Doha (26th - 31st May)

 

Having worked on various projects located in Doha over the past 5 years, it is only recently that I had the opportunity to visit it. It being a short trip we had just enough time to visit a new development called Katara and Souk Waqif that felt like public spaces, while rest of the experience was through the car on a busy high speed road surrounded by tower (West Bay) or low rise suburban sprawl. The built environment seemed to reflect the demographics of the place where one could visibly see the difference between built forms and spaces that were for Qataris, expatriates and low skilled workers, and a conscious space planning to keep these segregated. Workers were seen to use the street or vague in-between spaces as their public space to linger in the background, almost invisible.
This contradiction of desiring segregation but aspiring for an image of public life for each of the three groups under consideration reminds me of China Mieville’s The City & The City, described here as “The City & the City takes place in the cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma. These two cities actually occupy much of the same geographical space, but via the volition of their citizens (and the threat of the secret power known as Breach), they are perceived as two different cities. A denizen of one city must dutifully 'unsee' (that is, consciously erase from their mind or fade into the background) the denizens, buildings, and events taking place in the other city – even if they are an inch away. The twin cities are composed of crosshatched, alter, and total areas. "Total" areas are entirely in one city, the city in which the observer currently resides. "Alter" areas are completely in the other city, and so must be completely avoided and ignored. Between these are areas of "crosshatch". These might be streets, parks or squares where denizens of both cities walk alongside one another, albeit "unseen." Areas that exist in both cities usually go under different names in each one. There is also Copula Hall, "one of the very few" buildings which exists in both cities under the same name. Rather than being cross-hatched, it essentially functions as a border. It is the only way in which one can legally and officially pass from one city to another. Passing through the border passage takes travellers, geographically (or "grosstopically"), to the exact place they started from – only in a different city”. Only in case of Doha it would be 3 cities interlocked within one another. For designers who don’t have the luxury of fighting social injustices or demand democracies, developing such self-indulgent design briefs is the only way to survive work in the middle east, which to be honest can be lot more interesting given the crazy money + ambition combination than do work in a democratic process with restricted budget, a 100000 page convoluted policy guidance, 1 km deep sub terrain infrastructure, public consultations and if that is not enough bunch of boring consultants who are hired to purely tick the boxes to give rise to a reasonably well reasoned masterplan that reeks of absence of any ambition for the built environment.
 

Nymphaea thermarum

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/13/rare-water-lily-stolen-kew-gardens

reads' "Police have launched an appeal to trace a rare plant that was stolen from Kew Gardens. A Nymphaea thermarum, the smallest water lily in the world and extinct in the wild, was taken from the south-west London visitor attraction. A Scotland Yard spokesman said the theft had occurred between 8.30am and 2.55pm on Thursday at the Princess of Wales Conservatory. Experts believe the culprits would have had to dig or pull up the plant from a shallow pond. Nymphaea thermarum was discovered in 1987 in just one location, Mashyuza in Rwanda. But it disappeared from there around two years ago because of the over-exploitation of a hot spring that kept the plants moist and at a constant temperature."

Carlos Magdalena and Lily, source: here 

Further reading find was,
"The plant's native habitat was damp mud formed by the overflow of a freshwater hot spring in Mashyuza, Rwanda. It became extinct in the wild about 2008 when local farmers began using the spring for agriculture. The farmers cut off the flow of the spring, which dried up the tiny area—just a few square metres—that was the lily's entire habitat. Before the plants became extinct, Fischer sent some specimens to Bonn Botanic Gardens when he saw that their habitat was so fragile. The plants were kept alive at the gardens, but botanists could not solve the problem of propagating them from seed.
Botanists were unable to germinate any seeds until Carlos Magdalena, at Kew, discovered the solution—only after he was down to his last 20 seeds. By placing the seeds and seedlings into pots of loam surrounded by water of the same level in a 25 °C environment, eight began to flourish and mature within weeks and in November 2009, the waterlilies flowered for the first time. Nymphaea species typically germinate deep under water. N. thermarum seeds are different, needing CO2 in order to germinate. Once Magdalena understood that difference, he was able to germinate the first seeds. During this time, a rat had eaten one of the last two surviving plants in Germany. With the germination problem solved, Magdalena says that the tiny plants are easy to grow, giving it potential to be grown as a houseplant."

