|
|
 [Image: The present tectonic structure of North America, mapped by Ron Blakey, Professor of Geology, Northern Arizona University]. While out in California last month, hiking through Death Valley – on a cloudy day it looked like a painting by Caspar David Friedrich: an earth of snow, not salt flats – I read that California is actually a welded-together mass of remnant archipelagos and former island arcs. In other words, down there in the Californian gravel are the buried edges of old island chains – and the whole state is still shivering with collision, making adjustments, popping loose and sticking, always on the move... then stopping. Much is made of the apparent poetry of driving over the San Andreas Fault, which divides California into a left-half and a right-half, a coastal zone and a continental shield; but what of the silent lines you walk across everyday, from one former island to the next, unaware that those lands had even once been separated? Midway through the trip, I picked up a copy of John McPhee's Assembling California, in which he describes residual structures of ancient geology with "no known bottom" because they cut so deep. He talks about "the metamorphosed remains of what had once been an island arc," and how, through constant collision and restlessness, entire "Newfoundlands, Madagascars, New Zealands, Sumatras, [and] Japans" have all jostled together, ramming one into the other, year after year, piling up, forming "the outermost laminations of new landscapes." This is "the docking of arc and continent," a mismatched mess of rock "now consolidated as California." "California," then, is just the temporary shape taken by these lost islands and unknotted seafloors. Of course, then I found these unbelievable maps by Ron Blakey last week and I almost passed out. Utterly ingenious, each map represents "the paleogeography of North America over the last 550 million years of geologic history." You can actually watch as California comes home to collide.  [Image: The southwestern coastal archipelagos of North America, 310 million years ago; map by Ron Blakey]. But let's pull back and start 420 million years ago (bypassing some 130 million years' worth of Blakey's maps). This is North America, a tropical archipelago, covered in surreal vegetation, blowing seeds across itself – Shelley's "thousand nameless plants sown by the wandering winds" – cross-pollinating, hybridizing, surrounded by shallow seas, chugging northward over the equator.  75 million years later (below), what will eventually be North America has broken into pieces, partially flooded, surrounded by clusters of islands. These scattered subcontinents are about to collide with the north by northwestern edge of Africa – and unbelievable arcs, inlets, atolls, and bays all stretch across the landscape. What was it like to live in that geography? What sounds did the forests make? What did the stars look like? What half-legged fish swam through those waters?   Another 50 million years pass, and the collision with Africa is well underway. Deserts are forming in the American southwest. Global wind patterns shift due to the distribution of landmasses. Weird species that only live for a million years, and leave no fossil record, run unimpeded across giant landscapes of exposed bedrock.   Then the Atlantic rift begins; the Appalachian Mountains, which passed through Morocco, are now split onto three continents: North America, north Africa, and the embryonic British Isles, which drift northward, cultivating Albionic energy in ancestral swells of warm sea. William Blake will be born there – and Shelley, who'll write of a time "when St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey shall stand, shapeless and nameless ruins, in the midst of an unpeopled marsh."  150 million years ago. California is already starting to form: it's a distant horizon of islands in the Pacific. Those mountains of rock above water are coming in toward the mainland, slowly, lurching forward on broken faults, a conveyor belt moving masses east to raise hills in a ring around Los Angeles, propelling the Sierra Nevadas upward, walling-in the great Arizonan desert now temporarily beneath the sea. Could you map today's California according to the island chains it used to be? And look at Mexico: it's a weird spit of land, hooked and crooked through the oceans, collecting islands onto itself. What would it have been like, walking through those coastal mountains? And if you carved an entire island to look like the cathedral of Notre-Dame, what would it look like, breaking waves, coming toward you over ten million years, eventually colliding with the cliffs you stand on?   What's amazing in the above two images is that, in only 40 million years, an entire system of archipelagos has rammed into the mainland, assembling what will eventually become known as California, tipping the Rockies, torquing belts of metal into metamorphosed ribbons today exposed by roadcuts. What must that time period have been like? With thousands of small islands – a whole Indonesia – off the coast, groaning at night with tectonic pressure, shattering from strain, causing landslides, you could have boated from bay to bay, mapping species, collecting rocks – knowing that beneath your feet is what will someday be Bakersfield, Santa Barbara, Death Valley. But now, in the map below, look at Mexico again: it's a broken ridge of almost-islands, cooking in the Cretaceous sun. The Yucatan is an island. The whole Pacific coast is a weather-beaten cliff of caves and pockets. This was 65 million years ago.  