change in the large-scale weather pattern.”
In the late 1980s, there was a dramatic step-like drop in the amount of snow falling in the Swiss Alps. Since then, snowfall has never recovered. In some years, the amount that fell on the plateau between Zurich, Bern and Basel was 60 per cent lower than was typical in the early 1980s, says Christoph Marty at the Swiss Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research in Davos. He has analysed snowfall trends spanning 60 years and adds that the average number of snow days over the last 20 winters is lower than at any time since records began more than 100 years ago.
The future of winter tourism in the region is looking grim.
Maybe TAS should start manufacturing artificial snow machines? Preferably not.
Should you want to see it in action, you can download this video. There is another, but that file may be corrupt, as it won't unzip for us.
No doubt you've seen the HypoSurface everywhere at technology fairs, architecture biennales, gadget blogs and advertising industry trade conventions. It's the “world's first display system where the screen surface physically moves,” according to its developers.
Here, however, let's imagine it as a temporary art installation at a Chicago downtown plaza, specifically this plaza fronting a Miesian-inspired black box by Jacques Brownson, the one with the famous Picasso public sculpture. Rather than a wall, it's the ground itself, gyrating in the shadow of perfect geometries. It's also embedded below so that its occupiable surface is not floating above the plaza but actually a continuous ground plane.
But what sort of digital data will it be linked to? Earthquakes? Past tsunamis? The rise and fall of the price of oil and food? The fluctuating collective volume from all the silly debates, brought on by the premier The Dark Knight, which was filmed near the offices of Pruned HQ, about whether Chicago or New York is the real Gotham City?
Because someone was posting a bunch of Popular Science links to del.icio.us this weekend, we discovered an article about a wearable robot being developed by Sarcos for DARPA.
In the article, you will read about “the latest and arguably most advanced exoskeleton in existence”; other exoskeletons by other institutions who are competing with Sarcos for Army grants; the history of these machines; a cartoon character; and someone who is called the “Willy Wonka of robotics.”
There isn't much more we can say beyond that laundry list of items you'll encounter in the article, so we are left here with publicly fantasizing an Illinois — where Pruned is domiciled, in case you were wondering about this apparent arbitrary choice of geography — a future Illinois or a literary Illinois or an academic Illinois or even the real one wherein all landscape construction firms in the state have had their migrant workers, here legally or otherwise, outfitted with autonomous exoskeletons.
Because that vortex of immigration politics swirling around Capitol Hill has markedly reduced their labor pool, contractors have decided to invest in the development and, once perfected, in the deployment of these military gizmos, thinking that a lone worker wearing an Ellen Ripley couture can do the job of half a dozen workers, if not more.
Mowing the lawn and blowing leaf litter become a breeze. Pavers by the tons can be carried in one go. Stormwater bioswales get excavated without heavy machineries. A topiary wonderland complex in the love-hybrid style of Michelangelo and Bernini can now be sculpted without sweaty profusion.
The CEO of Caterpillar, an unavowed fan of Cinquecento garden design, wants to create for his palatial mansion located just outside the company's world headquarters in Peoria, Illinois, a replica of the Villa D'Este gardens, an exact copy, in fact, except that it will be planted with native vegetation of Plant Hardiness Zone 5a.
Despite the complexity of recreating late Renaissance, Mannerist and Baroque landscape elements, not to mention the signature terracing of the original site in contourless prairie country, the project is finished in record time. In one day.
Monumental projects and middling chores are done with ease and, of course, high profit margins.
But something else besides the economics of small businesses has changed.
The other has become a spectacle. Where before residents of the affluent northern suburbs of Chicago prefer to admire the beauty of their landscape without the thorny politics of immigration, race and labor, they now appropriate their laborers into their own aesthetic consumption practices.
In other words, instead of scurrying them away out of view or sending them home to their part of town just before the guests arrive to your Martha Stewart-inspired garden soirée, you let your pneumatic gardeners continue on with their work, instructing them to remain strategically framed by well-pruned maples, as in a Picturesque scene. When the canapé trays get passed around, you direct your guests' attention to the machine in the garden busy producing and maintaining landscape scenes of pastoral delights.
