Lightning Farm

[Image: Triggered lightning technology at the University of Florida’s Lightning Research Group].

This past winter, I had the pleasure of traveling around south Florida with Smout Allen, Kyle Buchanan, and nearly two dozen students from Unit 11 at the Bartlett School of Architecture.

Florida’s variable terrains—of sink holes, swamps, and eroding beaches—and its Herculean infrastructure, from canals and freeways to theme parks and rocket facilities, served as the narrative backdrop for the many architectural projects ultimately produced by the class (in addition, of course, to the 2012 U.S. Presidential election, the results of which we watched live from the bar of a tropical-themed hotel near Cape Canaveral, next door to Ron Jon).

While there were many, many interesting projects resulting from the trip, and from the Unit in general, there is one that I thought I’d post here, by student Farah Aliza Badaruddin, particularly for the quality of its drawings.

[Images: From a project by Farah Aliza Badaruddin at the Bartlett School of Architecture].

Badaruddin’s project explored the large-scale architectural implications of applying radical weather technologies to the task of landscape remediation, asking specifically if Cape Canaveral’s highly contaminated ground water—polluted by a “viscous toxic goo” made from tens of thousands of pounds of rocket fuels, chemical plumes, solvents, and other industrial waste products over the decades—could be decontaminated through pyrolysis, using guided and controlled bursts of lightning.

In her own words, Badaruddin explains that the would test “the idea that lightning can be harnessed on-site to pyrolyse highly contaminated groundwater as an approach to remediate the polluted site.”

These controlled and repetitive lightning strikes would also, in turn, help fertilize the soil, producing a kind of bio-electro-agricultural event of truly cosmic (or at least Miller-Ureyan) proportions.

[Image: Triggered lightning technology at the University of Florida Lightning Research Group].

Her maps of the area—which she presents as if drawn in a Moleskine notebook—show the terrestrial borders of the proposal (although volumetric maps of the sky, showing the project’s fully three-dimensional engagement with regional weather systems, would have been an equally, if not more, effective way of showing the project’s spatial boundaries).

This raises the awesome question of how you should most accurately represent an architectural project whose central goal is to wield electrical influence on the atmosphere around it.

[Images: From a project by Farah Aliza Badaruddin at the Bartlett School of Architecture].

In short, her design proposes a new infrastructure of “rocket-triggered lightning technology,” assisted and supervised by a peripheral network of dirigibles—floating airships that “surround the site and serve as the observatory platform for a proposed lightning visitor centre and the weather research center.”

The former was directly inspired by real-world lightning research equipment found at the University of Florida’s Lightning Research Group.

[Image: Triggered lightning technology at the University of Florida’s Lightning Research Group].

Badaruddin’s own rocket triggers would be used both to attract and “to provide direct lightning strikes to the proposed sites,” thus pyrolizing the landscape and purifying both ground water and soil.

[Image: Aerial collage view of the lightning farm, by Farah Aliza Badaruddin at the Bartlett School of Architecture].

The result would be a lightning farm, a titanic landscape tuned to the sky, flashing with controlled lightning strikes as the ground conditions are gradually remediated—an unmoving, nearly permanent, artificial electrical storm like something out of Norse mythology, cleansing the earth of toxic chemicals and preparing the site for future reuse.

[Image: Collage of the lightning farm, by Farah Aliza Badaruddin at the Bartlett School of Architecture].

I should say that my own interest in these kinds of proposals is less in their future workability and more in what it means to see a technology taken out of context, picked apart for its spatial implications, and then re-scaled and transformed into a speculative work of landscape architecture. The value, in other words, is in re-thinking existing technologies by placing them at unexpected scales in unexpected conditions, simultaneously extracting an architectural proposal from that and perhaps catalyzing innovative new ways for the original technology itself to be redeveloped or used.

[Image: Farah Aliza Badaruddin].

It’s not a question of whether or not something can be immediately realized or built; it’s a question of how open-ended, fictional design proposals can change the way someone thinks about an entire field or class of technologies.

[Images: From a project by Farah Aliza Badaruddin at the Bartlett School of Architecture].

But I’ll let Badaruddin’s own extraordinary visual skills tell the story. Most if not all of these images can be seen in a much larger size if you open the images in their own windows; they’re well worth a closer look—

[Images: From a project by Farah Aliza Badaruddin at the Bartlett School of Architecture].

