s.o.s. home

“The benefits will be long-lasting and enormous - benefits to our health, our economy, our quality of life, our very landscape. These are actions we can and must take now, if we are to have ‘no regrets’ when we transfer our temporary stewardship of this Earth to the next generation." - Mitt Romney on the importance of reducing America's carbon footprint as Governor in 2003.

“In place of real energy, Obama has focused on an imaginary world where government-subsidized windmills and solar panels could power the economy.” - Romney campaigning in 2012.

"Dear Governor, Thank you for your invitation to embark on a cooperative northeast process to reduce the power plant pollution that is harming our climate. I concur that climate changes is beginning to effect our natural resources and that now is the time to take action towards climate protection." - Romney letter to NY Governor in 2003.

"President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans... and to heal the planet…(laughter) My promise is to help you, and your family." - Romney at the Republican National Convention in 2012.

Etc… today is November 4th, 2012. 

In the wake of a catastrophic hurricane, the East Coast is reeling. Americans on both sides of the infamous 'aisle' are frustrated and disheartened. With 60 million people effected, millions more are looking for answers. While scientists are louder than usual, politicians remain quiet. Washington's dialogue surrounding weather extremes and climate change continues to dodge around with the election only 3 days away. Silence prevails on a world stage even as thousands of communities across the Atlantic Coast desperately search for answers and beg for action.

This week, we were reminded of how vulnerable our coastal cities are, how ineffective our infrastructure can be under stress, and how brutal the reality is for the coming century. Sea levels will continue to rise, as they have increasingly since the middle 1900's. While an inch or two every decade or so might not seem very threatening, that amount compounds itself during storm surges and combines with tides to allow water into and over coastal areas that lack much of a topography to begin with. In New York City, bay waters rose to 13.88 feet above normal levels along Battery Park, topping a previous local record by nearly 4 feet from Hurricane Donna in 1960. And while Sandy left only about 1 inch of rain in New York City this past week, Donna dropped a total of 4.95 inches. In 2005, Pass Christian (Mississippi) witnessed a record storm surge of 27.8 feet triggered by Hurricane Katrina, which claimed the lives of 1,833 people, leaving 108 billion dollars in damages and millions of homes underwater. The longer we neglect problems of infrastructural planning and energy protection the greater of a threat they will pose as time goes on. Economic consequences are increasing as floods, drought, temperature highs and lows become more commonplace. Today, politicians must be able to discuss climate in the same context as economy. A dialogue that has been disturbingly soft in recent years.

(Below) A graphic of natural disasters and cost of damages. 46 events between 1980-1995, 90 events between 1996-2012.

"We’ve just been lucky. We need hardening for the risk we’ve always faced. Until things happen, people aren’t willing to pay for it." - NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg (2012)

This method of thinking is frustratingly visible in the way that the presidential campaign has unfolded this year. Political discourse has centered around the struggling economy. The scientific community is crying out for a discussion on the role America will play when it comes to championing efforts of renewable energy and reacting to our changing climate. 

Photograph of Manhattan by Iwan Baan. (October 31, 2012)

Scientists aren't the only demographic with ruffled feathers, more and more American families are acknowledging their role in a changing climate, and engaging with issues both at home and abroad on a daily basis. Yale University's School of Environmental Studies released a study in September 2012, revealing that;

"Americans’ belief in the reality of global warming has increased by 13% over the past two and a half years, from 57% in January 2010 to 70% in September 2012. At the same time, the number of Americans who say global warming is not happening has declined nearly by half, from 20% in January 2010 to only 12% today." (source)

Even with a recent rise in public talk, a large percentage of the American public still remains unclear, uneducated and conflicted on issues of a changing climate. The 2012 presidential debates were a unique stage to reach out on this topic and discuss these relationships, but they were overshadowed by unemployment, China, nuclear centrifuges in Iran... and binders. This is a nation that prides itself on competitive innovation, self-reliance, and raising a model for the world to draw from. If the United States expects to set any bar on the world-stage and remain competitive, a reinvention of American infrastructure is the most important issue of the 21st century. 

Before and after Hurricane Sandy. Ortley Beach, NJ. (2012)

Peter Saville - art director, graphic designer, album artist and subsequent pulsar enthusiast. His first, and most notable work was the album cover for Joy Division's "Unknown Pleasures" released in 1979. With such an elegantly mysterious topography of peaks and valleys, Saville took what was once a recording from the depths of outer-space, and made it into one of the most recognizable images in the earthy world of music.

I say 'took' and mean that very literally. See here, from the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy. Which notes this diagram as "Successive pulsae from the first pulsar discovered. CP 1919, are here superimposed vertically. The pulses occur every 1.337 seconds. They are caused by a rapidly-spinning neutron star." Yes, it's exactly the same image used for the album. But, it was absolutely perfect to begin with. (As acknowledged by both the artists and the artist-artist). They discovered an incredibly addictive aesthetic embedded in statistics and data. Every 1.337 seconds, 2,283 light years away, a neutron star was slappin the base.

