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Sunday, September 2, 2007
Parked right now till 28 October 2007 at the Doris C. Freeman Plaza in Central Park is Damián Ortega's Obelisco Transportable, a 20-foot-tall “'mobile landmark' that one could potentially move anywhere to commemorate anything.”
Is is “a nod to the ways in which public sculptures and monuments have historically been moved from one city to another. Ortega describes this as the 'Napoleonic gesture,' in which the wartime victor plunders the monuments of captured cities and brings them back home to be installed in public there as a symbol of victory. Such transfers were meant to signal the rise of a new power and the demise of an older one, as well as an exchange of central and peripheral positions. Cleopatra's Needle in Central Park, for example, was originally created in Heliopolis, the ancient Egyptian city, more than 3,000 years ago. During the time of the Roman Empire, it was moved to Alexandria, where it remained for almost two millennia before being offered to the United States as a gift in the 19th century.”
We can't help here suggesting that Ortega should give Ikea permission to mass produce and sell his reusable memorials, because, firstly, we like to imagine them multiplying exponentially in public spaces everywhere (and no, there is still not nearly enough memorials), and, secondly, we also like the image of people scouring the city—a sort of pre-funerary cortege mixed in with some urban sightseeing—for an abandoned obelisk, one commemorating something already forgotten in the collective memory and thus can now be reused.
Other scenarios abound. For instance, one day of the year, those obelisks-on-wheels commemorating soldiers killed in the Global War on Terror are paraded through the city, like an Easter Procession. Before they are returned to their original sites, they would all be collected in the a central plaza, a formation reminiscent of Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe. Alternatively, they could be arranged less formally, more crowded, as haphazard as a favela. In any case, the sight of it all would be quite dramatic, a powerful statement on the consequences of war.
Another day might be set aside for victims of natural disasters and another for bicyclists killed by lunatic motorists.
Roadside memorials will similarly be made mobile, traveling the same route which the unfortunate souls they're memorializing may have taken. (Or seeking revenge?) But then they themselves will be involved in an accident.
Moving the Vatican Obelisk
Saturday, September 1, 2007
Given the opportunity for yet more indiscriminate self-linking, which undoubtedly is a favorite past-time here on Pruned, we'll take it, even though Crowd Farm, an interesting, albeit less than original, proposal to “harvest the energy of human movement in urban settings” by James Graham and Thaddeus Jusczyk, has been rightly covered by just about everyone during our recent hiatus.
But firstly, in the press release linked to above, you'll read that “a Crowd Farm in Boston's South Station railway terminal would work like this: A responsive sub-flooring system made up of blocks that depress slightly under the force of human steps would be installed beneath the station's main lobby. The slippage of the blocks against one another as people walked would generate power through the principle of the dynamo, a device that converts the energy of motion into that of an electric current.”
And some incredible bits of number crunching: “One step, for instance, can power two 60W light bulbs for one second. But multiply that step by 28,527 and you have enough energy to power a moving train for one second. And if you multiply a single step by 84,162,203? Enough energy to power the launch of a space shuttle.”
We say incredible, because it sounds too good to be true (or perhaps not even good enough?). Did they, for instance, consider energy loss and storage? Will the amount of energy be even enough to offset the cost maintenance, let alone the initial cost? But in any case, we'd truly love to finally see a feasibility test of this technology.
And now to some awesomely indiscriminate self-linking.
Wave Garden by Yusuke Obuchi
The Kumbh Mela Array
The Piezo Array
Airborne-Diving in the Southern Ocean
Modeling Urban Panic
On blogs discovered recently or otherwise.
All-Terrain, “an occasional journal at the intersection of National Geographic and the kitchen sink.”
Private Islands Blog, for those wanting to buy their own islands.