—including what amount to a short graphic novel telling the story of her proposed controlled-lightning landscape-decontamination facility.

[Images: From a project by Farah Aliza Badaruddin at the Bartlett School of Architecture].

All in all, whether or not architecturally-controlled lightning storms will ever purify the land and water of south Florida, it’s a wonderfully realized and highly imaginative project, and I hope Badaruddin finds more opportunities, post-Bartlett, to showcase and develop her skills.

Climate Change Archaeology

New archaeological discoveries continue to be made as glacial ice patches melt, revealing their previously unknown contents. Teams of archaeologists and historians have taken to wandering around newly exposed ground in locations as diverse as Norway, the Alps, and Glacier National Park.

Animal bones and cultural artifacts, including 3,000-year old woven bark baskets and old wooden tools, are most prevalent.

[Image: Courtesy Oppland County Council. Photo by Johan Wildhagen/Palookaville, via Archaeology].

“Prehistoric ice is melting and revealing artifacts and organic materials like wood, feather, and bone that have been frozen within the snow for thousands of years,” Kevin Grange writes in National Parks magazine. “As temperatures continue to rise, researchers and Native people are racing to find these materials before they vanish.”

“Enter the ice patch archaeologist,” Grange continues. “These explorers don’t sift through the dirt for artifacts—they prowl the retreating edges of ice patches and glaciers, searching for ancient tools, weapons, wood fragments, bones, and even animal dung. Glaciers move, sort, and grind material down, but ice patches—the result of windblown snow accumulating on alpine slopes—are unique for their ability to stay put and preserve anything frozen within them.”

But there is a justified sense of urgency, as many of the organic materials begin to decay as soon as they’re exposed; if they aren’t found soon after being revealed, they might not be found at all.

The loss of cultural heritage as ice patches give up their archaeological goods was the subject of a 2011 letter to the editors of Nature Geoscience by Kathryn Molyneaux and Dave S. Reay. “In the central Asian Altai Mountains,” Molyneaux and Reay write, “approximately 700 tombs have been preserved for 2,500 years by ice lenses or permafrost. They contain frozen mummies, wood, leather and textiles, which are very rarely preserved and can provide a unique insight into the culture of prehistoric societies in this region. As a result of increasing ground and surface temperatures over the past century, these tombs and their deposits are now within only a few degrees of melting.”

Although I suppose this sounds like the set-up for a new supernatural thriller—in which ancient kings arise from the ice of Central Asia, stepping forth from their melting tombs—in reality, it often has tense emotional and political consequences.

[Image: A shot of the Golden Mountains of Altai UNESCO World Heritage Site by Gleb Raygorodetsky, courtesy of Our World 2.0].

Here, the authors refer to the rise of “rescue archaeology,” where artifacts are rapidly and even haphazardly removed from an endangered site, in operations “carried out under less than ideal conditions with limited funding and a lack of long-term goals. For example,” they add, “a coastal cemetery near Barrow, Alaska is eroding at rates of up to 20 [meters per year], because the sea ice that used to protect the coastline has receded. As a result, indigenous people’s remains that date back to the fourth century AD are being exposed at a rapid rate. At present, rescue work is carried out annually in an attempt to document, stabilize and relocate the cemetery material that is being washed away owing to high beach erosion.”

In the Altai region itself, meanwhile, the exhumation of a “princess” led to “political unrest in the local shaman community,” Molyneaux and Reay write. These disturbed and literally geopolitical circumstances are only set to grow.

[Image: Two shots from the Golden Mountains of Altai UNESCO World Heritage Site by Gleb Raygorodetsky, courtesy of Our World 2.0].

Writing for the somewhat unfortunately named publication Our World 2.0, Gleb Raygorodetsky reiterates the point that the changing ground conditions of the region that once so effectively “preserved the remains of the Altai’s ancestors in burial kurgans [or tombs] for thousands of years is disappearing, melting away because of steadily rising air and ground temperatures in the region. Climate change is literally melting away the cultural heritage of the Altai people, a rich and irreplaceable part of the global heritage.”

It’s worth noting that there have been some architectural proposals for helping with the in-situ preservation of these frozen tombs. As Raygorodetsky writes, “UNESCO and Ghent University, along with their Russian partners, have been cataloguing the Altai’s frozen tombs to help develop conservation and preservation plans. Some of the proposed solutions include elaborate schemes to shade each individual tomb from direct sunlight to stabilize its temperature.”