“So very Jean-Paul Gaultier,” the woman in the hat will say.
And if things get a bit boring, you clap your hands, dim the lights and your cybernetic living sculptures begin to perform a Carmontellian proverbe, titled, perhaps, Le Nord.
During the day in sprawling backyards and exclusive golf courses around town, kids flock to them with xenophilic enthusiasm. “He is way cooler than Iron Man.”
There are no more furtive glances, only uninhibited gazes akin to birdwatching. Gawking as though they were fountains, temple follies or Reptonian livestocks.
Until, of course, they rebel.
One day a charismatic landscape architect, who's probably seen too many PBS documentaries on Che Guevara and Cesar Chavez, rides into town. Angered by the exploitative conditions of the migrant workers, he galvanizes them into action. First there are the casual meetings with the employers, then a letter-writing campaign to elected officials, followed by protest marches and the founding of a union and membership drives. All of which, unfortunately, fail to correct what he perceives to be unjust.
One night, then, he and his comrades break into storage depots across the state to gather up all the XOSes; the first strike in their rebellion begins at sunrise.
Atop an artificial hill divined up from the flat terrain by his soldiers in their former lives, the newly christened Spartacus, FASLA, surveys their objective, a sleepy ex-urb, hoping that he remembers well the lessons he had learned from reading J.B. Jackson.
Those bored executives and hedge fund managers inexplicably unaffected by the worldwide economic freefall and seeking new thrills that only a handful have ever experienced can peruse through the online catalogue of Cloud 9 Living.
This adventure outfit, based in Boulder, Colorado, advertises itself as “the premier experience gift company that offers the highest quality experiences as unforgettable gifts.” Such offerings include, for instance, diving with a Great White shark from a private luxury yacht. Priced at $100,000, you'd better be diving from and uncorking champagne on the deck of The Gigayatch. If wading in the deep doesn't interest you, you can fly a Mig 25 from a top-secret Rusian airbase. Of course, this chance of surveying the landscapes in rarefied air, at supersonic speeds, will also cost you dearly.
There are, however, plenty of affordable options as well. You can sign up for nighttime white water rafting expedition in which you can survey the terrain through unfamiliar wavelengths of light with night vision goggles. And again, if floating in water bores you, how about a nighttime helicopter tour of the neon-drenched alien landscape of Las Vegas?
One “experience gift” we wouldn't mind giving to ourselves is a day or two or even a whole week spent at Dig This. There, at “the 1st heavy equipment play arena,” you can “play in the dirt - super sized” with an array of “empowering” heavy machineries.
You can get lost in our 10-acre site with hills, valleys and a spectacular views of the Yampa Valley. Under the supervision of Dig This instructors, you can remove yourself from the external influences of life and focus only on the adventure at hand, automatically building self-confidence and adrenaline levels.
As if to feed some primal urge, starved by a 21st century lifestyle disconnected from the earth, emasculated by the droning shrills of sustainability and pastoralism, you can “doze and excavate dams and ponds” and “move and remove sand, gravel, rock, and other materials from your own individual area.” In climate controlled machines.
We can call this Post-Industrial Romanticism. Mineral lyricism?
Making tiny mountains or rock gardens seems to be a popular task there, as are “team building” and “character building.” But for some real fun, why not spend a whole month excavating a new city, another Denver ex-urb without its McMansions? In this supersized urban sandbox, you can scrape the outlines of future roads, driveways and cul-de-sacs. You can will into existence an entirely new hydrology of storm culverts and drainage channels, thus undoing billions of years of natural tectonic activities.
These foundational landscapes are all ready to be paved over and occupied, but no lawns or SUVs will come. It's as if the developers and creditors have fled, the bankrupt homeowners unwilling to visit their spectacularly failed investments. It's a landscape in a perpetual state of waiting.
In any case, exactly how popular Dig This is, we don't know. But the operators and instructors are certainly attuned to the zeitgeist.