Twelve years earlier, In July 1967 - astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered CP 1919, the first pulsar. She recorded the discovery alongside Anthony Hewish, her thesis advisor at the time. This was a first of its kind recording from outer space. It was like listening to a heartbeat from the depths of our universe, which led to the ambitious title "Little Green Man 1" or LGM-1. At that time, Bell Burnell and Hewish really did believe that its source was extraterrestrial life. 

The cult following that surrounds this enigmatic image has been built on a similar foundation of myth and science. On the original record, the image simply appeared on the front, no description and no reference. Just like the initial discovery of LGM-1, there was a strange comforting resonance, a beautifully simplistic graphic that pulled you into the record. Whatever natural rhythm was captured in that diagram, it managed to blend a culture of senses. A unique marriage of science, music, and design.

(Above) A must watch short / trailer of sorts featuring Saville, as he recounts the process and discovery of creating the album cover. 

Not to be confused with a walleye. This installation was designed by the Korean new-media-collective, HYBE. From their website (below) :

"IRIS is a unique media canvas with matrix of conventional information display technology - a monochrome LCD. Through the phased opening and closing of circular-segmented black Liquid Crystal, IRIS can create various patterns and control the amount (size) of passing lights. IRIS is an interactive medium for visual simplicity which uses the passage of ambient light, not emission of light itself." 

IRIS (2012) Interactive Media Canvas with Expandable Matrix of Transmissive Monochrome LCD.

"The most beautiful spaghetti work ever done..."

"Massimo Vignelli explains his infamous 1972 New York Subway map and the controversy it caused." From the documentary film, Helvetica. By Gary Hustwit. (2007)

(Below) A zoom view of the 1972 NYC subway map. Click for > LARGE. 

"Intersection of Paths in a Landscape" by Hans Dieter Schaal (1970's)

"Franklin's Footpath" by Gene Davis (1972). Painted along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia.

"Golden Age – Somewhere" a futuristic vision by Factory Fifteen, blending architecture and communication. (Scroll down for video)

"Within ‘Somewhere’ we are transported to a time where the boundaries between what is real and what is simulated are blurred. We live online and download places to relax, parks and shopping malls. We can even interact with our friends as if they were in the same room with simulated tele-presence. Everyone is connected and immersed in nanorobotic replications of any kind of object or furnishings, downloadable on credit based systems. Distance and time become as alien as the ‘offline’ The local becomes the global and the global becomes the local..." (source)

Directed By Paul Nicholls, of Factory Fifteen. (2011)

"The film places us into this vision, observing an average inhabitant within the ever changing environment of the latest SimuHouse. From a painting to a park and from a telephone call to a shopping mall. That is until there is a leak in the system and everything malfunctions. The film concludes with the house being forced to reset, giving the character and viewer a stark reminder that nothing is ‘real’ even her dog, which re-materializes in front of her." (source)

(Above) A rendering from the Disney "Science at Play" Research Lab.

From Disney's website; "Botanicus Interacticus is a technology for designing highly expressive interactive plants, both living and artificial. Driven by the rapid fusion of computing and living spaces, we take interaction from computing devices and places it in the physical world using livings plants as an interactive medium. 

The Insect Hotel. London, England.

The façade design of the creepy crawly condominium (by Arup Associates) was derived from a Voronoi pattern. A cellular tessellation commonly found in nature; the pattern is easily recognizable in the wing structure of a dragonfly (a possible tenant), giraffe skin, turtle shells and dried mud among others. 

Rising 1.5 meters above the park floor, the hotel is composed of 25 horizontally stacked layers of the birch-plywood. Each Voronoi unit is equipped with an exotic variety of natural and artificial debris, anywhere from plywood to leaves, cardboard to used sneakers. All of which was designed in order to attract a healthy population of bugz.

Take a Longfin Inshore Squid, add a headphone jack, your iPhone, and a videocamera. Put the pieces together and you've got a new kind of itunes visualizer. Call it the iSquid. With all those parts in place, the folks over at Backyard Brains captured some funky visuals of squid chromatophores (pigment-cells) as they vibed alongside Cypress Hill, "Insane in the Brain".

It's amazing to see how subtle differences in frequency can effect an underwater creature so intensely. And even though Cypress Hill doesn't mean much in the depths of the ocean, there are a great deal of predators that do use sound for communication. (Echolocation with dolphins, among others). 