Robotic Ecologies Lab. This, “an experimental energy-harvesting robotic glass house,” is interesting. Can it be turned nomadic? Moving, topsy-turvy-like, across the Illinois plains (or a super-mega Wal-Mart parking lot) like tumbleweeds? Or scurrying through Floridian wetlands in advance of hurricanes or through the Public Lands of the West to flee from wildfires?
Super Colossal Blog, formerly gravestmor. This post, on the perpetual traffic of New New York as imagined in Gridlock, a third series episode of the rejuvenated Doctor Who, is a recent great.
Virtual Sustainability, by Quilian Riano.
Waterblogged. On water!
Thursday, August 30, 2007
For those who were utterly disappointed by Danny Boyle's Sunshine, particularly by the preposterous last third of the film, some images of the sun, courtesy of the Transition Region and Coronal Explorer. These and some of the movies were very helpful in relieving our disappointment. 
And lastly, this movie still, which the title of this post specifically refers.
The four panels you see above and others not captured are essentially mini-movies projected onto a gray circular disk. One starts here, then progressing to there, playing for a few brief seconds or even considerably less, while other panels also appear now and then, starting here or there, like stellar detonations. Glimpses of the sun resolving into a whole.
As before, be sure to accompany the movies with a soundtrack of your own choosing.
Sunscapes
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
From the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois, via Edward Lifson a.k.a. The New Modernist, some photos of Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House under threat by floodwaters from the Fox River, this after visits from Brad Pitt and one other nominal celebrity.
Preservationists and Modernists certainly must be agonizing over these photos.
Iconoclasts, on the other hand, must be praying for yet more torrential downpours.
One regular Pruned reader, an avowed anti-Modernist, sarcastically asked us if this is what “they” meant by “architecture engaging with the landscape”? He was wondering, or so we assume, whether architectural historians, critics and students--in overpraising the house (and Philip Johnson's Glass House and Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water) for harmoniously intertwining with nature--are simply full of shit, as what they think of as a harmonious engagement (or the idea of those high priests of Modernism “designing with nature”, or at the very least acknowledging context beyond formal and material concerns) is an illusion.
“Nature has been subjugated. There, it is expected to be static, as structured as the building. That or it must act within a prescribed set of parameters. Abnormal hydrology is frowned upon, for instance. So harmonyschmarmony. But thankfully, when things like this happen, architecture is laughingly displayed as impotent.” Too harsh.
In its defense, however, the house does look beautiful and quite striking in its state of quasi-failure.
Meanwhile, we are eagerly waiting to hear, hopefully accompanying other reports of Brad Pitt's generous donation to architecture, that proposals are underway for a levee system to protect the Farnsworth, millions of dollars worth of flood protection that most assuredly will fail in order to further sustain the illusion. We're waiting, because it will be hilarious to hear them.
POSTSCRIPT #1: The Farnsworth Flood of 2008: Blair Kamin, architecture critic of the Chicago Tribune, reports here, here and here — the comments are worth a read. Meanwhile, we wonder how many postscripts bearing this sort of news will we add in the future.
Chicken Wing
Erasing Mountains, Defining Wetlands, Geoengineering the Planet & Other Infographics from The New York Times
at 8:39 PM
We love the illustrations The New York Times creates to accompany some of their articles. Oftentimes they are infographically dense without being cluttered, readily comprehensible without being too compromisingly simplistic, visually gorgeous without being unnecessarily flashy. For someone commonly tasked to distill fantastically complex information for laymen clients who might consider interpreting plans and schematic diagrams akin to deciphering ancient, dead languages, these illustrations always provide important lessons for creating a successful graphic presentation. There is much to learn (or emulate).
We're huge fans, in other words, collecting them ravenously as though we were lunatic orchidophiles or fanatic philatelists, and hoping all the while that they will be collated and published in a volume, which will be ten times better than anything Edward Tufte puts out, of course, though perhaps similarly overpriced, in which case, if you have your own collection, you should now create a Flickr set for it, such as the one we have recently created.
