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Plant Patterns: Living Roots Manipulated Into Nature-Based Art

02 Feb

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Sculpture & Craft. ]

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The intricacies of a plant’s secret life beneath the soil, where its roots grow and change almost constantly, become a true work of art when manipulated into specific patterns. Artist Diana Scherer collaborated with biologists and ecologists at Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands to develop a system that can create the same kinds of spirals and other motifs found in traditional woven textiles.

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Subterranean templates act like molds as the root systems expand, channeling them in certain ways to form thick mats, almost like living fabric. As the roots grow, they curl and braid around themselves, becoming stronger and reinforcing the patterns.

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“In my work I explore the relationship man has with his natural environment and his desire to control nature,” says Scherer. “For the past few years my fascination has mainly been focused on the dynamics of below ground plant parts. I’ve been captivated by the root system, with its hidden, underground processes; it is considered to be the brain of the plant by plant neurobiologists.”

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“Charles Darwin was the first to watch the behavior of the plant roots. In his book The Power of Movements of Plants, he describes how roots do not passively grow down, but move and observe. A root navigates, knows what’s up and down, observes gravity and localizes moisture and chemicals. Darwin discovered that plants are a lot more intelligent than everybody thought. For contemporary botanists, this buried matter is still a wondrous land. There is a global investigation to discover this hidden world. I also want to explore it and apply the ‘intelligence’ of plants in my work.”

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Sculpture & Craft. ]

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Life After Death: Organic Burial Pods Turn Human Bodies into Living Trees

12 Oct

[ By WebUrbanist in Culture & History & Travel. ]

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Amidst a huge array of natural burial initiatives and urban cemetery alternatives, the Capsula Mundi stands out as a sustainable solution that serves wishes of the deceased as well as the land of the living.

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Italian designers Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel developed this solution in part to challenge constrictive existing laws surrounding burials in their home country.

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Essentially, a body is interred in an organic and biodegradable burial capsule situated beneath the seedling of a chosen tree. Instead of filling graveyards with caskets and stone monuments to the deceased, this system would populate parks with living memorials – trees over tombstones. In turn, family and descendants can come to visit and care for the plants in honor of their loved ones.

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Many other “green” burial solutions are generally not as ecological as they would first appear. Cremations, for instance, generate huge amounts of carbon dioxide in the burning process. And, of course, traditional burials are not very sustainable – chemicals, caskets, concrete, stone and space are all wasted in an effort to preserve something that will inevitably return to nature, one way or another.

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More from the project website: “Capsula Mundi is a cultural and broad-based project, which envisions a different approach to the way we think about death. It’s an egg-shaped pod, an ancient and perfect form, made of biodegradable material, where our departed loved ones are placed for burial. Ashes will be held in small Capsulas while bodies will be laid down in a fetal position in larger pods. The pod will then be buried as a seed in the earth.

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“A tree, chosen in life by the deceased, will be planted on top of it and serve as a memorial for the departed and as a legacy for posterity and the future of our planet. Family and friends will continue to care for the tree as it grows. Cemeteries will acquire a new look and, instead of the cold grey landscape we see today, they will grow into vibrant woodlands. The project is still in a start-up phase, but encouraged by worldwide enthusiasm for our concept, we are working to make it become a reality.”

[ By WebUrbanist in Culture & History & Travel. ]

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The City Is Your Living Room: 15 Modern Street Furniture Designs

01 Sep

[ By SA Rogers in Design & Furniture & Decor. ]

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Smart, well-designed urban seating encourages more interaction with the cities we live in and with each other, infusing them with vibrancy and a sense of connection. It’s even cooler when it’s built right into a park or sidewalk as a multifunctional element to add some sculptural visual interest, delineate different zones or offer opportunities for fitness and play.

Just a Black Box: Furniture Transforms Into Kiosk

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A cube of semi-private seating by day, ‘Just a Black Box’ by Max Boano and Jonas Prismontas transforms into a kiosk for commercial or public use at night (or whenever else it’s desired.) The box elevates itself on its own hidden hydraulic columns to become a customizable space that can be used for retail, cafes, bike repair, selling tickets or even as a mini theater.

3 Urban Hammock Installations

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Comfy hammocks come to public spaces in various forms to create some of the most nap-worthy urban furniture you’ll ever see, including a series of nets strung over the grass by The Chartered Institute of Housing, bright blue hammocks inserted into a void in a promenade along Paprocany Lake in Poland, and re-purposed fire hoses hung from a steel grid in Copenhagen.

Vanke Cloud City by Lab D+H

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Vanke Cloud City is a mixed-use development project in Guangzhou, China boasting a series of creative public seating strategies by Lab D+H. The Cloud Line is a continuous tubular steel structure offering benches, monkey bars, parallel bars and other uses, while Cloud Seat is a modular set of interacted spaces made of perforated steel plate, with vertically stacked seating.