There is an almost extinct Water Lily (gone extinct from the wild) being conserved in Kew Gardens, someone stole it and police are looking for the water lily thief...this world just got a little beautiful again.

Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot

Around the time when I was a a kid and had started admiring the beauty of moving images, my dad with great efforts had put together some savings and bought a coloured TV, a novelty that few homes could enjoy. Being born in 80's in India meant you did not have cable tv, childhood life was co-ordinated around very few definite programs that used to be screened on Doordarshan, one of which was Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot (created by Mitsuteru Yokoyama). 
This was one of those many things that sent its influences across schools, playgrounds and other spaces infested with kids. A bunch of us doing a Giant Robo excercise before a showdown fight for the swing had always perplexed teachers and parents alike. But in the end we would be rest assured that the Robo would struggle through all sorts of acrobatic fights, be badly injured/broken, and still emerge victorious thanks to a combination of fast computing, secret alternative use of already existing weapons (mentioned in the manual, but Sokko and therefore the audience did not know of) and last but not the least sheer brute force.
But then we all grew up and read Kafka's Trial. I have been in one since 2 months now. Got an outcome yesterday, next steps involve further exploration of the labyrinthine corridors of bureaucracy. A Giant Robo would had been very very useful in such matters of the State.

La Vie Aquatique

(The text below is not a description of London aquarium, but it was inspired by a recent visit to it)

(image of the Crystal Palace Aquarium sourced from here.)
Though designed by a name obscured by time and tides, the aquarium could be considered to be a dream project of curiosities, entertainment and science, set within the Victorian era that bravely peered into the oceans' depths. Oceans that unlike today's still nurtured within them the myths of mermaids, sea monsters,loch ness and science of species in equal proportions. The aquarium was indeed a small sample of this vast primordial soup of life that had abilities to shelter myth and science simultaneously, to be viewed and awed by the public, a television set of the 19th century!

And so the stone facade of the aquarium building was an alto relievo jigsaw of two intertwining narratives, one of the oceans created and the other of the oceans formed. The Darwinian narrative covering the plinths of the building with relief work of smaller more intricate Crustaceans, Mollusks and Echinoderms that could be observed and displayed at human height, flowed along the stormy biblical waves of Philip Gosse as species got simultaneously created and evolved, with whales, squids and sharks forming support system for the rusting copper roof and sea monsters occupying the place of gargoyles that poured water out into various crevices of the facade to bring the oceans to life on a rainy day.

(Statue of Poseidon. Found on Milos with the statue of Amphitrite. In his raised right hand he will have held the trident. Next to his right leg is a support of in the form of a dolphin. 125-100 BC . National Archaeological Museum of Athens, sourced from http://www.greek-thesaurus.gr/hellenistic-age-marble-sculpture-statues-photo-gallery.html)
The entrance of the aquarium was a double height wooden dome with copper handrails, circular riveted portholes and other borrowings from Jules Verne's Nautilus, at the centre stood a six metre high black granite statue of Poseidon, whose beard, hair and cloth seemed to turn the air around into water. A recent material analysis had confirmed the stone came from the submerged monument of Yonaguni Jima, Japan. Our tickets came bundled up in mermaid's purse, an object that just like the facade embodied within it echoes of myths and science alike.

