McDonald's is really sprouting up some good ideas in the Chicago Area. This billboard advertising there now heath conscious menu is a growing a new green. According to the Chicago Business Times:
McDonald’s Corp.’s latest effort to promote its health-conscious menu items takes advantage of the saying that the medium is the message.
Green lettuce has been planted to form the words “fresh salads” on a billboard in Wrigleyville near the intersection of Addison and Clark streets to promote its four premium salads.
[McDonald's ad agency's] creative team worked closely with a horticulturalist to create a billboard that could start with 1½-inch spouts and grow into lush leaves. The garden appears to be safe from being plucked apart by birds because there is no place for them to perch and peck.
How leaffy! What if green cards were edible or plantible... Moneysigns green and growing. Why does that not feed the people on the streets?Where are the tomato plants?
Notes from presenting this little ditty... I presented it as a piece of propaganda's but its missing the dichotomy of the utopia/dystopia. Parade of information is the passive voice. So what now? Start to write stories. Aaron Bocanegra gave me the best advice I think. Develop what it means to be in these places. This totally makes sense to me as it is a reexamination and elaboration on the senses. Expressing it in real translated feelings and notions. What if you received post cards from these different places where the inhaborg was deployed much like the Greek restaurants in Floridian beach towns. This piece is too much on the surface right now and has to get into the grind. I completely agree with this as this could be called a TEASER and not the whole money shot. Other things - express the bottom emerging proliferation. What are the arguments (to be or not to be alive and encompassing?) This agent is not just a design tool what do I want to do with this? Good question. Like so what we have all this and all this could be bricollaged together for form a "new", a third form/function/fatality. This needs to be imploded in the presentce and not to for get about the METABOLISM. I need to elaborate and really push this part because it is the ultimately defining factor. I need some flow charts!
Gregory Thorpe had some great advice for me also, as he has seen how I work from my days hunting glory holes. I need to antagonize my own design tendencies and escape and then oh yes.. return. I have to make it about the thing itself. not the representation. It is the matter that communicates its own being.
I am going to finally finish this list and get back to you. But till then.. more to digest.
Elan Fessler proposed OPAM, the Organic Public Art Machine. This device is transnational, benign. OPAM is made from "smart" materials, predominately an organic, biodegradable, corn-based plastic. This organic-machine is a solar-powered, video projecting, transportable mobile ecosystem. This "urban phenomenon" could also be considered hippie terrorism.
Last year in San Diego scientists Shu Chien and Ying-Li Hu captured on video the intracellular version of a postal delivery service. Reported in the journal Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications (BBRC), bioengineering researchers at UC San Diego published videos of a key message-carrying protein called paxillin moving abruptly from hubs of communication and transportation activity on the cell surface toward the nucleus. Paxillin, shown in the video above and the image below are highlighted with labeled with a red fluorescence marker to make it stand out in live cells. Even without video evidence, scientists have confirmed over the past 10 years that higher organisms use paxillin as a transmitter of locomotion and gene-expression signals from several classes of growth-factor receptors to the nucleus. The agent of communication, the cellular cell phone.
Paxillin's malfunctions have been linked to a variety of cancers, tumor metastasis, and other disease processes. Tumor-causing versions of signaling molecules may attach to paxillin and disturb the normal adhesion and growth factor signaling steps required for controlled proliferation and cell growth. Human papilloma virus, which can lead to cervical cancer, produces a protein that binds to paxillin. That interaction may contribute to the carcinogenic potential of the sexually transmitted virus. *note, potential for a building out of AIDS This filming of paxillin was via cells from the inner membranous lining of a cow aorta. They added genetically engineered proteins tagged with red and green fluorescence markers to the bovine aortic endothelial cells, grew them in tissue culture, and filmed them while they passed fluid across the cells’ surface in a simulation of flowing blood.
Paxillin is found primarily at focal adhesions, busy intersections of activity scattered around the cell’s cytoplasmic membrane. Focal adhesions are regions highly rich with receptors for growth factors (!!!) and they are also structural attachment points that link the extracellular world to the protein filaments and tubes that comprise a cell’s internal cytoskeleton.