Now the North American inland sea has sealed up, and a riverine bay several orders of magnitude larger than the Mississippi or the Saint Lawrence flows southeast across Texas. Then it, too, is gone (below), leaving behind the massive fossil reefs of the Guadalupe Mountains National Park. There is no Florida yet; Alaska and Russia are one; the Caribbean is a malarial bog of proto-islands, choked with seaweed, overrun with electric eels and tide pools. Somewhere humans are chipping flints together and hallucinating spaceships.  Till North America hits its Ice Age. Thousands of acres of frozen arches stand whistling in frigid winds above the future site of Washington DC. Humans huddle in caves – then move south, populating the New Mexican desert. Global sealevels drop, revealing caverns in the coasts of every continent. The magnetosphere howls in the freezing air.  Then it's today. New oceans continue to form. Major geological events continue to happen. Someday the coast of California will drag along the edge of Alaska, depositing pieces of Culver City in the front range. Eventually the planet will melt, cities forming rivers of liquid stone. It's interesting in this context to note that, if the Antarctic ice cap melts, Antarctica itself may rise: "The continental shelf of the South Polar land lies four times lower than normal," New Scientist reported, "suggesting that if the ice (more than a mile thick below sea level at some points) were removed, the continental surface would rise." This is called post-glacial rebound. Fascinatingly, Antarctica's "present mountains would attain considerable heights and introduce new frictional opposition to prevailing winds, so new weather patterns would be created." In any case, every one of those maps above suggests about six hundred novels or short stories just waiting to be written; but the most exciting part of all of it is that we are already living in that world, of altered weather and island arcs, abraded coasts and rivers. It's what we're doing right now. Beneath the house I write this in are seams of lost continents. Outside the place you read this in are moving unmapped geographies yet to come. (Note: All maps in this post are by Ron Blakey, Professor of Geology, Northern Arizona University – perhaps, if enough people ask, we can get him to map North America as it will someday be).
Though I'm not convinced anyone in the Philadelphia region actually reads BLDGBLOG – and that includes myself – I'll be giving a talk at the University of Pennsylvania Architecture Department this Thursday at 6pm. In Philadelphia.  The talk will be exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds long, and is part of talk20. I'll be joining Winka Dubbeldam, Ferda Kolatan, Anuradha Mathur, Jenny Sabin, and many others – so come out, drink wine, look at some pictures of offshore utopias, Christopher Walken, tunnels under London, replicant landscapes, an abandoned island off the coast of Japan – and so on. And listen as I slur my words, make things up, hiccup uncontrollably – then collapse into the arms of a horrified crowd...
A few marshes in north-central Mexico are so chemically unique that some scientists think they're "little versions of the primordial sea, before the dawn of nucleated cells."  [Image: New Scientist]. "Fed by underground waters coursing through the mountains' limestone layers and caves, as well as gushing up from deep and ancient aquifers, the pools – or pozas as the locals call them – have strange chemistries. Phosphorus tends to be in short supply, whereas calcium, magnesium and sulphur are richly available... Primitive microbes flourish here." Some of these marshes are choked with "microbial mats. Under certain conditions, some microbes, such as photosynthetic cyanobacteria, sulphur-reducing bacteria, nitrogen-fixing bacteria and other helpful waste-eaters, glue themselves together into slimy cooperatives that are often layered like a cake. The incorporation of silt and minerals creates a harder structure, a 'living rock' called a stromatolite."  [Image: An underwater field of stromatolites, from MIT's geobiology lab]. These ecosystems are so chemically abrasive and oddly unlifelike that scientists from Caltech's Virtual Planetary Laboratory hope they might even reveal what forms organisms could take on other planets. (For a bit more on this see Lunar urbanism 3 or Super Reef; and for some very vaguely – in fact really not – related photographs, see this interview with David Maisel).
"Most new species arise not from the insensibly gradual transformation of large populations but rather by the rapid differentiation of small, isolated populations at the periphery of the main group." – Andrew Knoll, Life on a Young Planet And so we live, every one of us, the potential origin of new species.
 [Image: Lost rivers and bedrock beneath today's rivers and bedrock].
