Month: September 2010
Gut Control
For the next sixth months, visitors to the gloriously named Maison d’Ailleurs in Switzerland (a museum of “science fiction, utopia, and extraordinary journeys”) have the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be given a deep-tissue massage by a prototype double cyborg. IMAGE: Enteric Consciousness 2010 by Ken Rinaldo. Photo by Joana Abriel. The installation, by artist Ken Rinaldo,…
Mobile Libations
Today’s New York Times has a fascinating story on the relative popularity of different drinks on the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) and Metro-North New York City commuter train routes. IMAGE: “Tracy Bonner, right, sold a drink to Kevin Davies of Port Washington on the Long Island Rail Road track at Penn Station.” Photo by…
You Are Here
IMAGE: Artist Liz Hickok is gelatin-mapping Manhattan’s skyline for “You Are Here.” Katherine Harmon loves maps, and is the author of two gorgeous books that collect unexpected and idiosyncratic applications of the cartographer’s craft — You Are Here and The Map As Art. She has spent a lot of time considering the appeal of maps,…
Intestinal Cyborgs For Obesogenic Environments
This September, Tim Maly of Quiet Babylon is curating a month-long 50th birthday party for the word “cyborg.” IMAGE: A cyborg mouse, depicted in Clynes and Kline’s paper, “Cyborgs and Space,” published in Astronautics magazine, September 1960: “One of the first Cyborgs, this 220-gm rat has under its skin the Rose osmotic pump, designed to…
Transgenic Mosquitoes, Musical Tomatoes, and Urban Fruit
If you are in or near San Jose, California, this weekend, these are just some of the delights that await at this year’s 01SJ Biennial. IMAGE: Transgenic Mosquitoes of California by the Center for PostNatural History. Under the pioneering and Utopian instruction to “Build Your Own World,” the Biennial’s curators have assembled an enormous quantity…
Didactic Plant Labyrinths
IMAGE: Das Currywurstfeld, in Berlin, as seen from above. Germany’s Bundesinstitut für Risikobewertung (BfR) is the federal government agency responsible for studying and assessing food, products, and substances in terms of consumer health and safety. As such, it issues reports on nanosilver in cosmetics, determines the health risk of the cocaine content in Red Bull…
The Agri-Tech Catalogue
Matthew Spremulli, an architecture student at the University of Toronto, has recently embarked on an ambitious, if potentially quixotic, project: the assembly of an Agri-Tech Catalogue. IMAGE: The rake, from Matthew Spremulli’s Agri-Tech Catalogue (click for larger image). Thus far, his nascent encyclopedia of food production technologies contains the rake, the tractor, the self-propelled sprayer,…