builder ballet

windmill skin

Where once our technologies used to be mechanical and centralized, after the invention of electricity the form of products started to be less and less a factor in their functioning. In fact you could even say that we live in a dualistic world, where form and information have become separated. The information surrounding us that we call physical is mostly distinct from the information we say belongs to the mental realm.

With the advent of bio-engineering and nano-manufacturing, this is changing. The material physicality will more and more be able to match the patterns of the electronic; complex, parallel, minuscule and fast. A concept depicting beautifully how new technologies will mean a paradigmatic shift in our manufacturing processes and interaction with technologies is Nano Vent-Skin, by designer Agustin Otegui. He designed a building with an outer layer that can generate energy from the sun and the wind. This skin would consist of nano-scale elements that transform sunlight into electrical energy, and moreover contains tiny turbines that rotate when the wind blows against them, subsequently conferring this energy to micro-organisms that generate electrical energy. The structure also contains nano-wires that can send information about potential failures to a central system, that in turn sends new micro-organisms, so the system can regenerate through self-assembly.

This way, we can integrate functionalities holistically into a structure that hence becomes more like a biological organism than a 'piece of technology'. It all sounds too good to be true.

Here is a link to the website of the project: NanoVentSkin

the broccoli brain

scientists at Harvard and MIT have created a depiction of a complete neural circuit diagram, or "connectome", of the part of a mouse's brain that controls the muscle used to move the mouse's ears. To make this mapping possible, the mice were genetically modified so that their motor neurons would be fluorescent when active, and hence be perceivable through a microscope. This way, the scientists unraveled the structure of the connectome at a rate of half a millimeter per hour. The visualizations showed that there are significant differences between the same connectomes in the right and left hemisphere, and that the length of axons in the brain is not optimized at all to occupy as little space as possible. I think it's fascinating how these visualizations show that our internal landscape can be just as beautiful as ones we perceive out there.

Here's a link to the original paper:

Lu et al. - The Interscutularis Muscle Connectome

Coca Cola and the new humanity

I never thought I would be posting something from Coca Cola, but this commercial is pretty well done and very actual. If there's anything like illusory happiness, it's the Coca Cola type of happiness. If there's anything like an illusory self, it's embodied in the digital avatar. We seem to be heading towards a surreal world of tempting transitory illusions indeed, but let's not forget that happiness as chosen by yourself is the only transcendent and invulnerable form of happiness. Another thing, this commercial makes the classical McLuhanesque mistake of projecting the contents of an older medium, the virtual screen-based world, onto a new medium, namely what we call the 'real' or 'physical' world.

As to conclude as usual with a more abstract statement: we will need to learn to holistically re-ecologize ourselves in a functional niche of our technobiological future, in which we empathically co-evolve with anything we perceive as an other to in the end become one with it.

dynamical fractal animation

I created this animation to explain visually the basics of the dynamical systems approach to perceptual-motor skill acquisition, a particularly powerful and elegant theory that I use as an input for the design of a wearable technology for yoga practitioners.

knitting goes biomorphic

The design world slowly seems to be shifting towards a new idiom that is largely inspired by natural growth processes. Luigi Colani as the great pioneer of organic forms kicked this development off, Ross Lovegrove brought it to the 21st century, but now slowly we seem to be on the verge of reuniting with our full biology, including the raw, fleshy, undefined, wild and dirty aspects of it.

New York based artist Emily Barletta has created abstract objects with a knitted exterior that look like future organisms, or organic products for that matter. From a completely different professional field, psychiatrist Dr. Karen Norberg also put her hands on the knitting needles and created a more or less anatomically correct version of the human brain out of wool.

We are entering a surreal phase, after which we will hopefully realize we can re-ecologize ourselves as holistically functioning entities in biotechnological niches.

Quote of the day

"the big bang is the god of science"

                                                                             Nassim Haramein