     [Images: The Taj Mahal, the Ariane 5 rocket, the Space Shuttle – all buildings built to be hurled into the sky at high speed?].The Taj Mahal looks like a cluster of secret rocketry structures; so what if we tested it out? Built engines in freshly excavated subcellars, cleared the area, trucked in fuel...? What other buildings are rockets waiting to happen? Could the Empire State Building be a secret space shuttle – deep down in the tunnels of Manhattan, spelunkers find an unbelievable enginery locked inside tombs of bedrock? Or, if we discovered a way to hurl all the high-rises and skyscrapers of the world into space, could we form our own rings of Saturn – loose buildings aggregated in orbits, linked by bridges, turning in circles above a planet we've left behind? What would Arthur C. Clarke or Hugh Ferris have to say about this? And would the Indian government mind if we started with the Taj Mahal?
In the summer of 2005, the San Diego-based company SeaCode announced that they would permanently anchor a cruise ship off the coast of Los Angeles, in international waters, filling it with an army of "offshore" computer programmers.
This odd new micronation would beam the results of its cheap labor back to mainland clients via microwave and T3 internet connections. It would have a steady labor base, sovereign terrain, potentially even immunity from taxes – and loads and loads of code.
As the journal Application Development Trends writes: "the ship will retain all of its cruise ship facilities and will feed and house workers in style. During off hours, programming teams can partake of the ship’s recreational facilities or head for the lights of L.A. on a water taxi, since each worker will be required to have a U.S. tourist visa." (But check out the comments at the end of that link for some Archigram-worthy speculation).
Work teams will be broken up into "pods," with "pod leaders," and they will work around the clock.
Interestingly, both sides of the political spectrum seem outraged by the idea; right-ish and left-ish observers have responded with outright hostility, even making sarcastic comments about where the ship's toilets will flush.
But I like it; if there's some loophole in international maritime law that allows you to start a free state off the coast of Los Angeles – then I want several. A whole island arc of decommissioned cruise ships, with BLDGBLOG offices on a super-boat somewhere, helicoptering architects out on weekends for coffee; feeding sharks; shooting skeet; awarding novelist-in-residence titles to Jeff VanderMeer, J.G. Ballard, China Miéville, Don DeLillo... We can host the world's first Miss Micronation Pageant, as well as conferences on the state of plate tectonics. Grow orange trees on a hydroponic barge to stay healthy. Panic when storms come in.
Meanwhile, a fully inhabited ghost-archipelago of Chinese "zombie ships" has been found off the coast of West Africa – but it's a lot less interesting than it sounds. This account, by Greenpeace, doesn't like the ships – and has nothing to say about their implications for offshore architectural design. Or whether Constant would be pleased.
Nor does the article offer any thoughts about the first truly great horror film of our globalized times: a weird industrial accident in China has somehow turned all the local workers into flesh-eating zombies; for whatever reason, these zombies are put onto an archipelago of rusting ships in the Indian Ocean; a band of pan-European scientists studying deep ocean-floor tomography sees the ships on the horizon... and the film goes on from there.
(SeaCode discovered via Scott Webel and his Museum of Ephemerata; Chinese zombie ships found via things magazine).
 [Image: Julius Popp's Bitfall]. Bitfall, pictured above, is a kind of liquid computer monitor. As Ruairi Glynn, of Interactive Architecture dot Org, describes it, Bitfall uses carefully-timed drops of falling water "to project images taken from the internet. A computer observes various news websites and chooses thereafter the images to be displayed. 128 nozzles are controlled by synchronised magnetic valves, and the water drops falling to the ground shape the images. The visual information is only tangible for a second before the drops merge to become water again." The sheet of falling water, then, becomes a screen – a liquid cinema – a monitor on which to surf the web.  All of which would be amazing enough were it not for some unbelievable landscape design possibilities. You're in Rome, and you decide to visit the Trevi Fountain – but you're confused. Is that an image you see in the cascading water...? You look closer and realize a television show is being played using the water itself. The whole city, in fact, is full of fountains, and they're all playing films, news shows, stationary images of art. It begins raining later that evening, and you swear you see films in the falling water... Then fountains are installed in red light districts around the world, showing porn... The next summer huge gates are attached to the top of Niagara Falls, and every August a film fest begins: you sit down on the Canadian side of the border and watch Hitchcock, Truffaut, Roberto Succo, an almost-subliminal cinema roaring downward into mist with the water.  A computer-controlled showerhead is installed in your home bathroom, and you watch the news, or put on a film and... do whatever while you watch it. Headlines falling on your shoulders from above. Hotel lobbies with fake waterfalls are transformed into newsrooms, with financial information trickling down the corporate surface of the falls. From different angles you receive different information; from further away you see different films. The New York Stock Exchange replaces its news tickers with fountains: the Dow, the FTSE, the price of mined tungsten. Mineral futures. All cascading inside smooth surfaces of water.  [Image: Asymptote's re-design of the NYSE]. Soon trees can be genetically altered to form images in their bark: tree-screens. You accidentally stumble into a test-forest, after a car accident in rural Bavaria, and all the trees around you seem covered in pictures, and certain angles make them all add up into a 3D film... Filmstills from award-winning directors of the past are put into genetically modified flowers; you look closely and it's Hollywood Ninja, frame by frame, growing in your bestfriend's garden. When breezes come, short scenes go animated, looped. Hypnotic. The film garden. Then flowers replace DVDs, and we go from libraries to planting special trees. Landscapes everywhere bear encoded information.  A huge dome is built over New York City. As rain falls the water is filtered, bit by bit through the dome to form texts: images, signs and financial information. You pay the city and your logo is displayed, coming down in curtains on the city, liquid. The weather-advertising complex. The rain industry.  [Image: Buckminster Fuller, glass dome for Manhattan]. Endless information, printed three-dimensionally in space. (Via Interactive Architecture dot Org, via Information Aesthetics).