You'll find there, among others, the following graphic summarizing the U.S. Supreme Court decision on Rapanos v. United States, a dizzyingly complex case (to us, at least) rendered penetrable.
And also this more recent graphic listing five proposals to combat global warming on a gargantuan scale, all neatly and beautifully presented in 800x1155 pixels. It makes you feel as though you no longer need to read New Scientist for further research, although we wouldn't recommend you stop reading the venerable periodical.
One more? How about this on the migrating barrier islands of North Carolina?
Quite clinical and somber in its presentation of the data, and yet it's always a source of endless hilarity here on Pruned. Can you spot the hilarity?
Leidenfrost Fountain
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
(“Plan de Marly,” from George Louis Le Rouge's Detail des nouveaux jardins a la mode, 1777.)
Exactly how many landmines buried in the Korean peninsula is a state secret. Some estimates put the figure at over 2 million in the 2.5-mile wide DMZ and about 1 million more in the 6-mile wide Military Control Zone. Though thousands are being removed to make way for rail and road links and many more have become non-functional through environmental wear, they can easily be replaced with the millions stored in stockpiles throughout the countryside.
Also a state secret are their locations. Of course, one only has to draw one line in the north and one in the south to generally know where not to go traipsing about. For everyone, this is enough. For military war strategists, however, maps would definitely be of some help. But then again, some of the land mines perhaps may have become a secret even to those who keep the official records, as one typhoon years ago showed what could happen.
From BBC News (7 August 1999):
As Koreans begin to clear up after the floods [caused by Typhoon Olga], they are being warned of the danger posed by landmines and other explosives dislodged by floodwaters from the heavily-fortified border zone between North and South Korea.
The South and its ally, the US, are thought to have placed about one million landmines and anti-tank explosives along the border.
Marines say they are looking for 150 mines which may have been dislodged. Reports say just four have been found so far.
Artillery shells and more than 7,000 other pieces of ammunition have been swept away defence ministry officials say.
Not clarified in the article is the fact that those landmines were washed out of the DMZ or storage sites into areas frequented by civilians. And though 150 sounds like small change, just one is needed to ruin an entire family.
Also not mentioned is that this sort of thing apparently happens periodically, not only through flooding but also from erosion, landslide, melting snow, and other natural elements.
For another case of unexploded ordnances shifting from their original locations, check out this briefing paper prepared by Human Rights Watch on the landmines in Mozambique affected by catastrophic flooding in 2000.
(Sarah Pickering, Landmine, 2005.)
(Sarah Pickering, Fuel Air Explosion, 2005.)
(Sarah Pickering, Artillery, 2006.)
*
Last year, TIME Europe reported on a remarkable research being done by Jarne Ellehold and Carsten Meier into possibly using a common type of weed to detect landmines.
“On scrubby flatland outside Copenhagen Airport,” we read, “on old army shooting ranges that have been seeded with land mines,” their biotech start-up company, Aresa, is growing large patches of thale-cress that have been genetically modified “so that its leaves turn red when the plant comes in contact with nitrogen dioxide — a compound that naturally leaches into the soil from unexploded land mines made from plastic and held together by leaky rubber seals.”
While more experiments are still needed, initial results seem to show that the weeds are indeed turning red where they should be.
Not to be outdone by the plant kingdom, some Croatian bees are learning to become mine detectors.
According to BBC News, Professor Nikola Kezic of Zagreb University and his colleagues are training honey bees to sniff out explosives that might have been missed by de-mining teams.
Training the bees to find mines takes place in a large net tent pitched on a lawn at the university's Faculty of Agriculture.
A hive of bees sits at one end, with several feeding points for the bees set up around the tent.
But only a few of the feeding points contain food, and the soil immediately around them has been impregnated with explosive chemicals.
The idea is that the bees' keen sense of smell soon associates the smell of explosives with food.
