Calling Planet Earth

'Refer to the discourse of music improviser and wine and ask around less the secret of time
for one hasn’t solved and won't solve this puzzle through science.'

Hafez

Sun, Oct 5, 2008  Permanent link

local river

The Locavores appeared in San Francisco in 2005 and define themselves as ‘a group of culinary adventurers who eat foods produced in a radius of 100 miles (160 km) around their city’. By doing so they aim to reduce impact on the environment inherent to the transport of foodstuffs, while ensuring their traceability.

Local River anticipates the growing influence of this group (the word ‘locavore’ made its first appearance in an American dictionary in 2007) by proposing a home storage unit for live freshwater fish combined with a mini vegetable patch. This DIY fish-farm-cum-kitchen-garden is based on the principle of aquaponics coupled with the exchange and interdependence of two living organisms - plants and fish.

The plants extract nutrients from the nitrate-rich dejecta of the fish. In doing so they act as a natural filter that purifies the water and maintains a vital balance for the eco-system in which the fish live. The same technique is used on large-scale pioneer aquaponics/fish-farms, which raise tilapia (a food fish from the Far East) and lettuce planted in trays floating on the surface of ponds.

Local River responds to everyday needs for fresh food that is 100% traceable. It bets on a return to favour of farm-raised freshwater fish (trout, eel, perch, carp, etc…), given the dwindling supplies of many saltwater species due to over-fishing. It also demonstrates the capacity of fish-farmers to deliver their stock live to a private consumer as a guarantee of optimum freshness - impossible in the case of saltwater fish that has been netted.

Local River aims to replace the decorative ‘TV aquarium’ by an equally decorative but also functional ‘refrigerator-aquarium’. In this scenario, fish and greens cohabit for a short time in a home storage unit before being eaten by their keepers, the end-players in an exchange cycle within a controlled ecosystem.

Materials: glass: blown & thermoformed, water pump, joints.
Dimensions : Large : 64 x 29 x 39 inches, Small : 29 x 18 x 36 inches.

“Local River”
Mathieu Lehanneur
with Anthony van den Bossche, spin doctor

Sun, Sep 7, 2008  Permanent link

Architecture, Teme and Mystics

Teme: A new term in sociobiology by Susan Blackmore explaining 'a new kind of meme which spreads itself via technology-and invents ways to keep itself alive'.

Considering teme to be a new meme, questions came up about the time it was branched out of meme and its independent procedure in human evolution.

By looking at the timeline of technology, measuring geometry has played an outstanding role in mystifying the nature of life to human’s perception. Perhaps natural numbers , were invented by women counting to keep track of their menstrual cycles, belonged goods, population and in weaving. They were added, subtracted, multiplied, until the concept of ratio was perceived in spatial calculations.

Constructing thick and safe walls, using bricks and stone-cuts as units, required much complex forms of calculation and numeral systems that were not perceived before that. For centuries constructing pyramids and measuring the circumference of circle by its radius brought new understanding to mathematical observations. The calculations inspired one of the deepest pleasures that the mind seeks: to be awed by existence, this time not only with fleshly pleasures, but by becoming intelligent enough to uncover nature’s precision and thus to conquer it. As irrational numbers appeared through the ratio of rational numbers, mind joined Ecosophia in conceiving proportionality of space and time that still to this day transcends precision.

In short, I see as ratios were discovered that showed numbers that could/would not terminate (e.i. pi), teme distinguished itself from meme. Does the historical fact that the development of geometrical math happened around the same time when the myths about human’s creation were introduced to cultures, (starting 5th millennium BC in Egypt, Babylon and India), reveal anything about teme?

Sat, Aug 30, 2008  Permanent link

BigDog

by Boston Dynamics

Tue, Aug 26, 2008  Permanent link

Lillian Schwartz's Pixillation (1970)

"

Tue, Aug 19, 2008  Permanent link

Cultitecture of Espace

Units Form Nets - Activity Follows Network

To begin with, designing form and determining function depend on emotional and intellectual motivation. In the realm of human affairs, as the selves complement each other, emotion and intellect condition the affairs. The type of imagination and memory activity that is from anxious and aggressive mind, weaves future with visions and reasons that endure what ails in illusion: an afterimage of meantime struggle. The form that is born out of excited lively memory anticipates in forthcoming changes.

As the structure becomes physical, it situates itself in the intensity of matter and constant reactive responses of both natural and cultural worlds; The physical form finds its way into this multidimensional labyrinth by attracting codes and patterns and through exchanging energy impulses. So every impression of attraction, whether arising from human percept or the physical environment, should be able to modify their structure by realigning it to currents.