  [Images: All but perfect for album art, these are new photos of Jupiter's South and North poles, respectively; see also this ridiculously beautiful landscape scroll of Jupiter unrolled into a ribbon. Meanwhile, one wonders if you could actually be alone there, flying through hydrogen storms, breathing helium, reading Ovid, self-exiled... In any case, does Jupiter sound like this?].
The New York Observer thinks BLDGBLOG is "adorable," and that its author has taken to impersonating Brad Pitt on Archinect...  ...but neither is true. However, I will be playing Brad Pitt in an upcoming documentary about male virility. Watch for it.
 [Image: Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, another cover of which pleads: Lord, have mercy on London...]. Is Trafalgar Square doomed to become an avian flu hotspot? New Scientist implies as much in a short piece published last week: "Pigeons could carry H5N1 bird flu into city centres," we read, "increasing the chances of humans being exposed to the virus." But does this tiny factoid mean anything at all – let alone that public squares all over the world will soon act as disease vectors for bird flu's apparently impending sweep through the human genome? If it does mean something, and if pigeons are a major risk for spreading influenza, will we first hear reports of human-human infection coming from hospitals in central London? Again, if so, will the pigeons of Trafalgar Square be to blame? And do infected pigeons mean that Venice's Piazza San Marco is also a European vector for the disease? Or am I just giving away the plot for BLDGBLOG's first feature film...?
 [Image: California Academy of Sciences]. While BLDGBLOG just explored the possibility that reefs might actually be huge musical instruments, it turns out that a group of Scotsmen have been testing that exact hypothesis: "Stephen Simpson at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and his colleagues set up 24 artificial reefs, each with a speaker system, near Australia's Great Barrier Reef. On six consecutive nights they played recordings of natural reefs at half the sites. A reef that was noisy one night was silent the next and vice versa. Reefs with the audio cue attracted four times as many cardinal fish and nearly twice as many damselfish." This "audio cue" is elsewhere described as the "'frying bacon' sound of snapping shrimps," and it "can be picked up from 20 kilometres away." All of which is another way of saying that reefs already are musical instruments: vast landscape saxophones being played by shrimp underwater...  Having said that, what if you switched Simpson's recordings and played, say, the sound of Madison Avenue along one of the reefs – what new ecosystems might result? Conversely, what if you played the sounds of a reef through speakers down Madison Avenue? And could you imitate the sounds of a reef at a Hong Kong karaoke bar? Rather: what would happen in you did? What is the future of abstract karaoke? If you totally scramble the soundtracks of the world – what happens?
 [Image: 2012; see also their bit on Hollow Earth Cities]. "I declare that the earth is hollow," U.S. Army Captain John Cleves Symmes Jr. wrote in the early 1800s, "and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentric spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles twelve or sixteen degrees. I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the hollow, if the world will support and aid me in the undertaking." Somewhere along the line, Himalayan space ships, Nazi explorers, remnant Stone Age tribes, undersea caves, north-flowing Siberian rivers, and Edmund Halley all get involved... setting up BLDGBLOG's upcoming pitch for Indiana Jones 5...