So like libidinous sows to truffles, they follow the scent of TNT while a special heat-sensitive camera tracks their every move. And if they've been trained properly, they should then “settle on areas of ground that smell of explosives,” their collective buzzing turned into an alarm bell.
But unlike those prized hogs, the weight of the insects won't trigger the discovered landmines, blowing them up into smithereens or into tonight's dinner.
Locating buried bombs is one thing; rendering them harmless is another, something which the thale-cress and Croatian bees are incapable of doing.
Fortunately, as but one example of a phytoremediating organism, there is the white-rot fungus Phlebia radiate, specifically mentioned by New Scientist in a short article about Robert Riggs' idea for what Subtopia brilliantly referred to as fungoidal bomb-hacking.
The invention, according to the patent application, entails mixing dormant fungal spores encased in biodegradable pellets into the explosive material. If the bomb explodes, so goes the fungal package as well. But if it remains undetonated, moisture will eventually find its way inside, allowing the spores to grow and proliferate. As the fungi become metabolically active, they begin to eat their way out of the capsules. And once they make contact with the explosive material, they too will begin metabolizing and degrading it.
Just so they won't feel left out, here are the other fungi mentioned by Riggs that are quite suitable for his invention: Ascomycete mycelia; Bjerkandera sordidicola sp BOS55; Pycnoporus cinnabarinus; Stachybotrys; Inonotius dryophilus; Perenniporia medulla-panis; Ganoderma oregonense; Trametes versicolor; Phellinus badius; Agaricus bisporus; Pieurotus ostreatus; Lentinula edodes; and Phanerochaete Chrysosporium.
Who wants to bet that somebody is now planning, if not already in mid-experiment, to genetically modify one of those? Because why involved yourself into making yet more bombs just to make them safer when you could forgo the manufacturing process altogether?
So: after surveying the weather and cosulting your manual on the wind dispersal pattern, you spray the special spores onto a minefield using a hydroseeder, the same one that groundskeepers to seed green grass on golf courses, and which Ares also used to cover their experimental field with thale-cress. Once on the ground, and activated by the meerest contact with soil, they begin sniffing out the tell-tale chemical signs of explosives, burrowing deep into the ground, their rhizomes following the scent of nitrogen diozide until they touch metal or plastic. The feast begins thereafter.
(“Bosquets de la principale parlie des jardin,” from George Louis Le Rouge's Detail des nouveaux jardins a la mode, 1777.)
Moving away from landmines for the moment, it is worth mentioning, at this point, this recent article from National Geographic News regarding three species of fungi that apparently “grew larger and faster when exposed to high levels of radiation, even when deprived of nutrients.”
These fungi, we learn, contain “black pigment melanin -- a substance also present in human skin,” and “observations suggest that the pigment may play a role in the fungi similar to that of chlorophyll in plants, which traps energy from sunlight and converts it to 'food energy' needed to sustain life.”
Potentially, then, with edible mushrooms containing melanin or with plants genetically grafted with genes from these self-feeding fungi, you can grow your own food without the sun or gas-guzzling artificial light sources. In tunnel cities charged with ambient radioactivity. In Martian-bound colonial spaceships constantly bathed with cosmic rays. Or on the surface of Mars itself, in barrel vaulted greenhouses half-buried in solar irradiated soil.
To quickly revert back to the earlier subject of biodetection, we'll note that the article goes on to quote John Dighton, a fungi specialist who has done research at Chernobyl. He says, “Fungi that have been previously exposed to ionizing radiation have a propensity to direct their growth towards sources [of the radiation].”
Like Croatian bees to TNT, no?
(Above is the Shewanella oneidensis eating away some bits of the iron oxide mineral, hematite. An ideal candidate for bioremediation, they can neutralize uranium, nitrates, and other substances harmful to humans.)
Having now amassed a menagerie of sorts, there is only one thing left to do: you cultivate a garden out in the DMZ.