[Image: Diagram of the thermal effects of an Altai rock tomb or kurgan, from “Saving the Frozen Scythian Tombs of the Altai Mountains” by Jean Bourgeois, Alain De Wulf, Rudi Goossens and Wouter Gheyle].

Here, Raygorodetsky refers to a 2007 paper originally published in World Archaeology, called “Saving the Frozen Scythian Tombs of the Altai Mountains,” where the possibility of constructing thermal shading devices to protect the tombs from melting is explored.

However, considering the visually intrusive nature of such shelters, not to mention the expense of construction and upkeep, the authors instead suggest what amounts to refrigerating the ground: proposing a solution that would involve “self-regulating seasonally acting cooling devices or thermosyphons. They act like refrigerators but without needing an external power source. By extracting heat from the ground and dissipating it into the air, they lower the ground temperature and prevent the degradation of permafrost.”

As such, these would be not unlike the ground-refrigeration columns currently used to artificially englaciate the ground beneath the epic Beijing-Lhasa high-altitude, pressurized train in China & Tibet, or artificial glaciation as a form of architectural design.

[Image: Diagram of archaeological ground-refrigeration techniques, from “Saving the Frozen Scythian Tombs of the Altai Mountains” by Jean Bourgeois, Alain De Wulf, Rudi Goossens and Wouter Gheyle].

But perhaps precise cataloging of the exposed artifacts really is all that can be done in most locations.

In the most recent issue of Archaeology, journalist Andrew Curry tags along with a team of surveyors and archaeologists as they explore the Jotunheim Mountains of Norway.

As the ice fields recede due to changing temperatures, ancient artifacts, such as 3,400-year old leather shoes, are being uncovered more and more frequently, now found just sitting there on the rocks. Finding these and other soon-to-be-disturbed objects is, Curry writes, “an effort that combines high-tech mapping, glaciology, climate science, and history. When conditions are right, it’s as simple as picking the past up off the ground.”

[Image: Courtesy Espen Finstad/Oppland County Council. Photos by Johan Wildhagen/Palookaville and Andrew Curry, via Archaeology].

Growing beards and loaded down with survey gear, the archaeologists Curry traveled with hiked up into the mountains, following meltwater streams to the ice patches they came from. At one of their camps, sleeping inside “Everest-rated” tents, one of the scientists tells Curry of an experience from a prior year’s survey work.

They had been ready to return home, the archaeologist explains, hiking carefully through a heavy fog, when they noticed a woven tunic and scattered leather goods lying on the rocks down at their feet.

Then the fog lifted and they saw the landscape around them, “littered with leather, textiles, wood, and animal dung”—artifacts everywhere—an archaeological site newly exposed from its frozen burial like a fully-stocked stage set dramatically revealed, dream-like, on all sides, an ancient open-air exhibition that had only recently been hidden from view.

(For more things locked in ice, suddenly revealed, see Ice Patch Archaeology earlier on BLDGBLOG).

Combat Preservation

[Image: A SWORDS unit firing; photo via National Defense Magazine].

A U.S. ground combat robot has been accessioned by the Smithsonian Institution to form part of a future museum display, National Defense Magazine reports. The robot, one of the first to be sent into live combat—specifically, into Iraq in 2007, where the machines were seen “roaming the streets… carrying guns”—is part of the SWORDS system, or “special weapons observation remote reconnaissance direct action system.”

While this should come as no surprise, considering the already exhaustive collections of arms and armor found in museums around the world, it’s nonetheless interesting to watch as semi-autonomous combat machines become subject to the Q-Tip-wielding fragility of museum restoration techniques, which will no doubt seek to preserve these machines as if they were never meant to be altered or broken.

But it’s also a slightly haunting conceptual moment in military history, as the earliest examples of armed ground devices less than a decade old now stand shrouded in the halls of national memory, like returned soldiers from a war no one wants to think about, encased alongside medieval knights holding onto their own swords well into the afterlife.

[Image: Knights at the Metropolitan Museum of Art].

The news also makes it hard not to imagine a Museum of Military Robotics on the horizon somewhere, its displays filled with heavily armed sentinels standing there, polished and dormant, behind glass, sleeping artifacts that unstoppably emerged from cracks in the laws of war and the possibilities of sentient machinery.

Google Glass-wearing parents take their kids to the Tomb of the Unknown Robot, while algorithmically patterned bursts of artillery soar over the laser-leveled landscape, a former test range for ground drones.