"Deep beneath our feet, rock is constantly on the move."  According to New Scientist, massive avalanches of molten rock inside the earth's mantle may affect the speed of the earth's rotation – briefly accelerating the planet. "Like an ice skater pulling in their arms," these internal landslides shift mass towards the earth's core, making the earth spin faster. Over the long term, the earth is actually slowing down – yet weird anomalies in the planet's geological record suggest that short bursts of acceleration come, as if from nowhere, and last roughly ten million years before fading. "For the trilobites," for instance, "530 million years ago, one year contained about 420 days and each day lasted about 21 hours. Now we get a mere 365 days every year and our days last for 24 hours." Interestingly, "as time goes by, days and nights will continue to stretch" – meaning that every single day, albeit probably by only a few nanoseconds, is literally longer than the day before. (PS: don't forget to set your clock forward tomorrow night). So, when a runaway chunk of the earth's mantle starts to slide, it "carries on going, sliding through the lower mantle like a stone dropped into a pond," meaning that "a massive blob of rock the size of the Moon has shifted towards the centre of the Earth."  What I'd like to know is: could you deliberately bomb the internal fissures of the earth – using a new hydrogen bomb, nicknamed The Jules Verne – starting huge mantleslides that accelerate the planet's rotation so fantastically... that the skyscrapers of New York go flying into space?
"The moon," New Scientist claims, "is about to follow the fate of Antarctica, which remained virtually untouched for nearly half a century after the first intrepid explorers penetrated its vast expanse. What followed was a mushrooming cluster of year-round laboratories, observatories and research facilities used by tens of thousands of scientists in summer and a thousand more who brave the long, dark winter."  [Image: Where to site a lunar laboratory; New Scientist]. Deep within such a permanent lunar base, scientists will find an "interference-free environment," which is "the perfect place to search for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence." Though one is forced to wonder: if the scientists aren't on Earth anymore... won't they themselves constitute a source of extraterrestrial intelligence? In any case, in "certain places near the poles" these scientists will find "perpetual sunlight, handy for continuous solar power; and in the shadows of crater rims, perpetual darkness, ideal for astronomy... Plus, there is a rock-steady surface on which to build structures, and the materials with which to build them." Except – that's not entirely true: in fact, the very real risk of " deep moonquakes," NASA warns, is so great that the astronauts "may need quake-proof housing." Finally, somebody go get Barry White 'cause "there are sites available where the nights are long and uninterrupted" – and that's all I gotta say about that. [See also: Lunar urbanism 5, Lunar urbanism 4 – et cetera].
Pruned's resident genius, Alex Trevi, continues to pour shame on the blogosphere, this time by digging up an unbelievable image of Jupiter re-imaged as a cylinder, unrolled as a scroll – complete with what Mr. Trevi calls "dendritic hyper-mississippian superstructures."
Read more, at Pruned.
 [Image: Australia's Great Barrier Reef].
A "vanished giant has reappeared in the rocks of Europe," New Scientist writes. It extends "from southern Spain to eastern Romania, making it one of the largest living structures ever to have existed on Earth."
This "bioengineering marvel" is actually a fossil reef, and it has resurfaced in "a vast area of central and southern Spain, southwest Germany, central Poland, southeastern France, Switzerland and as far as eastern Romania, near the Black Sea. Despite the scale of this buried structure, until recently researchers knew surprisingly little about it. Individual workers had seen only glimpses of reef structures that formed parts of the whole complex. They viewed each area separately rather than putting them together to make one huge structure."
 [Image: The reefs of Raiatea and Tahaa in the South Pacific; NASA/LiveScience].
In fact, Marine Matters, an online journal based in the Queen Charlotte Islands, thinks the reef was even larger: "Remnants of the reef can be found from Russia all the way to Spain and Portugal. Portions have even been found in Newfoundland. They were part of a giant reef system, 7,000km long and up to 60 meters thick which was the largest living structure ever created."
 [Image: The Pearl and Hermes Atoll, NW Hawaii, via NOAA Ocean Explorer].
The reef's history, according to New Scientist: About 200 million years ago the sea level rose throughout the world. A huge ocean known as the Tethys Seaway expanded to reach almost around the globe at the Equator. Its warm, shallow waters enhanced the deposition of widespread lime muds and sands which made a stable foundation for the sponges and other inhabitants of the reef. The sponge reef began to grow in the Late Jurassic period, between 170 and 150 million years ago, and its several phases were dominated by siliceous sponges. Rigid with glass "created by using silica dissolved in the water," this proto-reef "continued to expand across the seafloor for between 5 and 10 million years until it occupied most of the wide sea shelf that extended over central Europe."
