Control + P: 3D Printed Cities

Liam Young, 17 04 13

Like industrialization and mass production before it 3d printing has the ability to transform our world beyond recognition. But, with a backlash against the nascent technology already underway, it remains to be seen whether the future will be wondrous or dystopic. For ICON Magazine’s issue 118 on 3d Printing Liam Young has speculated on the consequences of this technology  from the scale of the cell to the scale of the planet. An extract of the article is below.

In September 2003 a single grain of sand was sucked up from the bottom of the ocean and shot out of the nozzle of a GPS controlled dredging barge. This particle changed state, from a nonspecific sand bar drifting endlessly with the currents of the Persian Gulf to the foundation layer of a terraformed island that would become a part of The World Dubai. It is a 3d printed artificial archipelago formed, grain by grain, into a scaled facsimile of the globe. The original world it is modelled after consists of such immense quantities of matter that make it possible to form an endless constellations of artefacts. The story of a particle of material laid down, accreting, aggregating, fusing and assembling is the story of these structures and their altered states. When we can print such structures, layer by layer, particle by particle we can reorder the world, from the very small to the very large.

The new world of 3d printing is not here yet. The hype however has already arrived. Some are swept up in what the new world could be, others are sceptical and look on with caution or disinterest. It is a technology upon which we project all our wonder and anxiety and the debates say more about ourselves than they do about the technology. In his state of the union address President Obama placed his hopes for new American jobs on 3d printing technology which “has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything”. Vast repositories of TED talks present the same lampshades, customized shoes, iphone cases, Stradivarius violins, ball point pens, key rings and plastic models of the statue of David.

It is a technology in transition. It is a before the laws technology, developed without regulation, without big corporate, in the wilds of garage hack shops and maker fares and we still don’t really know what it will all mean. It is an impossible question to answer but it is just as seductive as it was when it was asked of the personal computer in 1977. The role of the PC was not understood until across time people found unexpected uses for it, like email, word processing video games and the internet. Architects once speculated on the impacts of industrialisation and then mass production. It is not until you push back against the systems of control that they reveal themselves. From the very small to the very large, from the banal to the fantastic, micrometre by micrometre we can remake the world.

Down the fibre are beamed bootleg files filled with glitches, 3d spam and junk mail. We awake in the morning to the whirring, buzzing sounds of our kitchen desktop printer spitting out late night porn ‘physible’s (Pirate Bay defines ‘physibles’ as data objects that are able and feasible to become physical), unwanted object ads and 3d pizza delivery flyers. Objects are laser scanned and printed, shared, scanned, printed, over and over and resolution slowly erodes, not from thousands of years of wind and rain but from minor imperfections, discrepancies and data decay multiplied with each cycle. They are fuzzy objects, slightly out of focus, like Chinese whispers, forever distanced from the original. Luxury is resolution. We find decadence in smoothness, delivered by expensive clean data and long, time consuming prints. The man who stands to make the most money from 3d printing is notorious patent troll and future master of the universe Nathan Myhrvold and his company Intellectual Ventures. They own the patent for a Digital Rights Management (DRM) system for 3d objects. 3d printing began with maker hobbyists but that may not prevent it from being co opted by a small number of very large entities. Walter Benjamin’s aura of the original may become nothing more than patent documentation or DRM protection. Just like Metallica’s Napster attacks we will see Zaha file claims against Shapeways for publishing pirate vases and counterfeit couches.

The house and in turn the city may be a dense mashup of google earth models and Grand Design house proud scanners. Fragments of a favourite window can be cut up, recomposed and reprinted in situ. We could grow an architecture superstar Chimera. Someone turns down the polygon count on a digital model of Zaha’s double curvature Guangzhou Opera House to give it a bit of the circa 1980’s faceted and angular Vitra Fire Station look. Her Wangjing Soho Towers already have a pirated clone in Chongqing that is outpacing the construction of the original.   Architourists will pilgrimage across the new world with their laser scanners to scavenge the point cloud of iconic structures and bring them back to an architectural salvage yard of millimetre perfect pieces of plastic history. Last season’s suburbs are melted down and reprinted as the city endlessly remakes itself in an accelerated history. Something between Kowloon Walled City and a Rio favela the 3d printed city is a seething reprogrammable urban mass of recontextualised fragments and geological material processes.

Huge expanses of landscape will be given over to recycle yards where material will be ground up and processed ready to be reprinted. Just as we smelted cutlery for the war effort, nothing is precious anymore and everything is a new object in waiting. Shape and form is just a temporary moment in the life of a material. The lifespan of any object shrinks to zero across a long enough timeline but in the 3d printed world this is an accelerated process of obsolescence and reclamation. We used to understand a product because it was made in specific place. It came from a site with the appropriate raw materials, a viable labour market or the necessary technology. In the new world the line between production and supply essentially disappears and anything can be made in everywhere.