(image of Ascidiae plate 85 from Kunstformen der Natur by Earnst Haeckel, sourced from here)
The first chamber was a gallery of original paintings by Earnst Haeckel, letters exchanged between Robert Warington and Gosse, a manuscript by Jules Verne's recently discovered book 'The seas of Neptune' by a great grand daughter of his editor Jules Hetzel, a fifteenth century Latin translation of Plato's Timaeus and Critias and lastly a final piece of this puzzle Alastair Pilkington and Kenneth Bickerstaff, the men who made the Crystal Palaces, and aquariums possible for the Victorians, the men who made glass visible or should i say invisible! In this room the life aquatic, science, art and most importantly men seemed to evolve and achieve greatness that challenge the world as we know it.

(Cover of "L'Algerie" Magazine, 15 June 1884, image from wikipedia article on Jules Verne)
The visitors could travel through a series of chambers. Each chamber had two identical doors, faith and fact, objectivity and subjectivity, etc and through the selection of each door the aquarium revealed itself as a labyrinth of multiple choices that single cell plankton to multi cell complex organisms had to make as they evolved newer appendages for their faiths or shed older organs to well known facts, thus contributing to the success of their future generations and building on the strengths of the past. The displays were a part of the labyrinth influencing the visitors' choices, presenting themselves as part fact part fiction, like the sea anemone that forms gardens of living tissue along coral reefs or the sleeping whale that formed an island in the first voyage of Sindabad. This Labyrinth had multiple glass stairs and corridors leading up or down between display rooms; these being completely made of glass were the only spaces from where one could peer out at the labyrinth, see silhouettes of other people moving and be conscious of its massive scale and complexity. Peering out of these glass spaces, sometimes littered with objects of everyday use, spoons, tables, books, toys, etc the visitor realises he too like the fishes is a part of this aquarium, not a visitor, not a witness but an active organism that has influenced the labyrinth of evolution through the choices made and an inseparable display like the rest.

At the end of the journey the visitors who had travelled each his unique distance and observed a unique set of sea creatures, all converged into a common egg shaped chamber which was newly added annexe to the aquarium building. This chamber unlike the others was an iridescent, seamless opaque space lit by fluorescent white light. The centre of the space had a six metre high white marble statue of Oceanus rumoured to be made from Golgotha stone. The statue was said to had been recently acquired by the aquarium with its origins traced to a Renaissance genius working in Florence around the beginning of sixteenth century. The display tank was located along the equatorial line of the geoid. A robotic arm above the tanks whizzed and dropped in creatures announcing ticket numbers corresponding to each creature. These were chimeras, being printed for each visitor based on the visitors journey and his choices. Some were grotesque nebular lumps of flesh where the choices of fact and fiction had made the organism incapable of living, some exquisitely beautiful where the two dialectics had stabilised in cohesive harmony. Due to Global genetic laws, the life span of these fantastic creatures created by man was to be only few minutes till they formed the display and had been seen by their creator. But so unique and powerful would be the relationship of this creature to the visitor who created it through his/her choices, that the image would form a part of the visitors sub conscious, influencing decisions for rest of his/her life. This was a consistent effect seen on all visitors who visited the aquarium. Some controversial psychoanalysts had gone to the extent of calling it a Lacanian mirror stage of the entire species, some pointed that we had discovered the Omphalos, the ultimate allegory of the creator allowing the creations to create.

(Double plate illustration showing embryos of fish (F), salamander (A), tur tle (T), chick (H), pig (S), cow (R), rabbit (K), and human (M), at "very early", "somewhat later" and "still later" stages, from Haeckel's Anthropogenie published in 1874, image sourced from here)
And so the visit to the aquarium in the 21st century had come to be a Hajj for the entire human race, balanced between scientific exploration and spirituality. Thus the aquarium, the least expected institution of Victorian curiosity and intrigue had come to negotiate differences between subjectivity and objectivity, between the church and the parliament, between inquisitions and justice. Like fishes aligning themselves to light in the absence of gravity, mankind was aligning itself to the sea within.

