Inhabiting the Anthroposcene, Stream 03

Inhabiting the Anthroposcene

Stream 03

This issue is focused on the rapid urbanization and globalization of the planet. Demographic growth led to the concentration of population in major global cities, making them strategic territories to address contemporary challenges (environmental awareness, ubiquity of digital technologies) while trying to achieve a sustainable economic, social and environmental development. The Anthropocene describes a new geological age, where human activity has become the predominant geophysical force. The implications of this concept exceed the context of scientific debates. Stream 03 explores conceptual tools to apprehend our new urban condition.

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Experimental Design for Biologists, David J. Glass

Experimental Design for Biologists

David J. Glass

The effective design and analysis of experiments in biology are critical to success, yet graduate students in biological and medical sciences typically receive very little formal training in these steps. With feedback from readers of the first edition, colleagues, and students taking the very popular experimental design courses taught by the author, this second edition of Experimental Design for Biologists retains the engaging writing style while organizing the book around the four elements of experimental design: the framework, the system, the experiment, and the model. The approach has been tested in the classroom, where the author has taught numerous graduate students, MD/PhD students, and postdoctoral fellows. The goal of every scientist is to discover something new and with the aid of Experimental Design for Biologists, this task is made a little easier.

This handbook explains how to establish the framework for an experimental project, how to set up all of the components of an experimental system, design experiments within that system, determine and use the correct set of controls, and formulate models to test the veracity and resiliency of the data. This thoroughly updated edition of Experimental Design for Biologists is an essential source of theory and practical guidance for designing a research plan.

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Wildlife in the Anthropocene – Conservation After Nature, Jamie Lorimer

Wildlife in the Anthropocene – Conservation After Nature, 2015

Jamie Lorimer

In Wildlife in the Anthropocene, Jamie Lorimer argues that the idea of nature as a pure and timeless place characterized by the absence of humans has come to an end. Offering a thorough appraisal of the Anthropocene—an era in which human actions affect and influence all life and all systems on our planet—Lorimer unpacks its implications for changing definitions of nature and the politics of wildlife conservation.

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Are We Human? notes on an archeology of design, Beatriz Colomina & Mark Wigley

Are We Human? Notes on an Archeology of Design

Beatriz Colomina & Mark Wigley

The question Are We Human? is both urgent and ancient. Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley offer a multilayered exploration of the intimate relationship between human and design and rethink the philosophy of design in a multi-dimensional exploration from the very first tools and ornaments to the constant buzz of social media. The average day involves the experience of thousands of layers of design that reach to outside space but also reach deep into our bodies and brains. Even the planet itself has been completely encrusted by design as a geological layer. There is no longer an outside to the world of design. Colomina’s and Wigley’s field notes offer an archaeology of the way design has gone viral and is now bigger than the world. They range across the last few hundred thousand years and the last few seconds to scrutinize the uniquely plastic relation between brain and artifact. A vivid portrait emerges. Design is what makes the human. It becomes the way humans ask questions and thereby continuously redesign themselves.

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The Action Plant, Paul Simons

The Action Plant

Paul Simons

The Action Plant is a radical new way of looking at plants as sensitive moving creatures, more like primitive animals than vegetables, and is based on a wealth of research, brought together in one place for the first time.
Paul Simons examines the animal-like behaviour of plant movements and shows that movements are not peculiar to a famous few ‘weird’ species. Many leaves can search for light like miniature satellite dishes tracking the sun, insects can be bludgeoned into cross-pollination, and one fungus seems to have the habits of a triffid by spearing passing creatures with a harpoon.
But the book is not simply a catalogue of these extraordinary natural phenomena. Simons reveals that all plants have a ‘muscle’ and nerve-like system which they and the animal kingdom evolved from ancient one-celled creatures. The revelation that these seemingly simple creatures have sensors, signals and motors all rolled into one cell shows that ‘nervousness’ is probably universal to almost all living things.

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The Marvelous Clouds – Towards a Philosophy of Elemental Media

The Marvelous Clouds – Towards a Philosophy of Elemental Media

When we speak of clouds these days, it is as likely that we mean data clouds or network clouds as cumulus or stratus. In their sharing of the term, both kinds of clouds reveal an essential truth: that the natural world and the technological world are not so distinct. In The Marvelous Clouds, John Durham Peters argues that though we often think of media as environments, the reverse is just as true—environments are media.