We see accelerated geologies where GPS controlled landscape printers drift across the earth crafting in a morning what rivers and wind completed in a millennia. Laser scanned reproductions of iconic landscapes are terraformed in extreme resolution off the coast of Dubai. Boutique hotels and gated communities line the inside of their 1/3rd scale Grand Canyon. It is a theme park of synthetic copies, a reordered landscape at the scale of Google earth. Famous reefs are scanned and duplicated to reproduce perfect point break surf spots. Banzai Pipeline in Hawaii, Fiji’s Cloudbreak are printed along dead coastlines to spark tourist development and engineer resort growth. Like the planet engineers of Magrathea in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy we will remake our own planet and then begin to print other worlds spinning off into orbit.

United States Patent Application 20100281850 is for a rocket that prints its own solid fuel. We can launch our assembly line into space to drift like satellites, always on call, printing the night sky. Hubble could have been fabricating multiple versions of itself. Programmed to reproduce, this hurtling fleet of fab labs could build our space stations in advance of our arrival. A moonbase, printed autonomously from the recomposed material of its own surface would lie in wait. From this vantage point we can see that the recombination of matter in micrometres can have consequences at the scale of the globe.

Like any technology 3d printing is open to misuse, exploitative regulations and tedious banality but it also holds the possibility of something wondrous, profound and unexpected. The future scenarios’ being debated are no more than evidence of the collective fears and anxieties, hopes and desires that we all carry with us through the everyday. It is a technology that is both exceedingly strange and achingly familiar. As we look down from this 3d printed satellite hurtling through space we can see a technology that is beginning to reorder our world but it us that are remaining the same.

All images by Daniel Dociu and developed for Under Tomorrows Sky

Here Be Dragons: GPS Icebergs and other digital landscapes

Liam Young, 04 04 13

From the Unknown Fields Division 11/12 Far North Alaska Studio run by TTT’s Liam Young and Kate Davies comes a new project by Will Gowland. The world is now concealed and manipulated in ways that make answering the question of where am I an impossibility. Glitches in the big and fragile infrastructures of Global Positioning systems mean we are sometimes both here and there, as a pulsing blue dot locates us to within 500metres. What are the implications of a navigational system based solely on the virtual? Will Gowland, in our Department of Landscape Glitches has jammed the GPS networks and revealed an alternative virtual topography, a territorial architecture of spoofed cartography. It is an emerging landscape that operates and exits in two parallel worlds, the physical and the virtual. Imaginary protest icebergs drift through the autonomously navigated oil shipping lanes. We get lost in a wilderness of illegal signal jamming formations and we glimpse the faint flicker of covert militarised GPS territories, super stable under a secret sky of black satellites. Some are landscapes of misdirection, others are navigational markers guiding one safely through unstable terrain. We now put our faith in a digital territory that is just as unknown and fallible as the physical.

Imaginary gps ghost protest icebergs drift through the autonomously navigated oil shipping lanes.

Oil reserves are hidden below digital GPS mountains

An illegal oil field is hidden in a GPS spoof, a digital landscapes of misdirection.

New [Socialist] Village

Darryl Chen, 03 03 13

New [Socialist] Village is a research project that asks whether China could teach the UK how to plan. It was exhibited at the 2012 Venice Biennale British Pavilion as part of the Venice Takeaway: Ideas to Change British Architecture research project; and at RIBA London from 26 February until 27 April.

Quoting Mao Zedong, imagining Ai Weiwei as an urban strategist, and citing Communist China as a model of flexible governance, the New [Socialist] Village proposes handing revolutionary power back to local people while co-opting the entrepreneurial skills of Richard Branson to create a model entrepreneurial village for the UK.

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Under Tomorrows Sky. A new project for the Future City.

Liam Young, 06 10 12

Under Tomorrows Sky is a fictional, future city. For MU Foundation in Eindhoven Speculative architect Liam Young of the London based Tomorrows Thoughts Today has assembled a think tank of scientists, technologists, futurists, illustrators and science fiction authors to collectively develop this imaginary place, the landscapes that surround it and the stories it contains. Working with special effects artists from such films as Alien, Sunshine and Blade Runner, the architects of Tomorrows Thoughts Today have built a room sized movie miniature model of the city.  Across the course of the exhibition invited guests will work with the city as a stage set to develop a collection of narratives, films and illustrations. Wander through this near future world and explore the possibilities and consequences of today’s emerging biological and technological research. The team includes Bruce Sterling, Warren Ellis, Rachel Armstrong, Daniel Dociu, Paul Duffield, Factory Fifteen, ARC magazine, Centre For Science and Imagination and many more. Follow the project website to see all the concept art imagery, the think tank discussions and photos of the exhibition.

