PLANET Future Interactions

For those of you who have signed up for the BLDGBLOG/Atlas Obscura "expedition to the geoglyphs of nowhere" trip tomorrow afternoon, March 20, part of the first annual international Obscura Day, I wanted to touch base briefly about what will actually occur out there.

First of all, I'm excited—I think this will be a lot of fun, and I look forward to meeting lots of you and exploring the abandoned geometry of a city that was never fully built in the first place (and about which you can read a bit more here). Even CNN is excited, writing that nearly "200 people have committed to a trip to California City, California, a planned city in the middle of the Mojave Desert that was never finished. It is now home to about 15,000 people, many of whom live within a surrounding network of crumbling roads, the vestiges of the abandoned city plan."

In January 2010 the Cologne based design agencies Grosse8 and Lichtfront presented their cross-media installation titled Augmented Sculpture. The core of the installation is a 2.5m tall wooden form that builds the screen for a 360° projection.

 Below is a virtual tour of the City District in Moscow with a focus on the  Mirax Federation Tower:

This is just a quick reminder to anyone in Los Angeles that Architizer's official L.A. launch party is tonight down at the A+D Museum's new location on Wilshire Boulevard. Stop by Architizer for more details—but it should be a beautiful evening to be out and about, and things kick off at 6:30pm.

This is a further reminder, as well, that Peter Cook of Archigram and Crab Studio will be throwing open the doors for a new exhibition over at SCI-Arc tomorrow night: London Eight features work by professors and their "proteges" from the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. Tomorrow night—Friday, March 19—also includes a group discussion, moderated by Peter Cook, with Yousef Al-Mehdari, Pascal Bronner, Johan Hybschmann, CJ Lim, marcosandmarjan, and Mark Smout and Laura Allen of Smout Allen. That's at 6pm. Hope to see you at both events!

An update movie on our data collection via Twitter in association with urbantick. The data covers a weekend period from Friday evening to Monday morning containing 380,000 individual tweets. Within these 60,000 were geo-referenced, tweeted by 5,500 individual users.

Credit card brands appearing directly on this Beverly Hills parking meter.

Mapheads will no-doubt appreciate the world's largest compass etched into the Mojave desert here.

The video below was produced for an exhibition featuring the proposed Museum Plaza building for Louisville, Kentucky.

Museum Plaza from Brooklyn Digital Foundry on Vimeo.

Building design by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture; video direction and production by Brooklyn Digital. Music by Mouse on Mars (via O.M.A.).

[Image: San Francisco, as seen from the cockpit of a 747; photo by Olivier Roux].

The last few days have been pretty awesome. We've been road-tripping up from Los Angeles to Reno for a dinner with author William Fox, Matthew Coolidge of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, landscape activist Lucy Lippard, Land Arts of the American West co-founder Bill Gilbert, cultural programmer Dorothy Dunn, Steve Wells of the Desert Research Institute (DRI), Libby Robin from the National Museum of Australia, and the staff of the Nevada Museum of Art's Center for Art + Environment; we spent the day yesterday on a tour of the DRI's ice core research facilities, its micro-atmospheric testing rooms (like characters in a Borges story, they once used their equipment to test the metal content in the ink letters of a Gutenberg Bible in order to identify those letters' near-millennium-old liquid chemistry), and the DRI's full-scale virtual reality room.

George Basalla’s book called “The Evolution of Technology” (Cambridge University Press, 1988) is another important resource for the game controller project. In this volume, the authors describes his theory of technological change based on the history of technology, economic history and anthropology. The whole book is driven by a strong theoretical perspective: the analogy between the evolution of technical objects and the evolutionary metaphor in order to show to that this metaphor can give insights otherwise unavailable to the history of technology

Basalla uses the term “evolution” as a metaphor “at the heart of all extended analytical and critical thought” and highlight it as useful to apply this concept from biological evolution to evolution in technology. Initially this analogy was used from technology to biology (to describe living organisms in mechanical terms) and then the other way around, as a way to arrange technical objects into “genera, species and varieties and proceed from this classificatory exercise to the construction of an evolutionary tree illustrating the connections between the various forms of mechanical life”. To him the difference is the following:

“the evolutionary metaphor must be approached with caution because there are vast differences between the world of the made and the world of the born. One is the result of purposeful human activity, the other the outcome of a random natural process. One produces a sterile physical object, the other a living being capable of reproducing itself. (…) Technological evolution has nothing comparable to the mass extinctions that are of interest to evolutionary biologists. History does not record any widespread, cataclysmic extinctions of entire classes of artifacts, although something similar might occur on a local level in remote communities or on isolated islands”

26 years ago, the Guggenheim hosted an exhibition of work by Will Insley, focusing particularly on Insley's project ONECITY.

[Image: ONECITY by Will Insley; image via The Nonist].