[Image: "Endothelium" by Philip Beesley & Hayley Isaacs].
I mentioned a recent issue of Mark Magazine the other day, but I deliberately saved one of the articles for a stand-alone post later on. That article was a long profile of the work of Philip Beesley, a Toronto-based architect and sculptor, whose project the "Implant Matrix" BLDGBLOG covered several years ago.
In issue #21 of Mark, author Terri Peters describes several of Beesley's projects, but it's the "Endothelium" that really stood out (and that you see pictured here).
[Image: "Endothelium" by Philip Beesley & Hayley Isaacs].
Peters refers to Beesley's work as a "lightweight landscape of moving, licking, breathing and swallowing geotextile mesh" – a kind of pornography of ornament, or the Baroque by way of David Cronenberg. "Inspired by coral reefs," she continues, "with their cycles of opening, clamping, filtering and digesting," Beesley's biomechanical sculpture-spaces are "immersive theatre environments" in which "wheezing air pumps create an environment with no clear beginning or end."
I'm reminded of the penultimate scene in James Cameron's film Aliens, when Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) meets the alien "queen." The queen is laying eggs, we see, through a gigantic, semi-prosthetic, peristaltically-powered external ovarian sac – and the scene exemplifies the encounter with the grotesque in all its H.R. Giger-influenced, sci-fi extremes. Put another way, if organisms, too – not just buildings – can reach a point of ornamental excess, then James Cameron's aliens are perhaps exhibit number one.
[Images: Screen grabs from James Cameron's Aliens].
In any case, Beesley's work is a fascinating hybrid of advanced textile design, geostructural modeling, and rogue biology experiment. Peters's descriptions of the "Endothelium" are worth quoting at length:
[The structure consists of] a field of organic "bladders" that are self-powered and that move very slowly, self-burrowing, self-fertilizing and are linked by 3D printed joints and thin bamboo scaffolding. The bladders are powered using mobile phone vibrators and have LED lights. It works by using tiny gel packs of yeast which burst and fertilize the geotextile.
This latter detail – "using tiny gel packs of yeast which burst and fertilize the geotextile" – brings to mind something at the intersection of an improvised explosive device (or IED) and a green roof: you hire Philip Beesley to design a landscape-machine for installation atop a new building downtown, and, over the course of many decades, it vibrates, yeast-bursts, rotates, crawls, and grows through extraordinary cycles of grotesque architectural fertility. A solar-powered landscape of mold and microroots, generating its own soil. Within a few years, the original sculpture it all came from is gone, archaeologically undetectable beneath the vitality of the forms that have consumed it.
[Images: "Endothelium" by Philip Beesley & Hayley Isaacs].
Elsewhere in the article, Peters writes:
Endothelium is an automated geotextile, a lightweight and sculptural field housing arrays of organic batteries within a lattice system that might reinforce new growth. It uses a dense series of thin "whiskers" and burrowing leg mechanisms to support low-power miniature lights, pulsing and shifting in slight increments. Within this distributed matrix, microbial growth is fostered by enriched seed-patches housed within nest-like forms, sheltered beneath the main lattice units.
I'm a bit rhetorically stuck on "between" statements, I'm afraid, but it's as if Beesley's work falls somewhere between a loaf of sourdough bread and a sculpture by JeanTinguely.
[Image: "Endothelium" by Philip Beesley & Hayley Isaacs].
I'm curious, meanwhile, if you could bury a Philip Beesley sculpture in the woods of rural England somewhere, and allowed it to articulate new ecosystems slowly, over the cyclic course of generations. In fact, I'm reminded of an article in the New York Times last week, spotted via mammoth, in which we learn that two abandoned landfills in Brooklyn have since been used as unlikely foundations for new ecosystems:
In a $200 million project, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection covered the Fountain Avenue Landfill and the neighboring Pennsylvania Avenue Landfill with a layer of plastic, then put down clean soil and planted 33,000 trees and shrubs at the two sites. The result is 400 acres of nature preserve, restoring native habitats that disappeared from New York City long ago.
"Once the plants take hold," the article adds, "nature will be allowed to take its course, evolving the land into microclimates." But what if those weren't landfills down there but sculptures by Philip Beesley? Strategically sown seed-patches and gel packs of yeast wait underground for new roots to rediscover them.
It's living geostatuary, buried beneath the surface of the earth – a kind of extreme agriculture, with soil-preparation by Philip Beesley.
[Images: "Endothelium" by Philip Beesley & Hayley Isaacs].
I'd genuinely like to see what Beesley might do if he was hired by, say, a NASA R&D program dedicated to terraforming other planets. Could you fly a modular, self-unfolding Philip Beesley sculpture into the depths of radiative space, land it on a planet somewhere, and watch as revolting pools of bacteriological mucus begin to coagulate and form new fungi? Beesley's whiskered vibrators begin to shiver with signs of piezoelectric life, as small crystals surrounded by radio transmitters and genetically engineerined space-seed-patches imperceptibly tremble, evolving into mutation-prone "organic batteries" unprotected beneath starlight. Give it a thousand years, and vast infected forests, the width of continents, take hold.
You've colonized a distant planet through architecture and yeast.