Under Tomorrows Sky concept image by Factory Fifteen

‘Singing Sentinels’ exhibition and the accompanying performance ‘Silent Spring: A Climate Change Acceleration’

Liam Young, 11 06 12

Coal miners once hammered rock with twittering canaries living beside them, their changing song a warning alarm for a dangerous gas leak. These living sensors watched over us and kept us safe.

‘Singing Sentinels’ by London-based architect Liam Young of Tomorrows Thoughts Today explores a future scenario where bio-engineered birds once again monitor the air for us. Eighty birds have been released into the New Order exhibition at the Mediamatic Gallery in Amsterdam as an ecological warning system, living in the space and providing audible feedback on the state of the atmosphere. Across the course of the exhibition Liam performed the climate change acceleration piece ‘Silent Spring’ seen in the film above. As a ‘pollution DJ’, he flooded the gallery with CO2, altereing the air mixture to replicated the predicted atmospheric changes of the next 100 years. We hear the canary song subtly shift, their rythmn change and eventually silence, as the birds sing a toxic sky- an elegy for a changing planet.

To accompany the exhibition Liam Young, Geoff Manuagh and Tim Maly have written a near future birdwatchers guide “A Field Guide to Singing Sentinels: A Birdwatchers Companion” with illustrations from comic illustrator Paul Duffield. You can see an excerpt and purchase your copy of the limited edition book online here.

See below for exhibition photos.

Electronic Countermeasures GLOW Festival video

Liam Young, 06 02 12

In the skies above the city a drone flock drifts into formation broadcasting their local file sharing network. Part nomadic infrastructure and part robotic swarm they form a pirate internet, an aerial napster, darting between the buildings….

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Electronic Countermeasures performed live @ GLOW Festival Eindhoven

Liam Young, 06 11 11

Tomorrows Thoughts Today will be premiering their new interactive installation Electronic Countermeasures live at the GLOW Festival Eindhoven NL every night 5th – 11th November. The performance schedule is 1800, 1830, 1900, 1930, 2000, 2030, 2100, 2130, 2200, 2230, 2300, 2330. See the map for where you can find us. The project is an aerial drone choreography developed in collaboration with Superflux and Eleanor Saitta and performed by drone pilots Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu and Eleanor Saitta.

Today we are much closer to our virtual community than we are to our real neighbours. This death of distance has created new forms of city based around ephemeral digital connections rather than physical geography. In this context the Electronic Countermeasures explores the design and manufacture of a flock of interactive autonomous drones that form their own place specific, local, wfi community and pirate file sharing network. Drifting slowly above the water of Eindhoven’s parks the fleet of modified quadrocopters perform a balletic aerial choreography as their soft glow reflects in the canal below.

The drones continue their luminous dance and dynamic glowing formations as they wait for a passer-by to interact with them. It drone can be contacted by calling the following numbers
drone 0 +31 648521583
drone 1 +31 648521578
drone 2 +31 648521581
drone 3 +31 648521591
As we signal the drones they break formation and are called over. Their bodies illuminate, they flicker and glow to indicate their activity. The swarm becomes a pirate broadcast network, a mobile infrastructure that passers-by can interact with. Impromptu augmented communities form around the glowing flock. As more people interact with the drones the more excited the flock becomes. They swoop dramatically across the surface of the water and they hover above the heads of all those with their mobile screens still activated. It is almost as if these glowing blimps are alive as they become mobile infrastructures with endearing behaviours. They are part city infrastructure and part technological creatures living amongst the trees.

The project is developed by Tomorrows Thoughts Today with Superflux and Eleanor Saitta
Production Team- Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu and Denis Vlieghe
Performed by Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu and Eleanor Saitta.

Photos by Claus Langer.

The Great Babylon Circus: Landscapes of Unnatural History @ MU Gallery

Liam Young, 17 08 11

Tomorrows Thoughts Today is part of the summer exhibition at MU Gallery in Eindhoven NL titled ‘The Great Babylon Circus’ and curated by the Berlin based critic and curator Lukas Feireiss, author of the book ‘Utopia Forever’ also featuring a number of TTT projects.  The exhibition brings together a group of artists and architects to engage in “the continuation of the never-ending design of the Tower of Babel. The Tower of Babel is one of the primordial metaphors of architecture, art and construction, as well as of the multiplication and confrontation of diverse languages and styles. The tower also symbolizes the ultimate hubris of human creation — the ambition to build something larger than life itself.”