In the natural world, many subtleties of communication are easily misunderstood and largely unrecognizable. But today, many of these behavioral patterns draw ties and provide clues towards serious problems; one of which being noise pollution. Boating and invasive exploration can easily abuse underwater environments, producing some dangerous results. This interference problem isn't limited to habitats underwater. On land, bee populations have been struggling in recent years in part (or largely part - depending who you ask) due to cell phone usage. The signals have been proven to distract and disorient colonies. Bees are incredibly sensitive to frequencies, responding differently to incoming vs. outgoing calls. This proves distracting when they are flying back and forth from food sources, and then attempt to relay those directions to others around the hive.

So now we know that squids prefer hip hop, but bees are maybe a bit conservative. This next example is more of a southern style hoe-down, judging by the round-and-round rotations and a "waggle dance" in between. Bees utilize the groundwork of their geometric hives to choreograph some very specific routines. Within a hive, a forager bee can communicate the location of a new food source, all of which is based on the specific angle of the waggle and the relation of that waggle towards the sun. See the video below:

Jesus got an unusual makeover last week that's been sweeping the web, labeled as the worst restoration attempt in history. (Mr. Bean was a close second). The work entitled; "Ecce Homo" was [is] by 19th century Spanish artist Elias Garcia Martinez, located in the Sanctuary of Mercy Church (of Spain). The brush-happy culprit was none other than a devout 80+ year old parishioner. Despite the enormous amount of ridicule that this poor old woman has received, there has been far more positive response towards the unique image she left behind. Some even prefer it.

While the Beast-Jesus following continues to pick up steam; let's look at another unusual example of modern day restoration... there's one surprising method in which frescoes have been cleaned, sans the elderly and sans the technology you might expect for the 21st century.

Recently, a strain of bacteria called Pseudomonas stutzeri was harnessed by Italian microbiologist Giancarlo Ranalli, and used to restore frescoes in Pisa. The same method is being used in Valencia, Spain. How? Ranalli discovered the selective ability of Pseudomonas stutzeri to target and consume residue along the surface of the oil paints. Once the grime is eaten away, the bacteria die, leaving more Jesus and less Beast. 

Nature Abhors a Vacuum : Roosevelt Island's Pneumatic Trash System. By Greg Whitmore. (2010)

From Fast Trash : "Roosevelt Island collects garbage from its 12,000 inhabitants via pneumatic tubes with an “Automated Vacuum Collection System,” or AVAC. There are no garbage bags on the sidewalks and no garbage trucks. A computer empties trash chutes several times a day, sending the refuse of 16 residential towers through underground pipes to a transfer station at the north end of the island...

HILL. Produced and directed by Ben Wu and David Usui. Detroit, Michigan. (2012)

Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Synecdoche, New York. Directed by Charlie Kaufman. (2008). See the trailer here.

A play within a play. A figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for a part, the special for the general or the general for the special. - Synecdoche.

"A theater director struggles with his work, and the women in his life, as he attempts to create a life-size replica of New York inside a warehouse as part of his new play."

Tropical Islands Resort. The largest indoor tropical pool in the world, located in Krausnick, Germany. (Opened in 2004). Cargolifter-Werfthalle, the former airship hanger holds 55 million cubic meters of indoor space.

As we saw in the last post... artificial waves, a yellow Lamborghini and about a dozen Russian supermodels running around at Al Ain Surf Park Wadi Adventure. In the middle of the UAE desert, we find "Paradise". A mash-up of environment, color, nature and exoticism. The word is built of two extremes pushed against one another. Whether this manifests as a pristine tropical pool hidden between sand dunes, or equally, a sand dune standing alone in the middle of a pristine tropical ocean (palm trees in tow). Today, this concept of "paradise" appears to be popularly man-made. Something where nature appears indoors, and exists as a playground plopped within a suspiciously familiar landscape. If we're already constructing and accepting our own escape, does that mean there is nothing left to explore?

Tropical Islands Resort. Exterior (below).

Tropical Islands Resort, complete with a jungle, a ferris wheel and a hot-air balloon ride.

Meanwhile, in the deserts of Dubai...

Quote: "Introducing Globe's ELECTRIC BLUE HEAVEN... Smack in the middle of a desert mountain range in a foreign land.

Indoors was just too easy. The design studio HEYHEYHEY pushes it a step further; combining suitcases, marbles, and a knack for writing postcards. The contraption (named Melvin) uses a smartphone to record his location and to take a picture of his surroundings. The creators of Melvin build up a unique mix of digital cogs inside of what's traditionally a very manual-style 'machine'. Rube Goldberg could have a whole new playground for the 21st century... 

Melvin the Mini Machine, by HEYHEYHEY (2012).

"Conveniently built in two old suitcases, Melvin the Mini Machine is a Rube Goldberg machine specifically designed to travel the world. Each time Melvin fully completes a run, he ‘signs’ a postcard and sticks a stamp to it - making it ready to be sent."