A Utah-based startup company called Chamtech Operations is claiming that its Spray On Antenna Kit can turn any surface into a high-powered antenna.
As explained by Anthony Sutera in the video below of his presentation at Google's Solve for X event, “Our material uses thousands of nano-capacitors that we can spray paint on in the right pattern. All of these little capacitors charge and discharge extremely quickly in real time and they don't create any heat. When we hook up our material to a radio, the signal hops from capacitor to capacitor very quickly, finds its happy spot, and launches into space.”
Imagine painting wireless antennas on walls. Instead of planting them as fake trees or simply uncamouflaged, phone companies will blend their unsightly cell towers into the landscape. They could even commission artists like Haas & Hahn to turn the city as though fully draped with Joseph's Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
Alternatively, they could enlist children from local elementary schools to reconfigure the city's electromagnetic infrascape in exchange for very plump donations. Is that mural on that once seamy but now chromatically resplendent underpass depicting the neighborhood's tempestuous history and encouraging future, their parents will ask. Why yes, they'll answer back, and you can also bounce phone calls off of it.
Elsewhere, graffiti artists will independently fill in the dead zones. Or maybe not to patch up the network, but rather as part of a collaboration with sound artists to create a pop-up pirate radio station to broadcast an improvisational audio documentary of the local area. During times of protest, they could be used to burst through whatever electromagnetic kettling the security forces might be using to prevent the crowds from organizing and reaching critical mass. If there's no graffiti antenna nearby, just whip out a Spray On Antenna Kit to reclaim the public spectrum.
In any case, I'd like those “nut jobs” at DEMILIT given some of the stuff and see how they might use it in one of their sonic tours of military landscapes. Will they spray it on crumbling bunkers and derelict silos, thus repurposing them into antennas to transmit in real-time the acoustic ecology of war?
What might avant-gardeners, who presumably already know how to harness energy from trees, do with the stuff if they find out that you can also apply them to trees and turn them into arboreal arrays?
Trees broadcasting themselves singing. An entire national park airing an epic botanical opera. The Amazon sending messages to exoplanets.
With every passing project I feel like my basement is being converted from a living only area, to a work and project area. Computers being built, gadgets being taken apart, Lego projects all around. I’m not complaining by any means, but I do feel as my basement becomes populated with more and more tech based projects that the environment is missing something organic, something natural to balance things out.
… at some point I started wanting to use the heat from a computer as a way to warm the soil and help with germination/growth. I’m about as far from a botanist as it comes, I did some reading online and became pretty interested in the effects of soil temperature on germination/growth. I read different studies and papers from various universities. It was not too long into that process that I became hooked on the idea of using computer heat as a way to control the soil temperature of some sort of living plant life.
Alexander Trevi (Pruned) presented a couple of month ago the idea of "gardens as crypto computers". What about, in addition, burrying full datacenters (therefore "clouds" infrastructure) underground, use their generated heat to grow entire fields of crops or else in the country side (or in the city side)? Even so I've no idea how far ground heat as a positive or negative effect on crops...
*In contemporary practice, I guess this Vurb verbiage from FutureEverywhere boils down to “my pocket keeps beeping all the time,” but, well, of course in a network society you can take everyone you know and everyone you own, and scatter them across the planet’s surface. Especially if they already did that with you.
“In the background there are at the same time deeper, more systemic developments taking place: high-speed internet access, ubicomp, cloud computing, sensor networks, big data, etc.. And out of these, some weird, boutique threads that are relevant to spatial practice, like the 3D printing of rooms, robots weaving buildings, self-driving cars, domestic drones, urban operating systems and nonhuman cities.
“A few weeks ago, my dear friend Ben Cerveny stopped over in Amsterdam for a weekend on his way to Geneva. For a few years, Ben had been living in Amsterdam for some months a year, traveling back to San Francisco and Los Angeles after summer and returning to Amsterdam after winter. (((No wonder I keep running into that Cerveny guy all the time.)))
“It had almost been two years since we last saw each other, but because we have constantly been in touch via Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram and iChat, I felt like it had been only yesterday. When I explained this to Ben, he immediately said, without stopping to think about what he was saying, ‘oh of course: the continuous partial everywhere.’
“And that is exactly it. The continous partial everywhere is the aspatial experience of simultaneity in immediate media. I am in the city where my friends are at the same as the one where I am myself. The city for me is no longer only a city in space, but now also a city in time. An aspatial city, without distances, in a kind of aspace….”
In Charles Fishman's compelling exploration of water on Earth, The Big Thirst, there is a shocking statement that, despite the apparent inexhaustibility of the oceans, "the total water on the surface of Earth (the oceans, the ice caps, the atmospheric water) makes up 0.025 percent of the mass of the planet—25/10,000ths of the stuff of Earth. If the Earth were the size of a Honda Odyssey minivan," he clarifies, "the amount of water on the planet would be in a single, half-liter bottle of Poland Spring in one of the van's thirteen cup holders."
This is rather remarkably communicated by an illustration from the USGS, reproduced above, showing "the size of a sphere that would contain all of Earth's water in comparison to the size of the Earth." That's not a lot of water.
Only vaguely related, meanwhile, there is an additional description in Fishman's book worth repeating here.
[Image: The Orion nebula, photographed by Hubble].
In something called the Orion Molecular Cloud, truly vast amounts of water are being produced. How much? Incredibly, Fishman explains, "the cloud is making sixty Earth waters every twenty-four hours"—or, in simpler terms, "there is enough water being formed sufficient to fill all of Earth's oceans every twenty-four minutes." This is occurring, however, in an area "420 times the size of our solar system."
Anyway, Fishman's book is pretty fascinating, in particular his chapter, called "Dolphins in the Desert," on the water reuse and filtration infrastructure installed over the past 10-15 years in Las Vegas.
[The Placer County Courthouse, in Auburn, California -- imagine it swarmed by a glitch jam.]
NPR reported this morning(ed. note: last morning due to the repost) on a traffic jam in California caused by an algorithmic glitch “accidentally summon[ing] 1,200 people to jury duty on the same morning”. An excellent reminder of the tendency of algorithmic dysfunction to manifest as physical dysfunction, and (at a relatively small scale) of the potentially disproportionate impact of glitches when they are translated from dataspace into an infrastructural system. The glitch may be as simple as having accidentally swapped the 0 indicating “do not come in” for the 1 indicating “come in”, but the resulting jam is rendered in aluminum autobodies and on asphalt corridors where it is much more difficult to clear than it was to create.
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