In addition to Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today, participating artists are Brazilian social and cultural collective Project Morrinho, Belgium-German art collective Speedism and Moroccan artist Mounir Fatmi. The collaboration of these four global creative practices in the arena of MU unite around the mythic Tower of Babel theme, presenting us with new angles from which to view this legendary subject, and arguing for its social, political, and cultural relevance in today’s world.

Tomorrows Thoughts today (in collaboration with Denis Vlieghe and Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu) have installed an expansive living landscape of moss and robotics. Set within the vegation is a array and strange and curious creatures of the near future. Born of the city’s electronic surplus yet now essential to the city’s function, these species of beings have emerged who warm, warn, entertain, annoy, and play. They have arrived unannounced, emerged from the remains of rampant and uncontrolled modernisation, and have been subsumed into the normal workings of the city. In fact, the city itself has become a singular sentient being constructed of these malformed and (d)evolved freaks — the city’s new infrastructure.

Corporate research and development divisions scrutinize the beings, playing technological catch up with this autonomous evolution, the invisible hand of progress. Field researchers now observe the specimens captured in a controled environment. Gazing over this curated landscape, a robot zoo, the researchers’ working hypothesis is that the distinction between the products and byproducts of modernity have disappeared, and it is this disappearance that defines our new urban territories. In addition to the familiar favourites from our Specimens of Unnatural History project, collected within the zoo are such new specimens as:

The Virtual Forest
Observation notes: A landscape of artificial trees flicker with a distant wind. The augmented forest is wirelessly connected to a wind sensor in the Aokigahara forest at the foot of Mt Fuji. Thought to be haunted the remote presence of the winds rustling through the trees in Japan now illuminates a virtual ghost wilderness. Two simultaneous landscapes connected across the globe.

Networked Rodents
Observation notes: Existing animals are hacked to create a roving sensor network across the landscape. Like the old canaries in the coal mine birds sense and detect levels of toxicity in the air, grey squirrels track their own pest populations to extermination, moths and butterflies become a micro spy infrastructure and others monitor and scan for subtle ecological shifts.

Goldfish Avatar
Observation notes: Sensors track a lonely goldfish swimming in a tank. It becomes the live input for an emerging digital simulation. The fish’s movements are translated into an endlessly evolving online avatar that continues long after it is flushed away. Across time a virtual ecosystem takes shape on the web. Soon the internet becomes more of a wilderness than the disappearing landscapes of the physical world, a strange zoo of virtual ghosts.

The Digital shadow
Observation notes: Feeding off ambient electro magnetic fields of the cities neon lights and communications networks these floating antenna harvest the airborne energy to power a broadcast of white noise. Clouds of these blimps cast an electronic shadow across parts of the city. Initially an experiment in energy harvesting this infrastructure is now just gets up to general mischief but unexpectedly it also has creates some of the only disconnected analogue spaces in the city, where one can steal a brief moment of digital silence.

Monitor drone
Observation notes: Relentless and obsessive the tracking eye of the monitor drones scan ambient conditions and is sensitive to minute fluctuations in vast arrays of environmental data. Flocks laser scan the landscape recording animal numbers and vegetation patterns as point clouds of digital data. Wilderness sites become large curated landscapes constantly managed and engineered to create a perfect simulation of nature in balance.

Photograpghs by MU and Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu

Data Fossils

Liam Young, 09 05 11

From the Data Archaeology Lab in the Architectural Association’s Unknown Fields Division 09/10 Arctic Circle studio run by TTT’s Liam Young and Kate Davies comes Data Fossils by Tobias Jewson. Tobias, with Ioana Iliesu have explored what happens to our collective history when everything is digital. In the digital era our information no longer takes the form of the physical, but that of a electronic file stored in ‘the cloud’. Our collective history is quickly effaced from this fragile and ephemeral domain, a computer crashes, formats are quickly obsolete, a hard drive is lost and all is gone. With our attachment to physical objects and mementos becoming increasingly superseded by our relationship to information, what will we leave for future generations?

The project employs design speculation as a critical tool to explore the potential ways in which architecture and landscape may respond to our ever evolving digital fascination. ‘Data Fossils’ has evolved as a series of fictional scenarios grounded in technically rigorous physical and computational investigations. Real techniques have been developed for encoding digital information in the physical world at both individual and collective scales.