Photography of Time Travel

(the white lines in the sky are a result of the sun moving across the sky and variations in the sun path through the year. photograph sourced from here)
Recently I came across German photographer/artist Michael Wesley's monochromatic photographs that are a part of his open shutter project, which record the image over long periods of exposure sometimes lasting 3 years.
In the past I have also written of Michael Kenna's long exposure photographs in low light conditions giving absolutely stunning high contrast images that beautify the very constraint, the static nature of a photograph. Here the image isnt a split second capture but something that has been and will continue to be. The environments recorded are almost meditative minimal landscapes of silence.

(image sourced from here)
But when a similar methodology gets used in urban environments that attempts to record months of moving images in one frame the result is as magical. Within the greater Order of Things in the branch of still photography I believe it is like discovering dialectically opposite twins.

(image sourced from here)
Michael Wesley's monochrome photographs that continue capturing the image over a period of 2 to 3 years constantly as the glass eye of the camera gazes continuously at one focus and the world around it changes, it instantly transforms into a time machine with its precise control over the speed of light, absorbtion of the memory of the past, experience of the present and dreams of the future on the film. The images thus recorded are as magical as the moving pictures, they record the very ghosts of time, the paths of the sun as it speeds across the horizon, the glare of a glass window on a particuilar day in winter.

(image sourced from here)
I wonder what would it be to have a camera positioned whose exposure time will work through generations, what would one like to focus their eyes on for the next 80 years if they know it will only be their next generation that shall see what it looked like.

The Swan Song

(The sounds were recorded by Mark Fischer an engineer who used to work on US Navy sonar and software for defence and aerospace companies but he now records the underwater conversations between whales and dolphins and transforms the waves into art.)
Hiroshi found himself anxiously rechecking calibrations on the piezoelectric transducers. The wavelet patterns of the specimen he had been studying for the past 12 years had changed its spectrogram in a matter of days. He had slowly become aware of the responsibility that had been entrusted to him. He was one of the 7 researchers across the globe given responsibility to record, study and archive the life of the last 7 animals of this dying species, the Megaptera novaeangliae.

(Fischer uses a a branch of maths dealing with wavelet that transforms sound to intricate patterns. The patterns look intricate and remind me of Yantras and Manadalas that always seem to be encoded with something more that what we can comprehend.)
Despite suggestions to attempt breeding programs, besides the scale, the sheer magnificence of these gentle giants made it almost immoral to reduce them to conserved specimens of the human guilt. Instead it was voted by the Councils, Corporates and Governments alike, to allow the animals to die in dignity. On their deaths, divers would dive to collect complete DNA samples to join the ranks of numerous other animals on the Noah's Arc a Cryoarchive Lab in the middle of the Indian Ocean that promised a day of resurrection. It was observed that all the 7 animals had started singing the same song over the past few months, the separation between the North Atlantic and the North Pacific songs had merged into a singular string of notes. Slowly the number had further reduced from 7 to 4 to the last.

(Fischer has taken advantage of the striking look of his graphs, selling them as art through his company Aguasonic Acoustics, based in San Francisco.)
Hiroshi knew it was the Humpback's Swansong, something that had to leave a lasting reverbrance in the oceans of time. He wondered what are the conscious dying words of the last animal. like the million languages that had slowly faded away over the last century, from the memory of human speech, to die at the hands of 2 global languages. what were the words of the last person of a dead language, knowing that he alone made sense of sounds that had earned their syntax over years of collective efforts. And it was then that Hiroshi realized the very nature of this tradition, the preparation towards the end, the making of the Fayyum potrait that will stay and tell beings to come that I was here, I swam through the oceans of time changing with the world around, from paws to wings, from mammal to fish. And the whale had selected Hiroshi as his artiste biographe.
(Came across Mark Fischer's blog here)
Hiroshi quickly ran sono-trans, a program that interpreted different sounds, ran a comparative meaning-sound analysis to provide the closest 'meaning/gesture' that it could mean and group these together to form what we could understand as sentences. But this time, it did not make any sense, the sounds were different, they never repeated. The sound had no semiotics, no syntax. With no one to sing to had the animal broken away from the very rules of its language?...Hiroshi ceaselessly recorded every sound, every song and every gesture made by Moby, his whale, with whom he had lived, slept and ate in a submersible, away from the world. It soon dawned upon Hiroshi that the whale was not an individual animal anymore but a representative of a collective that once was. It did not have the luxury of leaving behind a self indulgent fayyum potrait but what it was leaving behind was the Rosetta stone itself. The very genetic code of its language, its existence and the collective memory of the entire species. Hiroshi witnessed the last animal sleep, with its body swaying limply along the ocean floor that had suddenly lost its voice.