Perhaps we’ll even see 4-star generals someday buried with their favorite combat machines, like Viking conquerors, not lying next to loyal falcons or warhorses but SWORDS units and Raven drones.

Offworld Metallurgy

[Image: Ancient Egyptian jewelry made from meteorites; photo courtesy of UCL Petrie Museum/Rob Eagle].

X-ray analysis has found that “ancient Egyptian iron beads held at the UCL Petrie Museum were hammered from pieces of meteorites, rather than iron ore,” Science Daily reports. “The objects, which trace their origins to outer space, also predate the emergence of iron smelting by two millennia.”

By scanning the beads with beam of neutrons and gamma-rays, the team were able to reveal the unique texture and also high concentration of nickel, cobalt, phosphorus and germanium—which is only found in trace amounts in iron derived from ore—that is characteristics of meteoric iron, without having to attempt invasive analysis which could potentially damage these rare objects.

The “meteoric ore”—that, presumably, at least in some instances, had been seen falling from the sky like heavenly precipitation—was hammered and rolled into pieces of ceremonial jewelry to be worn like gifts from the sky.

This brings to mind the famed “space buddha” of last year: “An ancient Buddhist statue which was first recovered by a Nazi expedition in 1938 has been analyzed by a team of scientists,” Science Daily wrote last summer, revealing “that the priceless statue was carved from an ataxite, a very rare class of iron meteorites.”

[Image: Space buddha! Photo by Dr. Elmar Buchner, via Science Daily].

Fabricating objects from chunks of metal that have fallen from space—or humans artifacts emerging from astral wreckage scattered across the surface of the planet—is a pretty compelling design scenario, I have to say, and to read that some of humanity’s “earliest known iron artifacts come from outer space” only adds a new, strange gleam to an already fascinating civilization.

However, we can only speculate what it might like in several generations’ time if industrial super-projects like offworld mining and post-planetary extraction do, in fact, take off—if geochemical reserves on the moon, for instance, are harvested for use in terrestrial power stations, batteries, and other pieces of electrical infrastructure—to know that, in that power plant humming away quietly in the forest north of New York City, surrounded by old trees and cliffs on the riverside, pieces of the moon and captured asteroids are burning, becoming fuel and light for our cities. Our devices will glow with the light of alien worlds, rocks alchemically scorched and purified in huge ovens run by ConEd.

And, in 5,000 years, archaeologists will uncover the crumbled dust of other planets in our factories, still glistening amongst the ruins in which they burned, perhaps wondering what religious connotation the power system played for us, this shining network where we ritually incinerated the heavens, computational clouds run with unearthly fuels that, like the Egyptian jewelry this post started with, can “trace their origins to outer space.”

Tensioned Suspension

[Image: “Cavity Mechanism #12 w/ Glass Dome” (2013) by Dan Grayber].

We’ve looked at the work of Bay Area sculptor Dan Grayber here before, but he’s got a small show of new work opening up at Oakland’s Johansson Projects gallery next month and it seems worth stopping by.

[Image: Another view of “Cavity Mechanism #12 w/ Glass Dome” (2013) by Dan Grayber].

Grayber describes his work as a study in “self-resolving problems,” where highly-tensioned devices hold themselves aloft inside glass vitrines, as if floating in space, fighting their own weight while pushing relentlessly against the walls that contain them.

[Images: “Cavity Mechanism #9 w/ Glass Dome” (2013) by Dan Grayber].

Graybar uses an over-arching description for many of pieces seen here, writing, for example, that each piece is “a counterweight driven mechanism that wedges itself into the inside of a cavity (the glass dome in this case), suspending itself.”

[Image: “Cavity Mechanism #11 w/ Glass Dome” (2013) by Dan Grayber].

They are as much displays of gravitational potential energy—like staged moments in some avant-garde machine-ballet whose only plot and purpose is to resist the pull of the earth—as they are “art objects.”

[Images: “Cavity Mechanism #10 w/ Glass Dome” (2013) by Dan Grayber].

While the highly contained, desktop scale of each piece adds to the overall feel of pent-up force and concentration, it’s hard not to want to see this guy working at Richard Serra-like proportions, scaled-up to the point of architecture.

[Image: “Display Case Mechanism #1” (2013) by Dan Grayber].