Reporting over a year ago on research by geologists Brandon McElroy of the University of Texas in Austin and his colleague Bruce Wilkinson of Syracuse University, the Discovery Channelwrote that “human changes to landscapes are now on par with the wasting power of weather and tectonic uplift.”
In other words, we are on par with the same natural forces that move continents across oceans and erode entire mountain ranges down to hills.
A new take of the scale of human changes to the face of the Earth shows that by farming alone, humans have now managed to move a thousand times more earth than the annual sediment loads of all the world's rivers combined. That's enough soil to cover the state of Rhode Island nearly two miles deep in dirt.
And the rate of human changes to the land is increasing.
Indeed, a recent article in The New York Timesreported that “thousands of farmers are taking their fields out of the government’s biggest conservation program, which pays them not to cultivate.” There are 36.8 million acres of land in the program, bigger in area than the state of New York; “last fall, they took back as many acres as are in Rhode Island and Delaware combined.”
Why?
“Because of a growing global middle class as well as federal mandates to turn large amounts of corn into ethanol-based fuel, food prices are beginning to jump. Cropland is suddenly in heavy demand.” So naturally, farmers want “to cash in on the boom in wheat, soybean, corn and other crops.”
And then there are the reports of a growing breed of diggers who also want to cash in on the boom in the mineral trade. Again in the The New York Times, we read that “160 years after a flake of gold found not far from here incited a frenzied stampede to the Sierra Nevada foothills, a new gold rush is on.”
Driven by record high prices and a suburban thirst for new outdoor activities, tens of thousands of ’08ers are taking to historically rich streams and hills all across the West in search of nuggets, flecks and — more often than not — specks of gold.
However, not everyone is foraging along rivers.
Some prospectors have taken to scouring ore dumps — discarded piles of rock left by old-time miners — with high-tech metal detectors hoping to divine what previous generations missed. In Arizona, clubs head for dry creeks, sifting through the dirt where gold might have washed down in past floods.
Here, one wonders how the big transnational mining companies will take advantage in this uptick in prices of not only gold but also copper, titanium, coal and whatever China wants to gobble up all for itself. But then again, one only needs to see the photos included in this Wikipedia entry on open-pit mine to get a fairly accurate prediction.
And this is the Grasberg Mine in Indonesia, the largest gold mine in the world. Here and in other gold mines across the world — where the earth is undone, where billions of tons of dirt get displaced, enough perhaps to save every Pacific islands from sinking beneath the climate-changed waters — is where the staggeringly complex relationship between gold prices and the global credit crisis, the falling value of the dollar and the failure of Bear Stearns are physically manifested in the landscape.
As new slums begin to appear out in the peripheries of American cities and even further afield and as the next generation of grandiose projects like the Orange County Great Park and Louisville's Museum Plaza stall due to lack of funds, elsewhere not covered by the top-tier and middling architectural press are new abysses being excavated, swirling towards the inner core, overlaying new un-earthly soil horizons, suffocating lives and geographies alike.
We won't be surprising anyone by saying that there is currently a construction boom everywhere. Read any articles published in The New York Times, The Economist and the BBC, especially those of Dubai, China and the quarterly profits of Caterpillar or those of earlier reports on Mecca eradicating its historic Mohammedan neighborhoods to make way for billion-dollar developments and Singapore pirating sand from Indonesia, and you're already well-informed of the situation.
As but one more iteration of this global phenomenon, there is the recently approved $5.25-billion Panama Canal expansion project. To accommodate post-Panamax vessels and to better cope with the projected increases in cargo traffic, new locks are to be built. New approach channels will be dredged and existing ones deepened and widened. Gatun Lake will similarly be deepened and its water level raised to increase water storage capacity. It is thus rightly labeled an engineering megaproject.
Earlier this month, ENR.com gave us an update by reporting that a dredging contract was given to the Belgian firm Dredging International. No new fascinating details are given, but it's interesting to note the other companies who made bids for the same contract. They are Boskalis International, Jan De Nul and Van Oord.