Update: article: lonely whale

Lebenswelt

I came across works by two very interesting artists last week, Nicolas Moulin who envisages ruins of mega monolithic concrete blocks in a deserted landscape while the other being Hiroyuki Hamada who designs comparatively small, vaguely futurist looking monoliths.





(Some of the many Hiroyuki's tablets that could easily come to be a parts of totem pole of a dystopian space age civilization, whose technological advancement has come at the price of erosion of memory of history and language...where technology is god. Images sourced from: http://acidolatte.blogspot.com/2010/02/hiroyuki-hamada.html?zx=883872d53fad4dd5)
Hiroyuki's artifacts that seem to draw semantic nourishment from manga, minimalism, space debris, Japanese Zen, Buddhism, God particles, Shivalingam, crustaceans, Mars and brush by closely to Nicolas's Béton Brut work that sends roots to Normandy Bunkers, Corbusier, Oplismeno skirodema, Berlin Wall, Moai, Rosetta stone, Noah's Arc etc according to me are not thriving on but are just the opposite. They are soil samples of the very ground that anchors the tree of Being, from where all these references germinate.



(Images of Nicolas Moulin's collages sourced from Vulgare one can also find an online blog recording by the artist and Amanda Crawley Jackson called Beton brut)
The ability of both these artist to have art works that spread roots through history and simultaneously come across as being so basic that it forms a part of Lebenswelt, the very ground of universality which anchors the roots of metaphysics, to be understood in equal ways by every member of the human race is according to me the true essence of their work.
Scale, texture and form, that is all to it, as wise old university stalwarts would put it, which according to me has more truth to it than the combined cacophony that we seem to have inherited from the circus that was post modernism and these two artists working independently in different circles and continents seem to echo just that. The simplicity of works is refreshing and it just looks very very sexy.

Moon

(A topogeoid map showing the Topology of the moon through a spectrum of colours indicating the difference in heights. In this case the colour coded topography is overlaid on a shaded relief map to give rise to the above composite. sourced from: here)
Somewhere during the mid 14th century when Knowledge was laying down foundations for Modern Sciences through Nicolaus Copernicus, Andreas Vesalius, Rene Descartes and many others who liberated the human body and space from being private properties of religion to secular entities...little did she know that sometime down to the present the same sciences will become tools to reclaiming the same body and space as private properties, right from the Human Genome to the Moon!

(Moon map from the United States Geological Survey produced in partnership with NASA between 1971 and 1998, showing "the moon’s dark side, with colours correlating to geological materials and phenomena" sourced from Wired Magazine)
Few days back I came across this website called "Earth's Leading Lunar RealEstate Agency". Its tag line reads: Nothing could be Greater, than to own your own Crater, followed by: "It's not just a piece of paper. It's a ticket to the future. In much the same way that major corporations — such as IBM or General Electric — offer shares of stock to raise capital, we are offering a limited number of land claims ("shares") in lunar property in order to fund privatized exploration, settlement and development of the Moon. The value of lunar real estate claims are directly related to their location on the Moon, and the growth of their value is directly dependent upon successfully achieving our goal of permanently inhabiting the Moon by 2015. Officially authorized by the Lunar Republic Society, the leading advocacy group for private ownership of land on the Moon, and in accordance with the Lunar Settlement Initiative, your lunar land claim purchase benefits the Kennedy 2 Lunar Exploration Project and other public-private programs to return humans to the Moon."