Paxillin is the way to tap into the sensory action of the cellular. Now the challange is to try to translate their means of communication. What is the code that is paxillin is the messenger for? Hello Pattern Recognition!
Self Organization - a process in which pattern at the global level of a system emerges solely from numerous interaction among the lower-level component of the system. Moreover the rules specify interactions amount the systems' components are execution only local information with out reference to the global pattern. (Self-Organization in Biological Systems)
What are the mechanisms and how they differ in biological systems verses physical systems.
Well it might happen in outer space. Let's look at the scales of self organization...
To more Elaborate on the first diagram here are is the relativity of the scales involved:
On a side note: everytime I tend to get an Idea about all this. I turn around and find that Mr. Roche was already there. Another hot shot to mention is Mitchell Joachim.
"To reclaim the scenarios and substances that condition architectr and reveal the contraditcions and fantasies that drive our societies, we need, on the contrary to draw on this vibrating, disquieting and voluptuously temporarily. Architecture is not something to be thought or produces for later, like the stander bearer for a morality. It can only be negotiated live, in its contingency on a situation and is solubility in a set of givens." FRANCIOS ROCHE_ (Science) Fiction & Mass Culture Crisis
"We are in the situation where we don't know what is going on, so we are in the city doing micro-architecture. If you start with a virus, you can change everything, you know, with the contamination system." (R&Sie)
What happens when you fall in love? and What ever you read and hear or see from this other party makes all the sense in the world to you?
It has me in a sticky position. Almost frustrating. But eyes on the prize. Ultimately, this exploration will be fulfilled through installations and a movie? I am working on a list of projects and will post them as soon as I reach a proper number.
So for those who believe this could possibly be not a reality, scientists everywhere are progressing the possibility of cells growing and developing. As I see this, they are new mailable materials for the not the "built" but "GROWN" environment. The BBC has an article on the progress of a team at the University College London lead by Professor Robert Brown who have learned to cut down the time it takes to grow living tissue. Scientist currently make tissues to be used for operations such as skin grafts by building a scaffold of cells that are grown in the lab. Previously, tissue growth would take up to one and 12 weeks are required to grow enough for surgery. Professor Brown and his team experimented on making a tissue called collagen, which acts as a structural support for skin, bones and tendons. (Hello Structural support!) By sucking out the water using a method entitled plastic compression progressed the development of the collagen growth to just over a 30 minutes. Not only was the tissue made much faster but it also was stronger and more like real collagen than other engineered tissues.
Imaging grafting on a new layer of leather on to your body. It's the new form of pleat. That goes out to all the fashionistas and their biomimetic actions.
SO knock knock. Let's take the grafting and start to grow towards things in buildings and etc.
To reach the Inhabitable Organism, or InhabOrg, we must map out the scale and the players in making the "monster" a reality. As this blog develops, new documents and maps of where and who these people are will become available. The range of scale goes from DNA and computational biology to nanotech material research on the micro end to the full range of architecture and urban context.
People have been coming up to me and asking me what is it I am trying to do. I am now embarking on my last semester and this will be the capsule for the information that I (and my fellow com padres) collect on the topics.
For those who might be confused dictionary.com provides us with their answers:
in·hab·it –verb (used with object) 1. to live or dwell in (a place), as people or animals: Small animals inhabited the woods. 2. to exist or be situated within; dwell in: Weird notions inhabit his mind. –verb (used without object) 3. Archaic. to live or dwell, as in a place.
—Related forms
in·hab·it·a·ble, adjective
in·hab·it·a·bil·i·ty, noun
in·hab·i·ta·tion, noun
or·gan·ism –noun
1.
a form of life composed of mutually interdependent parts that maintain various vital processes.
2.
a form of life considered as an entity; an animal, plant, fungus, protistan, or moneran.
3.
any organized body or system conceived of as analogous to a living being: the governmental organism.
4.
any complex thing or system having properties and functions determined not only by the properties and relations of its individual parts, but by the character of the whole that they compose and by the relations of the parts to the whole.
—Related forms
or·gan·is·mic, or·gan·is·mal, adjective
or·gan·is·mi·cal·ly, adverb
So what is my take on the phrase in its entirety? An inhabitable organism is an intelligent dwelling that governs itself and is reactive to its inhabitant.
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