Wednesday, November 23. 2011
Whilst we are pretty much all aware of the implications of 3-D printing as a process of making any arbitrary object at the push of a button, it is exactly what living organisms have been up to since the invention of multicellular life.
Designers at IDEO have teamed up with scientists at the Lim Lab at the University of California, San Francisco to envision a “provocation” (that’s designer-ese for thought experiment) in which they explore the possibilities of exploiting known properties of microorganisms to literally “grow” the products we use every day.
What is particularly interesting about these future scenarios is where we once thought about computer systems that evolve through immense network of both physical and conceptual parameters, where one influence the other as in the case of Nervous System’s process of “growing objects”, the process of printing may eventually evolve into processes of actual physical growing. These two systems, of digital creation and of the biological one may eventually merge, creating an ecology of both digital and physical networks that communicate and feed of one another.
“One day if we understand how to program [living organisms,] we can encode things beyond software–we could encode materiality” says Carey. “That’s already happening in nature, but we have no idea how to do that ourselves.”
Time to move away from mimicry?
Read more on Fast Company >Training Bacteria To Grow Consumer Goods
More on this topic at syntheticaesthetics.org
Tuesday, November 22. 2011
Via The Guardian via WMMNA
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Going to waste … Philips is bringing methane back in the kitchen design for its new Microbial Home, which features a bio-digester (centre)
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But if Bulthaup is modernism taken to its logical extreme, what if everything modernism taught us about the kitchen is wrong? What if bacteria and manual labour are the future of the kitchen? Philips recently unveiled a concept kitchen as part of its Microbial Home system, in which the central component is a bio-digester kitchen island. The idea is simple: bacteria digests food and toilet waste and turns it into methane gas for cooking and lighting. It's a self-sustaining domestic ecosystem, and it presents an alternative vision to the clinical kitchen, inviting the microbes and the rotting vegetable peel back in.
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More about it on The Guardian.
Personal comment:
An interesting and funny article by Justin McGuirck about modernism, Orwell, Reyner Banham and... the kitchen!
Via GeekOSystem via Computed·Blg
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A new installation at the Amsterdam Foam gallery by Erik Kessels takes a literal look at the digital deluge of photos online by printing out 24 hours worth of uploads to Flickr. The result is rooms filled with over 1,000,000 printed photos, piled up against the walls.
There’s a sense of waste and a maddening disorganization to it all, both of which are apparently intentional. According to Creative Review, Kessels said of his own project:
“We’re exposed to an overload of images nowadays,” says Kessels. “This glut is in large part the result of image-sharing sites like Flickr, networking sites like Facebook, and picture-based search engines. Their content mingles public and private, with the very personal being openly and un-selfconsciously displayed. By printing all the images uploaded in a 24-hour period, I visualise the feeling of drowning in representations of other peoples’ experiences.”
Humbling, and certainly thought provoking, Kessel’s work challenges the notion that everything can and should be shared, which has become fundamental to the modern web. Then again, perhaps it’s only wasteful and overwhelming when you print all the pictures and divorce them from their original context.
Monday, November 21. 2011
Via ArchDaily
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de Karissa Rosenfield
Haruka Kojin, Contact Lens; Photo © DAICI ANO
The computerization and urbanization of the 21st century is creating new lifestyles and forms of public space. Architectural Environments for Tomorrow presents the spatial experiments of 23 architects and artists from around the world responding to the transformation of their surroundings. “The metaphors of the world-views suggested by the artists resonate with the practical proposals of the architects, presenting images of future humanity from a variety of different angles.” Architects featured include Toyo Ito, Frank O. Gehry, Sou Fujimoto and many more.
Continue reading for a complete list of the participants and more information on the exhibit.
El Anatsui, Garden Wall; Photo © DAICI ANO
The creative minds participating in the exhibit react to natural disasters, such as the 3.11 earthquake or current political and social unease felt throughout the world. The exhibit will “present the discoveries that are made when universal architectural expression, inspired by the diverse experiences and ideas of people, nature and society, both in Japan and around the world, are fused with local wisdom and technology.”
Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA Rolex learning center EPFL; Photo © DAICI ANO
Architects + Artists Participating:
AMID.cero 9
El Anatsui
The Ministry of Culture of The Kingdom of Bahrain
Petra Blaisse
Doug+Mike Starn
Sou Fujimoto
Antón García-Abril
Frank O. Gehry
gelitin
Hiroshi Hara + Roland Hagenberg
Akihisa Hirata
Junya Ishigami
Toyo Ito
Christian Kerez
Haruka Kojin
Tetsuo Kondo
Luisa Lambri
Office Kersten Geers David Van Severen
Piet Oudolf
Smiljan Radic
Matthew Ritchie with Aranda/Lasch, Daniel Bosia & Arup AGU
Kazuyo Sejima+Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA
Matthias Schuler+Transsolar
selgascano
Studio Mumbai
Fiona Tan
Wim Wenders
The exhibit will conclude on January 15th, 2012.
Visit the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo for more information.
Matthew Ritchie with Aranda/Lasch, Daniel Bosia & Arup AGU, The Dawn Line; Photo © DAICI ANO
Friday, November 18. 2011
Via @chrstphggnrd
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A curious project and fake old book about the future that Christophe Guignard pointed out to me. Designed as an exhibition project by designer/photographer Cameron Baxter.
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