Thus, today, in the foundations of European geography, you see the remains of a huge, living creature that, according to H.P. Lovecraft, is not yet dead.
Wait, what—
"We do not know," New Scientist says, "whether the demise of this fossil sponge reef was caused by an environmental change to shallower waters, or from the competition for growing space with corals. What we do know is that such a structure never appeared again in the history of the Earth." (You can read more here).
For a variety of reasons, meanwhile, this story reminds me of a concert by Japanese sound artist Akio Suzuki that I attended in London back in 2002 at the School of Oriental and African Studies. That night, Suzuki played a variety of instruments, including the amazing "Analapos," which he'd constructed himself, and a number of small stone flutes, or iwabue.
The amazing thing about those flutes was that they were literally just rocks, hollowed out by natural erosion; Suzuki had simply picked them up from the Japanese beach years before. If I remember right, one of them was even from Denmark. He chose the stones based on their natural acoustic properties: he could attain the right resonance, hit the right notes, and so, we might say, their musical playability was really a by-product of geology and landscape design. An accident of erosion—as if rocks everywhere might be hiding musical instruments. Or musical instruments, disguised as rocks.
 [Image: Saxophone valve diagram by Thomas Ohme].
But I mention these two things together because the idea that there might be a similar stone flute—albeit one the size and shape of a vast fossilized reef, stretching from Portugal to southern Russia—is an incredible thing to contemplate. In other words, locked into the rocks of Europe is the largest musical instrument ever made: awaiting a million more years of wind and rain, or even war, to carve that reef into a flute, a flute the size of a continent, a buried saxophone made of fossilized glass, pocketed with caves and indentations, reflecting the black light of uncountable eclipses until the earth gives out.
Weird European land animals, evolving fifty eons from now, will notice it first: a strange whistling on the edges of the wind whenever storms blow up from Africa. Mediterranean rains wash more dust and soil to the sea, exposing more reef, and the sounds get louder. The reef looms larger. Its structure like vertebrae, or hollow backbones, frames valleys, rims horizons, carries any and all sounds above silence through the reef's reverberating latticework of small wormholes and caves. Musically equivalent to a hundred thousand flutes per square-mile, embedded into bedrock.
 [Image: Sheridan Flute Company].
Soon the reef generates its own weather, forming storms where there had only been breezes before; it echoes with the sound of itself from one end to the next. It wakes up animals, howling.
For the last two or three breeding groups of humans still around, there's an odd familiarity to some of the reef-flute's sounds, as if every two years a certain storm comes through, playing the reef to the tune of... something they can't quite remember.
 [Image: Sheridan Flute Company].
It's rumored amidst these dying, malnourished tribes that if you whisper a secret into the reef it will echo there forever; that a man can be hundreds of miles away when the secret comes through, passing ridge to ridge on Saharan gales.
And then there's just the reef, half-buried by desert, whispering to itself on windless days—till it erodes into a fine black dust, lost beneath dunes, and its million years of musicalized weather go silent forever.
These were all drawn by a computer, using code by Jared Tarbell.  The above image – called Substrate – is only one stage in a long algorithmic process. The various versions morph through different, oddly city-like fractal patterns, forming boulevards, squares, medinas – and reminding me of central Fes. A few intermediary steps:    And some square ones:   All of which leaves me to wonder if the Artificially Intelligent city of the future will constantly reprogram itself, forming new wards and clusters where there had only been streets before – only to back-track, erupting fungus-like in bursts of self-assembled geometry. Weird overlaps and elisions. Symmetrical superslums. Alternatively, you could create a videogame that reprograms itself as it's played – forming new and unique levels, none of which ever repeats itself – and the maps you try to make... look like these. Meanwhile, Tarbell's algorithms also produce more organic forms:   [Note: It's worth clicking on the sand dollars and scrolling down]. So if algorithms ever broke into a genetic lab – what might crawl out the next day? Finally, there's this beautifully tangled, gravitationally avant-garde quasi-planet, like someting out of a sci-fi novelist's wet dream. An anti-earth re-seamed together forming monstrous rings and topographies:   And there's more on Tarbell's website. (Via Drawn – with huge thanks to Brent Kissel!).
|
|