(image from MoonBell site that illustrates how the Lunar terrain being mapped by Lunar orbiting satellite Kaguya (SELENE), launched from Tanegashima Space Center on September 14, 2007 is being used to generate coded sound in the orbital play mode! One can also listen to the noise/sound/voice of the Moon here)
...for now we can just listen to the Moon...sing its swansong...

Bridges over Chronopolis

(Collage by artist Boris Bilinsky, City Art work for Metropolis c.1926-7, sourced from the Tate Liverpool website: here)
Like the Overload device from Surrogates (where every individual experiences the environment through a robotic surrogate), Bombay's density ensures that every facet of life is pickled with an overloaded complexity, sometimes irritatingly to an extent where everything is an abstraction of an abstraction, a post production of sorts that has completely forgotten its borrowed source. The combination of massive densities (12 million of us in 30 degree Celsius, shit, sweat and dust) and less resources turns the train stations into highly contested spots where concerned 'citizens' (local residents claiming authority/ ownership through their rights towards property), shopkeepers, hawkers, cops, eunuchs, beggars and commuters all stage a daily show of physical endurance, of Olympian proportions.

(Art work by Hugh Ferriss done for the Metropolis of Tomorrow. More images uploaded by Kosmograd here)
So in such a scenario the State Government attempting to untangle this complexity by distributing people in various levels through pedestrian bridges is hilarious and amazing at the same time. If the government goes as crazy with these pedestrian bridges as it went with the paver blocks, then we may even have an amazing cobweb of bridges crisscrossing above the city. In case of Bombay I believe, various bridge typologies like the flyovers, sky-walks, highway pedestrian bridges etc are similar to Viktor Ramos's Bypass Urbanism project, where the urge to bypass the chaotic complexity below is more stronger than desire to bridge places.
It would be interesting to see what nocturnal activities find refuge in these bridges and would they turn into corridors of sleeping, homeless bodies or isolated echo-tubes reverberating with memories of the morning stampede.

(Photo by Ranjit Kandalgaonkar of Skywalk bridge at Borivali)
Contrary to the delicate, minimal almost invisible structures preferred in European context, I like these elephant foot, over-reinforced columned bridges (a "creative" response to a design challenge by a Municipal engineer no doubt) which in some odd way celebrate the half a million people-crowd marching to their jobs everyday, every year and rest of their lives, like some Soviet monuments.

(Photo by Ranjit Kandalgaonkar of Skywalk bridge at Borivali)
I also wonder if finally the pedestrian too, like the motorist has found a good vantage point to enjoy the city but from a comfortable distance without getting his feet dirty. Maybe in some more years we may witness the first ever pedestrian traffic jam on one of these bridges with people stuck for 4 - 5 hours due to someone walking in the wrong direction.


(Photo by Ranjit Kandalgaonkar of Skywalk bridge at Borivali)
Few years back I had also heard a proposal to deal with the train crowding during peak hours, where various government and private offices could be told to stagger their opening and closing hours by half an hour, thereby distributing densities in different time slots. What is amazing is this possibility where the city continues to accommodate higher densities but divides those densities through time and space, different populations of the same city living in different time zones staggered by half an hour and different levels that get built slowly one above the other, somewhat like a combination of J G Ballard's Chronopolis and Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City. The level and time occupied by a person would be based on the economic status.
The only question is at which level and time zone difference will the city be when Violence erupts...

Rumination of Utopias

As Ian Macleod one of the speakers during the Thrilling Wonder Stories syposium had pointed out, that in the present context there are no trajectories left of a future that can promise designs of utopia. With strong global authoritarian systems in place it allows very little flexibility to imagine either the utopias of social hierarchy or technological revolutions to purge problems, on the contrary newer innovations in social networking and lab-made glowing mice only encourage an image of a dystopian future. The only way by which science fiction writers are able to circumvent the existing condition is to start with a clean slate, an apocalyptic event with strong gravitational force to bend light and future, one of the indicators being a string of Hollywood movies of floods, doomsday, diseases, meteors and other last-days-of-man-on-earth genre.
I don't know if such an event could trigger a formation of a real community or some sort of collective that is a fundamental backbone of all utopias right from Thomas Moore's Utopia island, William Morris's News from Nowhere to more contemporary Garden City masterplans, but Dutch artist Rob Voerman works around such an assumption.

