#8: Bio-artificial intelligence | Clock clocks | Products of the near future
art | science | digital culture | design | creativity | words | tech
In which I show some living art, some recursive design, and an example of design fictions that are now almost in the past.
art | science
Bio-artificial intelligence
The 3D printed structure above is designed to be an interface between human and non-human forms of intelligence. It is part of a project examining the challenges of life trying to adapt to an environment that is changing faster than evolutionary processes can contend with.
It is a project called H.O.R.T.U.S. XL Astaxanthin.g by ecoLogicStudio. The artists write:
In the digital era a new interaction is emerging between creativity and the fields of life science, neuroscience and synthetic biology. The notion of “living” takes on a new form of artificiality. This project confronts the dictates of human rationality with the effects of proximity to bio-artificial intelligence. It is developed in "collaboration" with living organisms. Their non-human agency is mediated by spatial substructures we have developed while studying biological models of endosymbiosis.
The project is deeply multi-layered in concept, development, construction, and installation and well worth a closer look.
design | technology
A clock made of clocks
The Changi airport in Singapore has one of the largest kinetic sculptures in the world, more than 7.5 metres across. A Million Times at Changi by the art/design/tech group “Humans since 1982” consists of 504 clock faces programmed to align their hands to show the shape of a digital time display.
An aspect I particularly like is the attention to detail in the intermediate patterns the hands form when moving from one configuration to another. You can see a good video of it on their vimeo channel, where they also show other versions of the clock in different sizes and materials.
And if you have a spare US$6000, you can buy a small one from the MoMA store…
design | creativity
Products of the near future
I’ve been quite interested in the concept of design fictions lately and the way different groups use fiction as a creative process to consider where the future is going, through the lens of design.
Made by Near Future Laboratory, the TBD catalogue is “The catalog of the near future’s normal ordinary everyday”.
They describe it thus:
Imagine a print distribution network with cloud-connected street vending/printer boxes. Overnight, algorithms API-shazam content for those boxes to print. Printed stuff piles up every night in those boxes, including cheap copies of a location-specific, regionally tuned catalog selling stuff for your normal, ordinary everyday life. This is TBD Catalog. It's an awkward attempt by an awkward business to attract more eyeballs and sell more stuff in a near future where the screen world has become so saturated and overrun that other mediums, like paper and street vending boxes, have become a natural spillover. It's a printed catalog you ritually pick up every morning to browse on your mostly boring, everyday ordinary driverless commute. You may even look forward to it, the way you look forward today to the free daily commuter news, or the Skymall catalog, or an entertaining bit of junk mail.
The 112 page catalog was produced by a 19-person team of designers imagining what the everyday near future might be like. It was produced in 2014 and even at that time, many of the fictional products in it were seen as actual, with people contacting the designers wanting to order them. Five years later, quite a few of the products exist in forms close to what was imagined.
The interesting part of this approach for me is not so much how future technology is imagined but how it embeds in our cultures and behaviours in various ways, often insidiously.
TBD catalog itself is out of print but you can see some sample pages in a PDF online.
I’ll be revisiting the topic of design fictions again in a future newsletter as I have some projects on the boil that revolve around the idea.
It’s always good to hear from readers so let me know what you found interesting here. You can reach me directly at physicsdavid@gmail.com.