You walk into Madison Square Park in Manhattan only to see a giant steel mantis weighing five or six tons, painted in fluorescent construction orange, poised kite-like inside a polarized glass dome, holding boulders the size of Fiats, sprung, tensioned, and impossibly buoyant, as if somehow lighter than air.

[Image: “Cavity Mechanism #7 w/ Glass Dome” (2013) by Dan Grayber].

There is an artist’s reception and opening on October 4, so mark your calendars ahead of time and stop in to meet the machines. More examples of his work can be seen here on BLDGBLOG or at the artist’s own website.

Chocolate Mill

In response to a description featured in an earlier post about “space truffles,” designer (and occasional photographer) Nick Foster pointed me to the video featured below. Originally released last year from the Vitra Design Museum, it documents a 2012 collaboration between Studio Wieki Somers and German chocolatier Rafael Mutter.

What appears simply to be a massive column of chocolate turns out, when shaved down over time—reduced millimeter by millimeter for hours—to have countless, stunning internal geometric patterns marbled and embedded throughout its previously unseen interior. Every turn of the mill reveals more, deeper patterns; every pattern is scraped away to reveal ever deeper shapes.



Objects that only reveal themselves through reduction—or, rather, objects that reveal infinitely different, all but unrecognizable versions of themselves as they are diminished in size or shape—are a particularly fascinating thing to think about.

From genetically modified trees whose inner rings are actually precise 3D objects only revealed when the tree is sliced in section—perhaps like something out of the work of Sascha Pohflepp, where grown machines emerge like fruit from trees—to multi-course meals where each course is somehow embedded within the course that preceded it, there is a bewildering amount of future design possibility in the field.

(Thanks, Nick, for the tip!)

Landscape Futures Arrives

[Image: Internal title page from Landscape Futures; book design by Everything-Type-Company].

At long last, after a delay from the printer, Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions is finally out and shipping internationally.

I am incredibly excited about the book, to be honest, and about the huge variety of content it features, including an original essay by Elizabeth Ellsworth & Jamie Kruse of Smudge Studio, a short piece of landscape fiction by Pushcart Prize-winning author Scott Geiger, and a readymade course outline—open for anyone looking to teach a course on oceanographic instrumentation—by Mammoth’s Rob Holmes.

These join reprints of classic texts by geologist Jan Zalasiewicz, on the incipient fossilization of our cities 100 million years from now; a look at the perverse history of weather warfare and the possibility of planetary-scale climate manipulation by James Fleming; and a brilliant analysis of the Temple of Dendur, currently held deep in the controlled atmosphere of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and its implications for architectural preservation elsewhere.

And even these are complemented by an urban hiking tour by the Center for Land Use Interpretation that takes you up into the hills of Los Angeles to visit check dams, debris basins, radio antennas, and cell phone towers, and a series of ultra-short stories set in a Chicago yet to come by Pruned‘s Alexander Trevi.

[Images: A few spreads from the “Landscape Futures Sourcebook” featured in Landscape Futures; book design by Everything-Type-Company].

Of course, everything just listed supplements and expands on the heart of the book, which documents the eponymous exhibition hosted at the Nevada Museum of Art, featuring specially commissioned work by Smout Allen, David Gissen, and The Living, and pre-existing work by Liam Young, Chris Woebken & Kenichi Okada, and Lateral Office.

Extensive original interviews with the exhibiting architects and designers, and a long curator’s essay—describing the exhibition’s focus on the intermediary devices, instruments, and spatial machines that can fundamentally transform how human beings perceive and understand the landscapes around them—complete the book, in addition to hundreds of images, many maps, and an extensive use of metallic and fluorescent inks.

The book is currently only $17.97 on Amazon.com, as well, which seems like an almost unbelievable deal; now is an awesome time to buy a copy.

[Images: Interview spreads from Landscape Futures; book design by Everything-Type-Company].

In any case, I’ve written about Landscape Futures here before, and an exhaustive preview of it can be seen in this earlier post.

I just wanted to put up a notice that the book is finally shipping worldwide, with a new publication date of August 2013, and I look forward to hearing what people think. Enjoy!

Wood Grain Cosmogram

The previous post, looking at the possibility of an object that could be carved, whittled, and reduced infinitely, each section revealing new, fractal details, reminded me of two short films we showed several years ago at the Silver Lake Film Festival, both by architect Bradford Watson.

