Bionic bird

You can't say that the people at Festo are very creative, but their creations are nevertheless astonishing for the technical accomplishment and techno-spiritual, light feel to their work. Here it is for the first time that we see an artificial bird that at first glance is pretty much indistinguishable from a real flying bird. Festo has accomplished this through an extremely efficient motion of the wings, that can rotate at different angles.

Be ready for a future in which we make our own animals.

Electric toy butterfly

This artificial butterfly does an impressive job on looking so much like the real thing that it might actually prevent children to go out and do their form of animal cruelty. It responds to vibrations by flapping its wings and is powered by 3 AA batteries. Replacing nature is not cheap though: the electric butterfly will cost you 100 US dollars, including shipping.

I AM

The animation 'I am' by Tronic Studio is some excellent eye-candy, with a message. This spot was created to give animals a voice and put them into our consciousness and conscience. They are depicted as temporary assembled from scrap materials, because that is more or less how we treat them in our urbanized landscapes. We still easily get seduced by technology's newness and in that we tend to 'progressively' forget what we call nature. Nature has become more and more useless in our everyday interactions, so it only remains on the background of awareness in providing a platform for organic life. Thus we are trading an embodied existence for one that is abstracted away from physicality but constituted by symbolic constructions, such as social relationships, the mediasphere, and the self-concept. We connect to static constructions we can give a name to, and give a place in our conscious web of mental associations so they can become social assets, but in that we are alienated from the ongoing and ever-flowing process that that construction is in. We seem to be too much conditioned by structuralism and the linguistic turn in philosophy. In general, people seem stunned by the complexity of the world this view gives us, and have forgotten simple wisdoms such as that everything is in flux and that all boundaries are created by the mind.

But back to the animation. To me, it is particularly well-chosen to depict the animals as temporary constructions without faces, so the focus is not on the character, but on the process of death and rebirth. It makes it clear that any identity is transient and that we all consist of the same things. We are all ghosts, and what defines us is not the form we are in but the potentialities of our embodiment and the stance that we adopt in the process of physical and psycho-spiritual evolution.

Thanks to the excellent blog Spatial Robots for this link.

a sensitive pan

This pan feels so alive that you'd almost feel sorry for putting it on a fire.

I love this direction for product design; showing how with simple technological augmentations an entirely new interaction can be elicited. In our capitalism-imbued machine-like technological lifeworld where emotion and deeper meaning in the products around us is abstracted to not much more than a surface coating, products that continuously, sensitively and meaningfully respond to their environment can make us feel much more connected, more at one with our world. This is not just adding emotion to an otherwise boring, functional product. Of course this physical response of the pan can induce an immediate emotion in interaction by viscerally showing a person how to handle the product. But this responsiveness of otherwise experientially dead products is changing our entire ontological relationship with the product too. If we see that what we create changes beyond our control, and that this can be beneficial to us if we just learn to flow with it, we might also ourselves see that we are continuously in a state of flux, part of our environment, one with it if we only choose to and see that it is much more fulfilling than condensing ourselves in something static that we attach to. As the old Buddhists and Heraclitus already knew, everything is constantly in a state of flux. Well that might or might not be so depending on one's frame of mind, it's in my opinion clearly a more beautiful and ultimately more fulfilling idea to design products for.

dolphin technology

These dolphins at SeaWorld in Orlando Florida actually create a kind of technology to play with. They apparently have a technique to create a continuous stream of air underwater in a way that makes the bubble ring not rise to the surface, but stay whirling underwater. This gives the dolphins the opportunity to manipulate it, break it, reshape it, much like we sketch with pencils. I wonder if they find out this technique by accident or they develop some kind of cognitive understanding of the physics of air in water that guides them in learning to create these underwater wonders. Maybe in the future we will combine our terrestrial intelligence with that of the dolphins. If you know any interesting papers on dolphin neurology, they are highly welcome.

Honey, can you walk out the fish today?

The content of car commercials was already peaking in far-fetchedness, but this is just insane. Apparently if you drive a Volkswagen Spacefox, why not go for the Fishdog as well?

Bubble Culture

As man is converting his entire lifeworld, the boundaries between products and organisms are rapidly blurring. We want our machines to be more human, social, and emotional and our animals to be more controllable and customizable.

The rather extraordinary Dutch artist Tinkebell reflects these trends and "researches the issues of contemporary populist movements, including animal rights activism, and their strategies." She shows in a very honest way how silly postmodern culture is in trying to make everything easy and pleasurable for people, and makes it obvious, almost in a caricatural way. 