You take Aresa's entire supply of altered thale-cress, Kezic's colonies of trained bees, Rigg's bomb-eating mushrooms, and every other pytho-Frankensteins we haven't yet heard about or still inside petri dishes unspliced and awaiting reconstruction. And don't forget to take those field-tested Dutch hydroseeders, too. Or better yet, you build a bigger, jet-powered hydroseeder that can coat a hundred football fields in 5 seconds or less with your special slurry of bioremediators and mulch.
Once the landscape has been coated, you wait for a week or two, maybe interviewing soldiers for the visitor's guide and tourist brochures in the meantime or taking in the sights. Soon patches here and there become hosts to thriving communities, lush with prismatic vegetation and bustling with activity, and whose biodiversity may only be matched by the Amazon. And because the design and technology actually works, the land mines underneath these small parcels of land are getting dissolved, folding back into the earth.
The thrill-seekers descend en mass, navigating around these strange arboretums which they cannot enter. Off limits, unless they are really that adventurous. Consequently, the barren interstitial zones get littered with well-worn foot paths, which consolidate, after much further use, into a highly ordered Serpentine circulation system. Hints of Capability Brown perhaps. And maybe of John Loudon, via the furnishings of “exotic” plants. Or Gertrude Jekyll's impressionistic “hardy flower borders”?
And what's a picturesque garden without framed, scenic views for histrionics and philosophical musings. They will be created collaboratively. Not accidentally, as everything here has been designed intentionally, unlike the quasi-wilderness of the involuntary park.
And fountains? Sarah Pickering has been hired.
From Google Earth, the arboretums resolve into curlicued, self-interlacing parterres. Edenic parterres, it must be qualified. For much like the first, these new Edens have been made inaccessible by our own follies. We can only gaze at them in exile, and only through acts of redemption could we possibly be allowed to enter.
(“Projet pour le Jardin Anglo-chinois du Petit Trianon,” from George Louis Le Rouge's Detail des nouveaux jardins a la mode, 1777.)
Has your village been flooded with landmines or is it now downwind from a nuclear meltdown?
Don't panic. Let's garden!
(“Jdée d'un Jardin Chinois,” from George Louis Le Rouge's Detail des nouveaux jardins a la mode, 1777.)
Vaux-le-Vicomte @ Wikipedia
Not A Cornfield
Wheatfield by Agnes Denes
Revival Field
Pteris vitata
Edenfern™
Monday, July 9, 2007
So it started with one very minor edit to the template, specifically, to replace the four lines from a Reginald Arkell poem with a Robert Smithson quotation, but that led to another tiny edit and then another one and then another and another. It simply snowballed from there. And after a week of almost nonstop tweaking, the tweaking still goes on.
We've been using browsershots.org to see what the blog now looks like in Windows, and because it's an easy option, in Linux as well. The site checks out fine on MSIE 7.0, but on previous versions, not so well. Fortunately, we won't be concerning ourselves with those older versions of MSIE.
However, we definitely want to resolve one problem on Firefox 2.0: the images are not loading. We absolutely have no idea why that is. Is it because they are transparent PNGs? Is it because the images are set (for the moment) to “private” on our Flickr account? Is it because of the machines and the network used by browsershots.org? Is it what?
In any case, please let us know what other problems you see layout-wise.
And postings will resume shortly.
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
On blogs discovered recently or otherwise.
catieblog : weather permitting
dysturb.net
Side Effects
Temporary Travel Office
The Itinerant Urbanist
Where
Monday, July 2, 2007
Tunneling into the abyss to gaze out into the firmament. It's the Super-Kamiokande once more, simply because the whole thing's so incredibly beautiful, here photographed after its reconstruction and before it was filled with 50,000 tons of pure heavy water. Once disused again, can we have it, rent free? It'll be the summer residence for Pruned.
Download some high-resolution photos from here to decorate your websites and blogs.
Unraveling the cosmos in the depths of Antarctica