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Nature’s Patterns: Exploring Her Tangled Web, Bill Graham

Nature’s Patterns: Exploring Her Tangled Web, Bill Graham

This book asks you to think about Nature’s patterns as networks of highly connected energy transportation and transformation systems that operate according to six organizing principles. These principles become both constraints and opportunities for you to act as a steward of Nature by identifying, studying, and preserving her energy networks. In the language of the naturalist and through examples, case studies, and a basic analytic toolkit, the book employs the principles of modern system science to provide you with conservation ideas for preserving Nature’s interconnected ecosystems.Interested readers will include students, educators, government conservation workers, thinkers, and all of those who wish to acquire a deeper understanding of how Nature’s ecosystems work. The material in this book has been used to teach a “Patterns In Nature” course to advanced junior and senior high school students. In addition, the material on Nature’s energy networks has been used in college level courses.Whether you be a teacher, a park ranger, a docent, a tour guide, the book’s consistent theme that “everything in Nature is connected” can be passed on to both youth and adults who receive your message.

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The Chemarts Cookbook – Aalto University (with DIY recipes!)

How can we make flexible and transparent wood-based materials? What kinds of materials can we derive from trees, while still respecting the preciousness of nature? Could the innovative use of renewable cellulosic materials change our material world?

The CHEMARTS Cookbook gives both simple and more advanced ideas and recipes for hands-on experiments with wood-based materials. The book showcases the most interesting explorations focusing on raw materials that are processed either chemically or mechanically from trees or other plants: cellulose fibres, micro- or nano-structured fibrils, cellulose derivatives, lignin, bark and wood extractives.

Get inspired, test our recipes either at workshops or chemistry labs, and develop your own experiments!

Download the free catalogue with DIY recipes here!

Corporeal Mélange: Aesthetics and Ethics of Biomaterials in Stelarc and Nina Sellars’s Blender

Corporeal Mélange: Aesthetics and Ethics of Biomaterials in Stelarc and Nina Sellars’s Blender

by Julie Clarke

In this article I consider Stelarc and Nina Sellars’s 2005 installation Blender alongside the works of contemporary artists who have used biomaterials in their oeuvres (although this comparison and description is not all inclusive). I argue that, since the artists’ previous artworks have engaged with the effects of technology on human ontology, Blender may be read as advancing some of these ideas. I propose that, although the aesthetic of the biomaterials in the installation is consistent with Stelarc’s interest in portraying the body as a kind of land- scape, it also evokes the potent use of human or animal fat by contemporary artists and filmmakers who alert us to the par- adoxical nature of the human body, which is perceived as both waste and as of use value. I maintain that, although the artists used liposuction to obtain biomaterials for the installation, Blender was not intended to provoke a discussion of cosmetic body modification. Instead the modification they allude to is one instigated in a laboratory, where human biomaterials are blended and used in various biomedical techniques. [continue reading here ]

Design and biotechnology:an exploration of the possibilities of objectifying living organisms. Oron Catts

Design and Biotechnology: an Exploration of the Possibilities of Objectifying Living Organisms.

by Oron Catts

The Journal of the School of Design Issue number 4 , 1996 In this paper I will look at current artistic trends, as well as recent developments in biotechnology that in the future may transform living organisms into objects. The concept of technological progress as a part of a linear perception of history that may exceed its limits is analysed, and the need for re-evaluating the concept of progress is emphasised. The role of biotechnology in technological progress, as well as the potential of biotechnology to change our perception of progress by applying natural processes in most basic terms, is highlighted. The relationship between art and technology is examined and shows that in some cases art explores technological advances before they occur. The work and the views of body artists Stelarc and Orlan are discussed, as well as those of some other artists. Bioethics is introduced as a scholarly way to examine biotechnological development, and it’s revealed that not much has been done in respect to issues that are not directly connected to humans. This area seems to be where design can come in and explore the prospects of living objects and their manipulation. The need for a closer relationship between design and biotechnology, in order to produce a better future, concludes this paper. [read here]