Meeting Bowls for NYC

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Small groups can get together and chat face-to-face in a comfortable, breezy space with ‘Meeting Bowls’ by the Madrid-based design firm mmmm… in partnership with the Times Square Alliance. The urban furniture installation was situated in the center of Manhattan’s busiest plaza in summer 2011to facilitate interactions and dialogue between friends and strangers alike. The base of each bowl gently rocks to imitate the sensation of floating.

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The City Is Your Living Room 15 Modern Street Furniture Designs

[ By SA Rogers in Design & Furniture & Decor. ]

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Google brings the National Parks to your living room with 360-virtual tours

26 Aug

In honor of the National Parks Centennial birthday celebration, Google has partnered with the National Parks Service to bring a unique and exciting virtual immersion experience to your fingertips. The Hidden Worlds of National Parks is a new exhibit that is part of Google’s larger Arts and Cultures Exhibit and Documentary series. In this new series, users will be able to visit and interact with some of the more obscure National Parks in the United States, such as the Dry Tortugas in Florida and the Kenai Fjords in Alaska through VR and 360 degree video tours.

In the video experience a National Parks service ranger will guide you through one of the five park options. Users will be taken on unique guided tours such as a hike through the lava flows in Hawai’i, a kayaking trip through the Fjords in Alaska or a snorkeling trip through the coral reefs in the Dry Tortugas of Florida.

The virtual tours are available online and in the Google Arts & Culture App which is available for both iOS and Android device platforms.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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Living Street Art: Contorted Human Bodies in Urban Spaces

09 Jul

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

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If you were to pass a bunch of colorfully-dressed human figures crammed into a crawlspace beneath a public staircase, you might think they’re mannequins at first, with their splayed limbs and claustrophobic positioning. The bodies are bent every which way, some hanging upside down, all of their faces obscured by hoodies, their positioning absurd. As you walk down the street, you spot more and more of them – folded beneath park benches, dangling from staircase railings, squeezed between utility boxes or piled on top of one another. But then a hand moves, or a muscle twitches, and you realize they’re alive.

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The brilliance of choreographer Cie. Willi Dorner’s ‘Bodies in Urban Spaces’ lies as much in the chosen setting as it does in the extraordinary flexibility of his performers. Dressed in vivid track suits, the performers quickly assemble themselves into position, hold their poses for an uncomfortably long duration, and then disassemble themselves to run ahead to the next spot and repeat the process. The temporary urban interventions leave no trace when the performance is over, and aim to encourage residents to experience their cities in a different way.

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‘Bodies in Urban Spaces’ has been traveling the world since 2007, showing up all over the UK and Europe as well as Texas, New York, Istanbul, Russia and Japan. The performers lead an audience through each city, highlighting various architectural and urban features and how we interact with them as human bodies.

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“‘Bodies in Urban Spaces’ is a temporary intervention in diversified urban architectonical environment,” says Dorner. “The intention of ‘Bodies in Urban Spaces’ is to point out the urban functional structure and to uncover the restricted movement possibilities and behavior as well as rules and limitations. By placing the bodies in selected spots the interventions provoke a thinking process and produce irritation. Passers by, residents and audience are motivated and prompted to reflect their urban surrounding and their own movement behavior and habits.”

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

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Living Light: Human Figures Dance Inside 3D-Printed Zoetrope

02 Jul

[ By SA Rogers in Drawing & Digital. ]

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All it takes are a few highly focused beams of light and a spinning zoetrope to make a human figure spring to life, walking or even dancing in a barely-visible translucent circle. ‘Process and WALK’ explores the relationship between time and movement, taking a two-dimensional image of a person and applying it to a three-dimensional object. In effect, the person’s movements are stretched out to take up the entire circle, each fraction of an inch containing its own particular shifts of the arms and legs.

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Artist Akinori Goto lays out the whole process in the video above, showing how he transforms a animation of a person walking into a 3D axis that can then be translated into data for a 3D printer. The result looks like no more than a warped piece of plastic mesh, with no discernible shapes embedded within it. Place it on a turntable and it still won’t look like much – until beams of light highlight just one segment of the edge.

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Once that happens, the walking figure appears. Every few seconds, the illuminated figure seems to multiply, sending additional figures to other points along the zoetrope. It’s simple and complex at the same time, pairing a pre-film animation device that’s been in use for centuries with cutting-edge small-scale manufacturing technology

[ By SA Rogers in Drawing & Digital. ]

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Living with the Dead: 12 Cemeteries with Surprising Alternate Uses

10 May

[ By Steph in Culture & History & Travel. ]

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The living play karaoke among headstones, hang their laundry from mausoleums, put on plays in crypts and golf right on top of graves in multipurpose cemeteries around the world, where the dead are integrated into modern life instead of remaining in solemn roped-off spaces. In some cases, it’s happening due to sprawl, like the family graveyard in a Walmart parking lot in Georgia, but in others, it’s more deliberate. As we grapple with population growth and urbanization, alternate ideas for the burial of our dead are coming into focus, all seemingly sending the same message: life goes on.