In the procedure of cultural evolution, traumas, among other non-conscious replicators of information, act much like viruses. They have been actively taken part in our perceptual evolution and have caused a major slow-down in the evolution of mind. They can be categorized as trauma of birth, death and natural disasters. The traumatized perception is in constant search of communal power. The seekers and creators of these powers can cause major shocks in societies which in times can have devastating results, depending upon individuals' creativity and intellectual strength of the society.

The ways that design deals with the life of the proposed form and/or function refers to the designer(s)'s cognitive memory. As memory, a major part of cultural process, replicates through variation, mutation, and competition, design education has a critical role in this process since it offers towering figures of knowledge and creativity. Majority of educators give priority to those ideas that can be best expressed through words and numbers, and not original imagination. In such interactions, originality, an inherent energy of all humans is overshadowed by communal power.


Now, for the sake of progressive life, the cultural memory is compelling us to rethink the quality of life as part of Espace: Ecosophic Space. It takes individual awareness to recognize the difference between heroic wisdom and holistic wisdom and choose the original way!

Sun, Aug 17, 2008  Permanent link

Earth is the only known planet that offers life: a natural system of energy and matter making different forms, structures and patterns that respond to the changing environmental conditions. As Rupert Sheldrake argues in A New Science of Life: ‘In the most general terms, form and energy bear an inverse relationship to each other: energy is the principle of change, but a form or structure can only exist as long as it has a certain stability and resistance to change.’

While the possibilities for pattern and form that matter or elementary substances propose are infinite, life is a struggle of energies over choosing the right network to move through matter. So the life span of an individual organ or organism is determined by its response and engagement to the natural system. In this context, function or activity should select the right network to win its way through time and space. Unless energy and matter loose touch with each other and death occurs. In this case if the dead body is surrounded by living energies its substances unfold themselves in the bio-system and return to the cycle of life.

In this system, birth and death follow the same value since no single organism, as part of a greater generation, is complete by itself. Each body, in each generation, contributes to form, function and the surrounding and surpasses its current values. The beauty of this system is that the formation of each modality in the process of growth is a constant response and adaptation to the environment. While distinguishing values from non-values consciously and unconsciously influences its mode of existence. If a breathing form fails to adapt its codes through time, its modality disappears from the face of our biosphere. This also applies to the cultures around the world as similar evolution has happened in the context of all dependent texts: genetic codes and human languages.

Herein being human is the same general coded plan as of all mammals with one exceptional quality that appears to be more degree of free will than other species. That has led mankind to habituate nature by analytical observations and therefore tooling in order to have a longer and happier life in a safer and more nutritious surrounding than that of our ancestors.

Now, having all the great advances in tooling, technology and knowledge of our environment, we know that we can add nothing foreign to the thinking. What we think and create emerges from our genetic text, language and the environment we put ourselves into. We have the opportunity to realize that our ideas and actions have their values beyond the moral judgments of institutes and constitutions and far beyond our momentary desires and pleasures since they are not just at the place of presence and that they can be made to grow and evolve through space and time.

Mon, Aug 11, 2008  Permanent link

Earth's Moon

Wed, Apr 2, 2008  Permanent link

THE PROGRESS OF MAN

First he appeared in the realm inanimate;
Thence came into the world of plants and lived
The plant-life many a year, nor called to mind
What he had been; then took the onward way
To animal existence, and once more
Remembers naught of what life vegetive,
Save when he feels himself moved with desire
Towards it in the season of sweet flowers,
As babes that seek the breast and know not why.
Again the wise Creator whom thou knowest
Uplifted him from animality
To Man's estate; and so from realm to realm
Advancing, he became intelligent,
Cunning and keen of wit, as he is now.
No memory of his past abides with him,
And from his present soul he shall be changes.
Though he is fallen asleep, God will not leave him
In this forgetfulness. Awakened, he
Will laugh to think what troublous dreams he had.
And wonder how his happy state of being
He could forget, and not perceive that all
Those pains and sorrows were the effect of sleep
And guile and vain illusion. So this world
Seems lasting, though 'tis but the sleepers' dream;
Who, when the appointed Day shall dawn, escapes
From dark imaginings that haunted him,
And turns with laughter on his phantom griefs
When he beholds his everlasting home.

R. A. Nicholson

'Persian Poems', an Anthology of verse translations
edited by A.J.Arberry, Everyman's Library, 1972

Fri, Feb 15, 2008  Permanent link

Myth of Mental Illness

'If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic.'

Thomas Szasz

Sun, Jan 20, 2008  Permanent link