(Image by Rob Voerman called The Epicentre, which reminds me of the nuclear explosion shot from Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira. Image sourced from Rob Voerman's website)
His website describes: "Some years ago, I started a body of work in which I try to create the architecture of fictive communities living in remote areas or occupying existing city-landscapes. The communities will consist of a mixture of utopia, destruction and beauty, a symbiosis of hippie-communities from the seventies, with their often highly decorated self-build structures, the cabin of the Uni-bomber hidden in the Montana forests, art-deco and other influences.

(untitled 2004, by Rob Voerman has some very good details)
Romanticism combined with the grim qualities of terror. It is often a direct translation of destruction in a purely aesthetic form..."

(sculpture works by Rob Voerman. The sculpture to the left is Annex#4 and was displayed at Bedford Square, London as part of the show at the Architectural Association. Images sourced from Rob Voermans site)
It reminded me of work that I and Kostas had done almost a year back on utopias and imagined communities, as we attempted to put together a Rubik's cube of different utopian ideas.

(the model of the cube done by me and Kostas for our final Masters thesis project titled ABBAU+, that presently lies at my house which soon will be sacrificed to recycling for something new to take its place...)
More photos and description of the project can be found on Kostas's blog here.
While I am on the topic of utopia, I came across:
1) Ananya Roy's lecture video (which also was her acceptance speech for the Golden Apple Award) where she elaborates on utopias.
2) The Self Sufficient City Competition (3rd Advanced Architecture Contest) organized by the IAAC, which sounds like an interesting competition to take part in.
This competition could be a good opportunity for people interested in different ideas of ideal cities and societies to test their schemes, constructing not only the inhabited but also the inhabitant.

Les Machines

(Vladimir Gvozdariki's rhino kept reminding me of Albrecht Durer's rhino, so thought I should put the two together)
Every now and then biologists discover strange-new, never before seen animal specimens (my personal favourite being Macropinna microstoma) that have evolved in isolation from rest of the world and challenge taxonomical tables through their glass tentacles, sonar vision and telepathic brains. I have come to believe the same being true of Russian artists who seem to do their own thing untouched by global rhetoric art, making drawings and artwork that have reference points within their introvert floating islands.

(some very beautiful drawings by Vladimir Gvozdariki from his website of machine animals that seem to come out from some Industrial utopian world.)

One such newly discovered specimen is artist Vladimir Gvozdariki whose mechanical animal drawings continue to intrigue me. Like the animal machines of Les Machines de L'Ile Nantes the drawings seem to graft mechanical details to appendages, eyes and metal plates that form the skin.

(Vladimir Gvozdariki's drawing of elephant with a photograph of the Great Elephant of Les Machines de L'Ile Nantes in London. The Elephant Celebes by Max Earnst is one such drawing that collaged the animal and machine together in surreal dreamlike world)

The machine becomes the animal, as if the drawings mirror Rene' Descartes’ Animals are Machines, that further blur the dialectics between nature and machine.
Another artist fusing animals and machines is Mike Libby whose website "Insect Lab" describes its work as "Insect Lab customizes real insect specimens with antique watch parts and other technological components. From ladybugs to grasshoppers, each is individually hand adorned, and original- a unique celebration of the contradictions and confluences between nature and technology." But coincidentally these speculative futures and art projects seem to have just been appropriated by the US military attempting to develop "insect cyborgs"! Somehow some very powerful entrepreneurship always have a knack of destroying everything beautiful and putting it for sale on E-Bay.