PIMP MY PLANET from STUDIO SMACK on Vimeo.

“We live in a time where everything or everyone can be upgraded or ‘pimped’. After the worldwide acceptance of plastic surgery, it was time to subject our worldly possessions (Pimp my Ride) and digital identities (Facebook) to an esthetical and/or functional upgrade. So it’s likely that eventually everything will be pimp-able. Even our own planet.”

The PIMP MY PLANET video, created the good people of Studio Smack, explores the possibilities of redesigning our planet according to ideals or aesthetic values. It is the wet dream of every modernist – I bet Mondriaan would have liked this – and then you wake up and realize that maakbaarheid is never finished and with every attempt to cultivate nature, a next nature arises that is wild and unpredictable as ever.

Related: If the implications of Global Warming were fair, Fight climate change, hack the planet, Ancient Man impacted environment already, Doggerland – mapping a lost world, Unfolding the Earth.

Geo engineering, Hypernature, Manufactured Landscapes, Plastic Fantastic, Technorhetoric

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Via NextNature

Personal comment:

Farming, industrialisation and more recently tourism, mobility (goods and people), production and therefore globalization have turned our planet into an artificial environment. Built up in a way, under a partially unplanned and iterative process.
Maybe more recently has it become more planned, through globalisation: production of this item into this country (due to low costs of goods and/or human workforce, "good political conditions", good knowledge, etc.), transportation here, selling there. Headquarters in this "low taxes" country, etc.

The problem is that this "planning" (called zoning) approach has failed in cities and landscapes in the late 60ies, revealed itself depleting (due to poor flexibility, diversity and variations) and that there are no reasons why it won't fail in the exact same way at the global level (in fact, it already starts to fail).

This means: we have to start "planning" our planet and come up with fresh theories and "earth architectures" for that! This approach might have to take into account (in disorder, non-exhaustive) weather and seasons, social aspects, technologies, cities, landscapes, architecture, resources, energy, food and goods production, sustainability, tourism, consumption, politics and economy, mobility, sustainability, birth control, satellites, (protection of) fauna and flora, information & communication, networks, physics, ethics, philosophy, psychology, etc.

Huge work...

Trillions from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers”, a remark made by Thomas J. Watson of IBM in 1943. But what if the number of computing devices connected to each other would reach the number of one trillion? A short animation.

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Via NextNature

Personal comment:

I like the sentence "people in information" and not "information in the computers" which could become our future. Another way to speak about ubiquitous computing.

As we bid farewell to 2009, it’s a good time to look back at our explorations of the year. Here are some of our most popular and peculiar posts, in case you missed them the first time around.

1. The Comeback of the ‘ugly’ fruits

As of July 2009, the European Commission abolished more than two dozen laws that have stipulated the look of Europe’s fruit and vegetables for the past 20 years. The rules stipulated that only the most perfect-looking produce adorns supermarket shelves and caused international ridicule by stating that all bananas must be “free of abnormal curvature” and at least 14 cm in length. Perhaps in the long run, historians will consider this as the official end of modernity.

2. Children’s dictionary dumps ‘nature’ words

To make way for modern tech terms such as BlackBerry, blog, voicemail and broadband, the latest edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary has opted to drop terms pertaining to old nature. No longer can a child check this dictionary and learn more about the blackberry, dandelion, acorn, heron, otter or willow. While words like voicemail, MP3 player, attachment, database, and chatroom are added. Nature changes along with us.

3. Boomeranged Metaphors

At the start of the digital era, metaphors from everyday life were used in order to make otherwise incomprehensible technology acceptable – think of the digital highway, windows, folders, buttons and trashcan. Nowadays, the digital environment is accepted almost everywhere and we see how proven concepts from the digital realm are gradually seeping into our physical environment. We call this phenomenon a ‘boomeranged metaphor’.

4. Virtual Money - cows, coins, credit, airtime

Heard the buzz on virtual money in online games? Some years ago the first virtual millionaire was announced, yet there have also been reports on people being  practically enslaved to farm virtual gold. The Chinese government recently announced to limit the use of ‘virtual’ currencies. An essay on the virtuality of money.

5. Michael Jacksons appearance in heaven

Our beloved King of Pop, Michael Jackson, who died tragically this year, throughout his career, he underwent countless groundbreaking cosmetic operations. Using childhood photo’s of Michael and knowledge on basic aging trends, forensic artists constructed a portrait of how Michael would have looked at age 50, had he never undergone plastic surgery. The difference between the portraits is striking. But which is the real Michael? The man of flesh and blood, sculpted by plastic surgeons or the highly speculative forensic image? Both Michaels are virtual in their own right.

6. Why are carrots orange? It is political

For ages carrots used be white, yellow, red and purple – and in some regions of the world they still are. Yet, orange has become the dominant color in most countries. Why is that? Its political: in the 17th century, Dutch growers cultivated orange carrots as a tribute to William of Orange – who lead the the struggle for Dutch independence – and the color stuck. Hypervegetables avant la lettre.

7. Plastic Birds

Bird spotting is not a typical activity for us next nature explorers, yet these ‘plastic’ birds spotted by photographer Chris Jordan are the most macabre thus far. One wonders what Darwin would have thought of these Albatross babies fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents. Are we ready for a plastic planet?

8. Designing Bugs that Eat Plastic

With the great pacific garbage patch now twice the size of Texas and over 500 billion plastic bags produced a year – which take about a 1000 years to decompose – plastic is well on its way of becoming a basic material in the Earths ecosystem. Perhaps in the long run microbes would evolve to digest plastics. But why wait for evolution? 16-year old high school student Daniel Burd already developed a microorganism that can rapidly biodegrade plastic.

9. Cavemen impacted environment already

The human environmental impact on our planet is hardly underestimated nowadays. Untouched old nature is almost nowhere to be found anymore besides perhaps some small areas on the South pole, in the deep sea or if one looks up at the stars – although the brighter ones may well be satellites. “We were here”, is written all over. So when did the writing begin? Much earlier than thought.

10. Doggerland – a lost world

So you think climate change is new? So you think the flooding of landmass by the oceans is a new? So you must have not heard of the times when people walked from London to Amsterdam.

11. Modern Fossils

So what happened to that old floppy drive, ipod or tape recorder? Time to dig up some of those modern fossils.

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Via NextNature

The shrinking size of electronics allows for the implantation of increasingly sophisticated electronic devices in the human body, paving the way for new prosthetics and brain-machine interfaces – think of the speculative phone tooth, conductive body paint or the brain-twitter interface. But so far a big challenge has been how to deliver power to electronic components embedded within the body.

While currently applied devices, such as cochlea or retinal implants, rely on inductive coupling, which means the power source needs to be centimeters away, engineers at Brown University have now developed an implantable neural sensing chip that is powered via a radio source that can be up to a meter away. The technology is similar to the equipment used to power and read information from radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags.

So far, the technology has only been tested to measure neural activity in moths, but of course “the real challenges and application potential emerge in work with primates.” says Arto Nurmikko, professor of engineering at Brown University. Another small step in the diminishing of the border between people and products.

Via Techreview. Image credit: Brian Otis. Related:  Implantable Silk Electronics, phone tooth, Metalosis Maligna.

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Via NextNature