Long-time readers of this blog may recognize these names. Jan De Nul and Van Oord are, of course, responsible for conjuring up Dubai's artificial archipelagos, both The World and The Palms, from the bottom of the sea. And Boskalis is known for its trailing hopper suction dredgers, a fleet that includes the largest THSD in the world; no doubt they'll be deployed to carry out the company's newly awarded contract, worth nearly $1.5 billion, to create a new port for Abu Dhabi.
All this, then, is the milieu in which Dig This, intentionally or inadvertently, has set up their operations, a creative playpen where future terraformers might be reared in the form of chief executives instilled with the acumen to capitalize on a very profitable futures market or lowly, overworked but extremely well-paid diggers and excavators.
Or the next generation of Robert Smithsons and Michael Heizers. A new breed of Olmsteds and Capability Browns liberated from the ancient paradigms of the Picturesque, Romanticism and Sustainability.
After going through Josef Solc's website detailing his designs for an anti-hurricane ship, you will most likely come away unconvinced that his machine will actually knock off hurricanes and typhoons dead on their tracks, or that it would at least dampen their cyclonic strength far down to an appreciable level — that is, kill maybe just one or two people and cause a few million dollars in damages instead of wiping off entire cities and slashing in half the GDP of Haiti.
What you might come away with instead — perhaps apart from a strange liking to the guy's beautifully whacky prose, like Yoda attempting Walt Whitman or a UN interpreter on crack — is a suspicion that the whole thing is merely an elaborate Nigerian scam to bait our grandparents anxious to protect their retirement homes from hurricanes and trick incompetent FEMA directors into parting with taxpayers' money to fund useless disaster mitigation schemes.
But in all earnestness, we don't really care. That thing should be built, regardless of buildability, scientific merit and cost.
And then instead of sending it out to sea to wait for the next Category 5 storm, you put it on wheels or, better yet, make it hover on its own aeolian power, after which you let it loose on your own private national park, totally misunderstanding the idea that disasters — like wildfires — can sometimes be beneficial and are actually an essential part of an ecosystem.
There, it will scour the landscape like a runaway garden-variety water hose, level trees as if inspired by the Tunguska event or Mount St. Helens post-1980, carve out a new drainage basin, reconfigure ecology with weather.
Shedding all pretense of humanitarianism, then, Josef Solc will probably have to find private individuals to fund his project, for instance, a Hollywood celebrity who wants to balance out his well-publicized acts of philanthropy with something that's completely bizarre (even by the standards of Michael Jackson), something that's disgustingly but forgivably selfish like buying one humongous toy.
Why buy silly motorcycles or start up yet another nightclub where you idle your time and money away when you could divert at least a part of your generous profit-sharing deal to making experimental landscapes. And by experimental landscapes we don't mean building artificial volcanoes in the middle of some pimped out Olympic-size swimming pool — though if it did actually spew out part of the Earth's core, that could be interesting.
Not that he has shown other overriding interests apart from furthering his metrosexual lifestyle but we think it would be fantastic to learn nonetheless that David Beckham has bought a sizable chunk of Public Lands in Nevada and plans to retire there as an avant-gardener. Instead of attending present and future Spice Girls reunion concerts, he's out there playing with his anti-hurricane toy, recreating storms past, designing new landscapes.
Instead of Britney Spears as the paradigm for celebrity living, there is a shift towards François Nicolas Henri Racine de Monville as a model for conspicuous consumption.
Obviously, Josef Solc need not ingratiate himself to an eccentric denizen of Los Angeles as there must be a private hedge fund manager, recently flushed with millions of dollars from rising oil prices, who is willing to patronize him, thus initiating the most fruitful patron-artist relationship of the age and engendering some of the most interesting landscape architecture ever — a collaboration not seen since the Sun King hired Le Nôtre or maybe since the popes hired Michelangelo and his contemporaries to remodel the Eternal City.
Instead of buying the latest Hermès satchel, you buy a weather machine.