Habitable Cemeteries: Living with the Dead in the Philippines

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Within the walls of Manila’s largest cemetery, 6,000 living residents thrive, going about their lives right on top of gravestone after gravestone, sometimes living in mausoleums alongside the tombs of their dead. The residents of North Cemetery are typically extremely poor, creating makeshift domiciles and living surprisingly normal lives. Within their cemetery city, they’ve created systems of public transit and schools.

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A second cemetery in the Philippines, the Chinese Cemetery, is nicknamed the ‘Beverly Hills of the Dead’ for the spacious, luxurious tombs that are fancier and more comfortable than most homes of the living. These houses of the dead have fully-functioning kitchens, bathrooms and bedrooms where relatives can sleep alongside their deceased loved ones, and sometimes live there full-time.

New Lucky Graveside Restaurant, India

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The patrons of New Lucky Restaurant in Ahmadabad, India don’t seem to mind dining right next to coffins from an old Muslim cemetery, which may belong to the followers of a 16th century Sufi saint. The owner decided to leave the coffins in place when building his establishment, and says the proximity to death hasn’t put a dent in business, which is brisk. In fact, he believes that it brings good luck, hence the restaurant’s name. Each morning, the servers pay their respects to the graves, wiping them, covering them with cloth and decorating them with fresh flowers.

Solar Power in Santa Coloma de Gramanet, Spain

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With so much of the rest of the land too hilly and shaded to be of use, the town of Santa Coloma de Gramanet outside Barcelona found the one location that would be viable for its solar energy program. It just happens to be a cemetery. The densely-built town packs 124,000 residents into 1.5 square miles, so they have to make creative use of every inch. Now, 462 solar panels provide enough energy to power 60 homes each year. The panels are perched above ground level, so there’s no notable change to the feel of the sacred spaces below. “The best tribute we can pay to our ancestors, whatever your religion may be, is to generate clean energy for new generations, says the director of Const-Live Energy, which runs the cemetery.

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Living With The Dead 12 Cemeteries With Surprising Alternate Uses

[ By Steph in Culture & History & Travel. ]

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Power Plants: Scientists Grow Conductive Wires in Living Roses

23 Nov

[ By WebUrbanist in Conceptual & Futuristic & Drawing & Digital & Technology. ]

wired rose plant

A group of Swedish scientists has developed a successful method for integrating conductive wire systems into plants, naturally soaked up from a gel into leaves and stems to create complete circuits in bionic hybrids. The implications, like the currents, run in two directions: power can be harvested from plants, but the plans can also be changed through the application of external energy.

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Botanists and mechanical engineers from the Laboratory of Organic Electronics at Linköping University added the gel at the base of test plants, which in turn hardened into flexible wires within the stems and leaves, all without damage to the organic components. They were then able to send electrical impulses through the plants, lightening and darkening flowers and leaves.

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“Although many attempts have been made to augment plant function with electroactive materials, [until now] plants’ ‘circuitry’ has never been directly merged with electronics,” write the researchers in their paper Electronic Plants. “With integrated and distributed electronics in plants, one can envisage a range of applications including precision recording and regulation of physiology, energy harvesting from photosynthesis, and alternatives to genetic modification for plant optimization.”

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A number of material combinations were tried before the effective solution was discovered. Some hardened and harmed the plants while others proved toxic or provided insufficient connectivity to be effective. The transparent organic polymer they settled on is able to fully wire a living rose, creating a bionic hybrid without compromising its natural functions.

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More from the abstract: “The roots, stems, leaves, and vascular circuitry of higher plants are responsible for conveying the chemical signals that regulate growth and functions. From a certain perspective, these features are analogous to the contacts, interconnections, devices, and wires of discrete and integrated electronic circuits. The four key components of a circuit have been achieved using the xylem, leaves, veins, and signals of the plant as the template and integral part of the circuit elements and functions.”

[ By WebUrbanist in Conceptual & Futuristic & Drawing & Digital & Technology. ]

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PIX 2015: Kiliii Fish on Living Wild

21 Nov

It’s certainly a rare occasion when a photographer is forced to choose between carrying a bow and arrow or a camera, but that’s just the dilemma Kiliii Fish faced. He’s made a personal project of joining and photographing a growing movement of people learning primitive survival skills. Check out his PIX 2015 talk and see some of his work. Read more

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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Dreaming for a living: The conceptual composite photography of Colin Anderson

12 Oct

Australia-based conceptual artist Colin Anderson is re-defining what it means to be a modern photographer. An early adopter of Photoshop, Anderson creates complex allegorical images from a number of visual elements, including stills captured with a medium format camera and 3D elements created from scratch. Find out what he’s learned from a long career in editorial and commercial photography. Read more

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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360Photography

Posts Tagged ‘living’

Plant Patterns: Living Roots Manipulated Into Nature-Based Art

Life After Death: Organic Burial Pods Turn Human Bodies into Living Trees