Liquid films and water-signs: landscape in an age of information design

[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).

The Remote Viewer

[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?].

For the record

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.

Trafalgar Flu

[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...?

Super Reef: In Stereo!

[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?

The Hollow Earth

[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...

Mantleslides

"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?