Here are a couple of snapshots taken from DeLaval's business presentation for its milking rotaries, the TURN-STYLES™ PR1100 and PR2100. During the brief seconds when the camera locks in on the “parlours” as they slowly twirl about their bovine passengers, industrial food production is transformed (un)expectedly into a Busby Berkeley's musical number.
In their precisely calibrated choreography, these elegantly designed machines are undeniably mesmerizing. Singularities subsumed by symmetry and repetition, merged wholly into a patterned geometry. Frolic and hypnotic spectacle together side by side with cooly modernist efficiency. And though the rotaries do not appear to conflict with Cartesian topography, any sense of site and context can be nullified if you ignore the spoken and textual commentaries in the videos.
But perhaps they can still defy gravity. Rotate them fast enough and they will detach, a gyroscopicwhirligig on its way to a dairy farm halfway across the world. With cows still on board.
Or better yet, for one week each year, the cows are replaced by these bloggers plus Kazys Varnelis, who are herded daily and singly into the compartments to blog whatever they want to write about while they are turned and “pampered” until they are returned exactly one hour later. And for anyone who did not produce an interesting post by the deadline, the abattoir awaits. Such is the brutal nature of the blogosphere.
When Jardinators have lived out their usefulness, they apparently go to pasture in Ferropolis.
Located right in the middle of a former open-pit mine near the city of Dessau, in Bauhaus country, it is part open air museum and part multimedia venue inhabited by monolithic machines, perhaps belonging to the same species that had turned the surrounding landscape into a post-industrial desert.
Meant to be “an ominous monument and symbol of the extensive exploitation of the countryside and the ecological consequences of doing so,” this City of Iron “also represents a new start in dealing with nature and the countryside. It is an attempt, at the end of an epoch, to create new perspectives for a landscape depleted by industrial exploitation. It is also an attempt to find answers to what are currently two of the most frequently asked questions: where is structural change in the region leading, and what will a post-industrial cultural landscape look like?”
And of course, there's Niall Kirkwood's Manufactured Sites. It's no coffee table book, and maybe a little bit technical for the lay person, but it's an incredibly important book.
Meanwhile, we read that there are only five mechano-titans. Surely that isn't enough. There should be at least 1,000, either arranged like the formal aeronautical gardens at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base or irregularly, an inorganic forest waiting for Bangladeshi migrant loggers and for descendants of the Brothers Grimm to pen new fairy tales.
Hypertechnological innovation has always underpin American agriculture. In the later half of the 1800s, for instance, flotillas of proto-steampunkdredge boats plowed through the Illinois landscape, as their their lived-in land-sailors carved canals, straightened rivers and re-knitted its embryonic, post-glacial hydrology, draining and transforming the weedy, swampy, supposedly pestilential swat of the American prairie into the most productive landscape in the world.
More recently, a new form of agricultural practice has been developed. Called precision farming, it entails using some of the most advanced remote sensing technology and analytical tools out there. These include aerial and satellite imagery, global positioning systems (GPS), sensors and information management tools (GIS). It isn't quite clear yet, however, if blogging, RSS feeds, Twitter and MySpace are involved.
But armed with actual precision farming gears, farmers can tell which part of their croplands need more water and fertilizer and are then guided precisely to these troubled spots. In this way, less resources is used and what gets used is applied more efficiently.
Now we learn, from an article published by Wired and another by the Associated Press, that troops of robotic harvesters are being readied to invade America's industrial orchards and vegetable fields.
On these mechano-hydras, the AP writes:
Mechanized picking wouldn't be new for some California crops such as canning tomatoes, low-grade wine grapes and nuts.
But the fresh produce that dominates the state's agricultural output - and that consumers expect to find unblemished in supermarkets - is too fragile to be picked by the machines now in use.
The new pickers rely on advances in computing power and hydraulics that can make robotic limbs and digits operate with near-human sensitivity. Modern imaging technology also enables the machines to recognize and sort fruits and vegetables of varying qualities.
Wired goes into more details. At an orange orchard, we read, “two robots would work as a team: one an eagle-eyed scout, the other a metallic octopus with a gentle touch. The first robot will scan the tree and build a 3-D map,” after which “it has to evaluate each piece of fruit. What size is the orange? What color is it? Does it have black spots on it?”