An over-literal description doesn’t really do Watson’s work justice. In the first one, embedded below, you are looking at nothing more complicated than a series of 768 sectional cuts taken through a 96-inch 2×4, after which the resulting wooden blocks were used to make black & white prints, and the prints were then played in sequence, like a flipbook. In the second film, you’re watching something even more straight-forward, which is a “matched pair” of 2x4s that have been cut down, photographed, and filmed in order until there is no more 2×4 left to cut through.

And that’s it.

But they’re both well worth watching, if for no other reason than the sensation they give, in the first video’s case, of flying forward through space, complete with weird astronomical bursts of energy shooting diagonally and comet-like across the wood grain (for example, the moment captured at 00:09-00:10).

In the second video, below, the wood seems to mimic the rings of Saturn, a planetary concentricity occasionally crossed and streaked by foreign objects (for example, see the event at 00:18-00:19 or rewatch the weird knotted prominence, like a solar storm in wood, that appears at 00:51-00:59).

It’s as if the wood itself all along had been filming the sun somehow, capturing that solar exposure in wood and documenting the star whose radiation and light had helped it to grow in the first place—as if, when you slice down into something as simple as a 2×4 normally used to construct suburban houses, you can find films of the universe, weird short loops of the skies exploding, splintered by comets and solar storms.

In fact, I’m reminded of a quotation I’ve always liked, from a book called Earth’s Magnetism in the Age of Sail by A.R.T. Jonkers: “In 1904 a young American named Andrew Ellicott Douglass started to collect tree specimens. He was not seeking a pastime to fill his hours of leisure; his motivation was purely professional. Yet he was not employed by any forestry department or timber company, and he was neither a gardener not a botanist. For decades he continued to amass chunks of wood, all because of a lingering suspicion that a tree’s bark was shielding more than sap and cellulose. He was not interested in termites, or fungal parasites, or extracting new medicine from plants. Douglass was an astronomer, and he was searching for evidence of sunspots.”

The idea that an astronomer seeking to study the sun would proceed by making incisions into trees, as if looking for solar fossils there—an astral forensics of the forest—is mind-bogglingly beautiful and seems also to form the poetic subtext that makes Bradford Watson‘s short films so captivating.

[Image: From The Fountain, courtesy of Warner Brothers].

A few years ago in Wired, meanwhile, veteran science journalist Steve Silberman wrote about the special effects created for Darren Aronofsky’s film The Fountain. Aronofsky, Silberman explained, stumbled across the photographic work of Peter Parks, “a marine biologist and photographer who lives in a 400-year-old cowshed west of London”:

Parks and his son run a home f/x shop based on a device they call the microzoom optical bench. Bristling with digital and film cameras, lenses, and Victorian prisms, their contraption can magnify a microliter of water up to 500,000 times or fill an Imax screen with the period at the end of this sentence. Into water they sprinkle yeast, dyes, solvents, and baby oil, along with other ingredients they decline to divulge. The secret of Parks’ technique is an odd law of fluid dynamics: The less fluid you have, the more it behaves like a solid. The upshot is that Parks can make a dash of curry powder cascading toward the lens look like an onslaught of flaming meteorites. “When these images are projected on a big screen, you feel like you’re looking at infinity,” he says. “That’s because the same forces at work in the water—gravitational effects, settlement, refractive indices—are happening in outer space.”

I mention this simply because it would be interesting to experiment with ultra-low-budget 2001-like astral effects using nothing but sequential shots of wood grain, with its stuttering bursts of spatial events constantly branching out from within.

Space Truffle

[Image: From Fabergé Fractals by Tom Beddard].

One of the perils of spending most of the summer away from blogging, I suppose, is that it’s so easy to miss interesting projects. Something that made the rounds several weeks ago, and that seemed worth re-posting here anyway is this incredible series of images exploring “Fabergé fractals” by digital artist Tom Beddard.

[Image: From Fabergé Fractals by Tom Beddard].

It’s not the sci-fi stoner appeal of the fractals themselves that is so interesting about the images, however, but rather the notion of a 3D object so dense and so complicated with internal surfaces, rings of growth, and convolutedly compressed whorls that you could cut an endless array of millimeter-thin slices from it and each one would always reveal something different. A different texture, a different marbling of colors, a different and effectively unpredictable internal geometry.

[Images: From Fabergé Fractals by Tom Beddard].