A recent work of hers, called "Save the Pets", is really interesting since it clearly shows how the distinction between 'animal' and 'product' has already disappeared. By putting each of 100 hamsters in a separate plastic ball and releasing them in a home-setting, our use of pets as toys is clearly exaggerated. The animals, each products of millions of years of co-adaptation with a complex environment, are reduced to mere motors for our shallow enjoyment based on what our senses seem to find interesting. And how can a better shape represent this than a brightly colored ball, reminding of childhood experiences in the ball pit of McDonald's, which undoubtedly has unconsciously contaminated Western culture with shallow ideas about pleasure and happiness. Ideas that only get uprooted out of you after a slight tad of intelligent thought, possibly catalyzed by the fact that originally, ball pits were developed to comfort the mentally less-abled.

So is this what we have become? A self-proclaimed handicapped species? Well yes, I would say so, though it is the only way for us to realize we are actually quite dumb and have no clue as to what we are really doing. Ironically, in our evolution we started to become dumb when we began to think. Let me expand a little bit on that.

When man started growing a neocortex, he started to symbolize his world and with the symbols hence created he confined his world to an abstraction in which he and his fellow-men, through social symbolic communication, could resort instead of having to be connected to the unpredictable wild nature 'out there'. Man became a mental being, disconnected from the larger whole, but reconnected to a new realm, created by himself. The problem is that this realm is created purely by our consciousness, which is inherently short-sighted and biased. Apart from creating language, man also started to embody conscious concepts into technological artefacts. Slowly, he started to build his own world based on ideas mainly derived from concrete conscious observations, and not on an unconscious, empathic and somatic understanding of the world as a whole. Instead, the ideas underlying technology design had to evolve bottom up too, just as the rest of the world. We started with the thought "I want to eat - let's make a sharp thing to kill a boar" and now are at "I want to have fun - let's put a hamster in a ball" or "I want to listen to low-quality music and look cool - let's make a white plastic box with buttons and cables and isolate myself from the rest of the world". A few centuries ago a tipping point was reached that marked the height of conscious transformation of the lifeworld: mass-industrialization. We were now able to sustain in ourselves the thought that we could control nature and live in an abstraction, an incubator, in which our needs could be met with a snap of the finger. Without many people understanding what was actually happening.

This technicization, and Tinkebell's work as an illustration of it, also is linked to the notion of freedom. Heidegger already warned us that technology restricts our lives rather than expands it, and that instead it should reveal more of the larger process that we stem from. I agree on that, though any polarized view is based on a bias; there is also a good side to this restriction. In general, we feel we lost touch with the whole, but on the other hand we also uplifted our mode of being to one that at least meets our basic needs. We form cultures based on ideas, like sanitization, and hence create a temporary bubble that keeps us happy, according to ideas of happiness predominant in the particular culture we are in. The technicization of our lifeworld makes us feel more free, and while we are free from nature, we created now our own restrictions by steering people to think and act in certain ways through for example the media, a law, and our technologies. Freedom is always an illusion and more an experiential feeling than an objectively measurable parameter. You are always guided by your environment and internal configuration of your brain and body, which seek for ways to resonate with each other. Consciousness is then a mere side effect of this process, imbuing us with all kinds of illusions that are temporarily practical, but fairly useless in the end. Personally I do not feel very free; my brain is very habitual, and while the hamster is clearly restricted, I am too in the same way: somehow my interactional intentions are most often limited by my 'bubble of buttons'. I spend much of my time being consciously engaged with a display and physically coupled to the plastic surface of some electronic device. Technology has put me in an incubator that optimizes the fulfilling of my desires, but keeps me from a real understanding of the whole of which I am an active part.

That having been said, I think the obvious development is a complete merge of nature and technology, so technology provides a 'natural' interface to everything around us. One that doesn't just invite us to think in terms of meeting desires, but also has us live in the moment and unconsciously understand everything that goes on around us, so we can feel one with the whole again whenever we need to. And we must not be biased towards either natural or technological entities, since all will rapidly change when the key enabling technologies start to converge. So I share my dislike of animal rights activism with Tinkebell; we need to accept that it is not spiritually sustainable for us trying to keep the world the way it is, with its still all too clear division of animals and products, and that we need to accept that the world as we now know it will fundamentally change, possibly leaving not one biological species as we now know it behind.

And that this is the only way to go, unless we genetically engineer ourselves to not grow neocortical columns anymore and revert to full animalhood again: a life based on immediate, localized, physical survival. But that would just be simplistic and easy, and ignoring the beauty of evolution of which we are still part, wouldn't it.