After the fruits have been digitized and evaluated, the scout robot will then determine “the best order in which to pick them. It sends that information to the second robot, a harvester that will pick the tree clean, following a planned sequence that keeps its eight long arms from bumping into each other.”
If we forgo the important issues of migrant labor, illegal immigration, social justice, food security and even globalization, which the creation and deployment of these machines do touch upon, we are left to wonder what would happen, assuming they are networked to the interweb, if they were hacked?
What if China, fresh from infiltrating computers in the Pentagon, were to take control of a platoon of these fruit-picking robots? What if the People's Liberation Army, instead of killing our dear Mister Snagglepuss and cuddly Lady Grizabella by exporting tainted pet foods, they do it by injecting neurotoxins into our locally grown produce?
Or what if an installation artist who's been rejected by one too many Manhattan art galleries decides to take his work to a different direction and takes full control of an entire division of pneumatic farmhands? Onto the flat terrain of Kansas he grafts a sort of anti-Jeffersonian grid, whatever that may be. He then carves out a second Double Negative, a homage, right next to the original. And having decided to try his hand on performance art, the artist terrorizes James Turrell at Roden Crater, Turrell's maniacal screams reverberating through the stellar tunnels of his unfinished volcanic observatory; the recording of this will be phoned in to +1 (206) 337-1474.
Even more interesting, what will happen if they become self-aware and go out to pasture? Fitted with solar panels, grazing from one oil well to another, domiciling in abandoned gold mines, what new ecologies will they terraform?
To cap our unintended series of posts on sacred landscapes, let us point you first to contour crafting, a fabrication technology being developed by Behrokh Khoshnevis whereby “a single house or a colony of houses, each with possibly a different design, may be automatically constructed in a single run, embedded in each house all the conduits for electrical, plumbing and air-conditioning.”
And then to Gallica, from where you can download the following images of Etienne-Louis Boullée's designs for tombs and memorials.
It's rather unfortunate that Khoshnevis and Boullée did not live in same century. What beautiful collaborations they might have had.
And everyone could easily have ordered cheap Pharaonic mausoleums towering over cities and landscapes. Entire provinces or states or even whole nations becoming literally valleys of the dead, hosting hundreds of encapsulated monumental voids.
“Why build a one-off ride that will eventually lose its appeal when you can create an infinite number of rides by using a programmable industrial robot?” asks gizmag.
Indeed, why go through all the trouble of clearing the last remaining stands of old-growth forest to make way for amusement parks that would only further unsustainable ex-urban development and extend travel time for gas-guzzling über-SUVs, when you could be building them, say, in the Loop or Millennium Park in Chicago as an interactive kinetic sculpture?
Quoting the article at length: “German company KUKA Roboter GmbH builds industrial robots for the automotive, aerospace and foundry industries, among others. Its fully-programmable 5- and 6-axis robots can reach of up to 3.7 metres with payloads of 570kg and are employed around the world for applications such as material handling and machine loading. Kuka has partnered with Canada’s Primal Rides to provide a new fully interactive amusement ride. The KUKA KR 500 robot will be used as the building block of Primal Rides’ new robotic gaming ride. The interactive ride can be designed to match customer’s requirements in theme, intensity and realism and to cost effectively change themes to adjust to rider appeal.”
And you can order the rides singly or as a whole group of Robocoasters, “each with its infinite range of programming options and ride variants: lined up in a row and performing the same acrobatic ride program in perfect harmony.”
Or you can order the Octomone, a swirling, gyrating mass of mechanized tentacles not that taxonomically different from a triffid.
![Agrobots](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCE0DjZfBWyOpknLpkxJmrCkiWTmK3vKjroxicgm10_7QPU4AEpCLEa28-1B3aAEVEWZCuk5pzdYCMAnReAE0Atc60_pLwDDCS8noJrPHa8G9i1Jc7Lha1ligviMGIMQ6EilPD7Nfd35I/s800/070909_hacking_4.jpg")