For more, check out Mark Magazine's issue #21. Beesley's also got a book out, called Hylozoic Soil, that I would love to read.
Personal comment:
Bien qu'"ornemental", pas très engageant comme environnement... Mais intéressant dans cette idée d'un système mi-architectural, mi biologique. un dispositif que l'on pourrait imaginer habitable, ngagé dans des processus d'échanges et d'évolutions avec ses habitants et avec l'environnement.
"The installation „capacitive body“ reacts to the sound of its environment. Each custom built module consists of a high bright electroluminescent wire, a piezoelectric sensor and a microcontroller. For a first setup at the Tschumi Pavilion (Groningen, NL) a sensor was attached on each side of the pavilion‘s glass shell, whose vibrations are triggered by the ambient noise of its surroundings. The sensor data is transformed into the light behaviour of each wire. A dynamic light space is thereby created, which gives visual feedback of the aural activity around the installation."
L'aspect interactif du projet ("transcrit l'activité alentour" -en utilisant ici aussi les vibrations-) est peut-être aujourd'hui à proscrire: on a vu en effet siffisamment de projets qui "transcrivent l'activité alentours" (y compris des projets de fabric | ch). Par contre, l'aspect visuel de la densité du mesh me fait penser un peu à quelques idées de projets que nous av(i)ons. Je pense à Electroscape 005 ou plutôt Camera & Gunshot Tracking Pavilion!
The device harnesses both sunlight and mechanical energy.
By Katherine Bourzac
Nano hybrid: A dye-sensitized solar cell (top) and a nanogenerator (bottom) sit on the same substrate in the new device.
Credit: Xudong Wang
Nanoscale generators can turn ambient mechanical energy--vibrations, fluid flow, and even biological movement--into a power source. Now researchers have combined a nanogenerator with a solar cell to create an integrated mechanical- and solar-energy-harvesting device. This hybrid generator is the first of its kind and might be used, for instance, to power airplane sensors by capturing sunlight as well as engine vibrations.
Nanogenerators typically use piezoelectric nanowires--hairlike zinc oxide structures that generate an electrical potential when mechanically stressed--to produce small amounts of power. The first such devices were made by Zhong Lin Wang, a professor at Georgia Tech and director of the institute's Center for Nanostructure Characterization. Wang hopes that nanogenerators will one day eliminate the need for batteries in implantable medical sensors, and will eventually generate enough power to charge up larger personal electronics.
Compared with solar cells, nanogenerators are still a relatively inefficient way of harvesting energy, says Wang, but "sometimes solar energy isn't available." So he collaborated with Xudong Wang, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to make the new hybrid device.
It combines two previously developed technologies in a layered silicon substrate, both of which rely on zinc oxide nanowires. The top layer consists of a thin-film solar cell embedded with dye-coated zinc oxide nanowires. The large surface area of the nanowires boosts the device's light absorption, a design based on work by Peidong Yang, a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. The bottom layer contains Wang's nanogenerator. On the underside of the silicon is a jagged array of polymer-coated zinc oxide nanowires in a toothlike arrangement. When the device is exposed to vibrations, these "teeth" scrape against an underlying array of vertically aligned zinc oxide nanowires, creating an electrical potential.
The solar cell and the nanogenerator are electrically connected by the silicon substrate itself, which acts as both the anode of the solar cell and the cathode of the nanogenerator. It is possible to string together large groups of solar cells and nanogenerators, but having them integrated in a single system takes up less space and is therefore energy efficient. The prototype device can generate 0.6 volts of solar power and 10 millivolts of piezoelectric power. While the prototype device had only one nanogenerator, Wang expects to increase the power output by creating devices with multiple layers of nanogenerators. He says that a likely first application of these devices might be in sensor-laden military aircraft. The U.S. Air Force recently issued a call for research funding proposals related to hybrid energy-scavenging devices.
Charles Lieber, a professor of chemistry at Harvard University, says that Wang's device is "creative" and is, to his knowledge, the first hybrid nanoscale device capable of harvesting two types of energy. "That is particularly important, given that one is light active, while the other can work in the dark," says Lieber. He expects Wang's work to inspire other researchers to focus on hybrid nanogenerator devices, as well as on devices that combine nanogenerators with "complementary nano-enabled power storage."
Eco Factor: Generator harnessing energy produced in multiple places on a bike.
Biking, as we all know, is one of the most ecofriendly ways to commute from one place to another, and if eco car technologies don’t hit in time, we might see more and more people going to their offices on these simple yet amazing machines. Deco Goodman wants to take the eco-benefits of bike riding to a whole new level with a device he calls the Commuter Cyclists Sustainable Energy Source.
Goodman believes that the dependence on a centralized electric grid is a thing of the past and every individual should resort to renewable energy sources if we really want to see a brighter planet. To keep things rolling, he has designed a generator that can harness the energy produced in different places on the bike to charge a storage unit located in the rear tail-light assembly.
The generator uses the energy gained from compression, braking, going downhill, and even bumps on the road. For this the design makes use of a tower of piezoelectric chips as shock absorbers. These chips, when moved in any manner generate electricity, which in turn charges a portable storage unit for your everyday power needs.
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