You could slice new gems from this thing forever—carving down from every side, milling from every possible angle—and always find some strange new object there before you, one that changes through reduction, always offering, no matter how small the object eventually gets, all but infinite surface area to explore.

Architecturally speaking, it would be internally infinite in plan, internally infinite in section.

[Image: From Fabergé Fractals by Tom Beddard].

It’s like a truffle—

[Images: Sliced truffles, randomly found via Google].

—a space truffle that could be whittled and shaved down, shaped, sanded, and cut, eternally different from what it used to be at every stage of this spatial surgery.

[Image: From Fabergé Fractals by Tom Beddard].

(Via but does it float).

Voices Loom

[Image: A telephone tower in Stockholm, Sweden, courtesy of the Tekniska Museet].

Trying to catch up on the huge variety of things saved over the summer while out on our most recent jaunt for Venue, I’ve got an awful lot of quick links, now less-than-current news items, and a few longer reads that you’ve no doubt seen elsewhere at this point, but I thought I’d go through and choose a few for posting.

[Image: A telephone tower in Stockholm, Sweden, courtesy of the Tekniska Museet].

In this case, we’re looking at a telephone tower in downtown Stockholm, one that stood from roughly 1887-1913, and that served at least 5,000 local phones lines—lines that take on the literal feel of a sketch or drawing as they stretch over the streets like some urban-scale loom enthroned over the city, weaving conversations together from every district. It’s a cast-iron stupa through which all voices must pass.

[Image: A telephone tower in Stockholm, Sweden, courtesy of the Tekniska Museet].

There are a few more photos available at the Tekniska Museet‘s Flickr set, but here is a selection of some of the most interesting—

[Images: A telephone tower in Stockholm, Sweden, courtesy of the Tekniska Museet].

—including a street scene of people walking to or from home with this strange skeletal structure seemingly waiting for them at the end of the lane, listening and dystopian—

[Image: A telephone tower in Stockholm, Sweden, courtesy of the Tekniska Museet].

—or this view of it blending into its urban context. It could almost pass as a cathedral or as the intimidating battlements of an unfinished electromagnetic fortress in the middle of the downtown core.

[Image: A telephone tower in Stockholm, Sweden, courtesy of the Tekniska Museet].

The weird and invisible mysticism of the phone system is laid bare, its nervous system exposed above the roofs of Stockholm and strung up on a tower like the pelt of some rare and conquered animal, forced to host even our most inconsequential conversations.

[Image: A telephone tower in Stockholm, Sweden, courtesy of the Tekniska Museet].

Teenage Mutant Ninja District

Abandoned terrapin turtles purchased 25 years ago at the height of popularity for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have been harming wildlife and changing the ecological character of England’s famed Lake District. Once an orbital center for the lives of poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the landscape is now infested with discarded pets purchased for their imaginative resemblance to kids’ toys and comic book characters.

Terry Bowes, a regional zoo director interviewed by the Guardian, has become “exasperated at the routine abandonment of creatures,” he explained, “that suffered the misfortune of becoming fashionable at the time of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle craze.”

“I was thinking what we could do about them all,” Bowes told the paper, “and then I heard about another Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle film coming out soon and steam came out of my ears. I was thinking, ‘Oh no, this is only going to get worse.'”

Human ownership of changing animal species responds to the quirks of popular appeal, we read, including hit films and toy lines: “Pets are just as vulnerable to fashion as anything else, said Bowes, as we passed three enormous European eagle owls he said were abandoned by their owners after they outgrew Harry Potter, and a trio of perky meerkats he said were probably originally bought after seeing the star of the Compare the Market insurance ads.” The region is an open-air zoo of animals that have escaped from popular media.

Surely, though, in a sense, this is just the latest, albeit inadvertent iteration of the infamous American Acclimatization Society, a group of literary-minded naturalists in 19th-century New York City who made it their bizarre goal to “introduce to the U.S. every bird mentioned in Shakespeare’s scripts.” As Scientific American writes, “The Acclimatization Society released some hundred starlings in New York City’s Central Park in 1890 and 1891. By 1950 starlings could be found coast to coast, north past Hudson Bay and south into Mexico. Their North American numbers today top 200 million.” Shakespeare, the Bible, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—all cultural artifacts and unintended animal blueprints for infested landscapes yet to come.

(The recent documentary The Elephant in the Living Room is worth a view here, for anyone interested in the unforeseen—or, far more often, willfully overlooked—negative side-effects of exotic pets).