F.U.N.Y. (Floating Underwater Nails Yard)

The concept of taking natural environment as a ‘ready-made laboratory’ with unlimited supply of ‘raw materials’ was the vigor behind F.U.N.Y. that cultivates diatom onto the artificial intelligent fingernails in an open water– where diatoms exist naturally. The idea then inspired the latest generation of diatom incubator that will be placed into a canal in London. A set of apparatuses sunk into the canal and turned the site into a diatom cultivating centre then activated the artificial nails manufacturing process right away.

The F.U.N.Y is a system that could easily setup by minimum a unit of floating incubator that contained a set of biodegradable S.L.A.N. scaffolds. A canal junction known as Little Venice by locals at Maide Vale where two major canals in London meet was spotted for this mission. Regent’s Canal that provides a link from the Paddington arm of the Grand Union Canal to the Limehouse Basin and the River Thames in east London conjunctions with Grand Junction Canal that forms the southern half of the Grand Union Main Line from London to Birmingham creates a very unique geographical landscape which also serves a roundabout for boats. A roundabout island in the middle of the junction that is currently inhabited by swans and ducks is almost like a reserved wild life island in the city of London.

The prototype was being designed as homage to David Greene’s Rockplug/Logplug project where connection for local networks were being installed into natural elements found in around the suburbs. To address general public over-reacted awareness towards any biological related projects, F.U.N.Y. tends to update Greene’s project in the notion of biotech, where the natural element was used as to camouflage rather than to blend into nature as Greene’s proposed in the Rokplug/Logplug project. Nevertheless, it seems like the Rokplug/Logplug project has inspired inventions more of a camouflaged high tech device for example the bluetooth enabled, data transmitting rock used by British spies in Moscow that enables communication with it via their PDAs or mobile phones. As a side note, the F.U.N.Y. prototype was illegally placed in the canal and successfully camouflaged itself with the floater made of tree branch.

S.L.A.N. (Semi-living Artificial Nails)

Inspired by the 40’s classic sci-fi novel written by A. E. van Vogt, where the Homo superior (evolved human) that could communicate through telepath and higher intelligence among themselves, and recent research by Michael Sussman in using diatoms as the material for microchips triggered the creation of artificial nails which dedicated to the ‘low-tech experiments’ with diatoms earlier on.

While we are so attached to the cyber technologies that is less than forty years in geological history, will future human evolution being shaped by human desire to stay connected? If there was an immediate mutation reacted to current cyber technologies, fingers are probably the closest anthropological contact with the cyber world. That is maybe why replacing a missing finger with an USB flash drive came into Jerry Jalava’s mind when he lost one of his fingers. S.L.A.N. project was meant to accommodate this immediate human need for microchips embedded fingernails in near future. Ultimately, genetic mortified or synthetic diatoms could be grown in underneath fingernails and structured themselves to perform certain intelligent functions. S.L.A.N. incubator was again being setup with domestic glassware in a low-tech way to demonstrate how domesticating diatoms could be. The scaffolds made of Nitrate, Phosphate, Silica, Vitamin B12, Biotin, Thiamine HCl and zinc create an environment that attracts diatoms to grow on them. However, the aqueous medium was purposely prepared with seawater sample from Brighton, UK hopefully the seawater diatoms would be cultivated. The distribution of nutrient on a scaffold shall be designed into certain pathway that eventually forms a circuit of a microchip or RFID which later on will be ‘implanted’ onto human fingers to allow one plugs into cyber world remotely which could be better illustrated in William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

from Anthropocene to Parallel ecology...

Open publication - Free publishing - More post human

Pachube

Pachube is a web service available at http://www.pachube.com that enables you to connect, tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices, buildings and environments around the world.

Brighton decay...

Interesting after life of one of the burnt down Brighton Piers that was built in 1866 in front of Hilton Hotel at Brighton beach. I am glad that it was left as it was after it caught on a frightening fire about 5 years ago which the origin of fire still unknown, however in my eyes, it is now more "lively" than the restored theme-park pier 5 minutes away. The burnt skeletons have eroded, collapsed and re-occupied by new lives. Seagulls rest and nest on them, algae and shells grow on them, millions of sea lives benefit from the decomposed iron, the eroding steels by the fire as well as natural courses have chosen some beautiful texture and colors from a rotting pallette, they blend in perfectly with the rocky beach of Brighton and live happily with the spirits that once enjoyed the pier... the bare skeletal structures that ghosted the memory of mystery flames look especially stunning when the sun sets, by drawing strong profile lines on the summer sky of golden hour with brushes and splashes of melancholy. The structures that once made a pier stands still on the sea are now supporting each other in an balancing act, but if your stand quietly in front of them, you might hear the whispers of the ruins and dead, and maybe the weak cranking sounds from the slow-moving joints of the skeletons that are still trying so hard to defeat the waves hitting on them and the tragedy happened years ago...

Smart underwater factory Amsterdam

Hard-rocking artsy diatoms

Haekel Swarm from Simon Jenkins

I first heard of Jenkins from his articles in Guardians, and I remember his cynical statement criticizing a few modernist architects as ‘the worst offenders because they became the most powerful’ in the article responded to the 2006 exhibition on modernist art at the V&A. Surprisingly he is fascinated by diatoms, too. That's probably why he hates modernists so much?

Simon Jenkins is a journalist and author. He writes a column twice weekly for the Guardian and weekly for the Sunday Times, as well as broadcasting for the BBC. Previously he wrote columns for the Times and the London Evening Standard, both of which newspapers he edited.

His career began on Country Life magazine and continued on the Times Educational Supplement, the Economist (political editor) and the Sunday Times (books editor). He served on the board of British Rail and London Transport in the 80s and was deputy chairman of English Heritage and a Millennium commissioner. He was Journalist of the Year in 1988 and Columnist of the Year in 1993.

His books include works on London architecture, the press and politics and, more recently, England's Thousand Best Churches (1999) and Thousand Best Houses (2003).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2008/apr/22/simon.jenkins