Advances in biocomputing are allowing the possibility of storing data in living, physical forms. As the division between our bodies and the digital becomes increasingly blurred, the bone’s ability to remodel itself, in response to stress, can be hacked to provide data storage. Polyps of calcified binary code become written onto our skeleton, recounting our digital identities.

A teenage informational glutton comes for a surgery consult, his skin stretched with the growths of excessive music and porn downloads. His hoarded browser bookmarks cripple his every movement.

A poet’s finest sonnet is read like Braille through his skin, prostitutes steal the secrets of their bussness clients through gentle carresses of their naked body.

The treasured remains of a loved one becomes an archaeology of memories.

An illegal immigrant hacks and grafts fragments of data bone into his own body in an attempt to conceal his true identity. His airport xray scan reveals the extensive titanium grafts typical of data identity theft.

Data Geologies

Liam Young, 09 05 11

From the Data Archaeology Lab in the Architectural Association’s Unknown Fields Division 09/10 Arctic Circle studio run by TTT’s Liam Young and Kate Davies comes Data Fossils by Tobias Jewson. Tobias has evolved his data fossils experiments from the intimate and personal attachments that calcify on our own bones into a vast digital geology of an internet archive cast into layers of volcanic glass across Iceland’s deserts. In the digital era our information no longer takes the form of the physical, but that of a electronic file stored in ‘the cloud’. Our collective history is quickly effaced from this fragile and ephemeral domain, a computer crashes, formats are quickly obsolete, a hard drive is lost and all is gone. With our attachment to physical objects and mementos becoming increasingly superseded by our relationship to information, what will we leave for future generations?

Our collective history can be deposited in columns and strata of earth – where once archivists trawled the library stacks, data geologists now roam the Icelandic landscape. Like climate records trapped in ice cores data archiving can also become a geological process. In southern Iceland the division found a ravaged landscape of eroding lava deserts- a desolate crust hiding beneath it extraordinary geothermal resources that now support huge investments in an emerging national industry of data storage and server farms. Data Geologies rehabilitate this damaged landscape by co opting these investments in technology and reimaging the Icelandic typology of data archives.

A suite of new software applications that subvert existing digital prototyping machines to encode the ephemera of the digital world into ever evolving architectural landscapes. Hoards of machines traverse the lava deserts, scraping loose sand from the surface, and under immense heat transforming it into elaborate glass like geometries, within which our recent internet activities are encased. Programs are developed to encode data inputs into structural building elements.

Simulation software is developed for the realtime growth of data geology from live twitter streams.

Informational topographies grow based and cluster on keyword inputs. The drugs keyword feed is especially active from late evening to early morning.

Topsoil blown by the harsh arctic winds soon gathers in the lee side of these immense structures, the grounded geological layer sprouting grass and moss. Over time, habitats will grow in the glimmering hollows as fields of data slowly reverse Icelandic soil erosion. Local Islanders read the growth of this landscape from afar, whilst archaeologists look close ,using advanced MRI scanners, searching for insights into our past. Information enthusiasts scan google earth sattelite images, deciphering geographies of data from across the globe.

People pilgrimage to this area known to hold the last data relating to flurry of internet activity from the day Michael Jackson died. It becomes an informational cathedral, a spatial obituary grown from a real time data feed.

And while tourists might flock to see history in the making archaeologists will read the dull fragments of frozen silica as records of our digital pasts.

Scatterbrain: A Cautionary Tale

Liam Young, 24 11 10

From the department of intangible technologies in the Architectural Association’s Unknown Fields Division 09/10 studio run by Liam Young and Kate Davies comes Scatterbrain Iceland by Jack Self. This is the first in a series of posts documenting the ongoing work of the division.

Scatterbrain Iceland is an architectural novella that proposes, through a narrative format, the construction of the Internet as an artefact, as a supercomputer server-farm. This is an excerpt:

“A crest of purple reflection wavered along the length of Songling’s bodysuit as her arm described the perfect parabola required to deliver the grenade to its target. As her hand attained the apogee of its circuit her front foot sunk into the spongy bundles of fibre-optics, which splayed under her shifting weight. Beneath her boots the crystal canopy quivered and flexed, and beneath that the halos of solid-state drives chimed like miniature bells in an informatic cathedral. The grenade now twisted along its arc, moving silently through the hibernal gloom across the fantastic billow of blue and red LEDs, across the floating sea of rhythmically pulsing information.

Fifty yards away the ventilation shutters of a server tower chattered and clicked, broadcasting thermal semaphore to electric storm clouds. A square hole in the curving basalt façade marked the liminal space leading to an open service hatch. As the grenade cleared the threshold of this short tunnel two yellow-suited figures appeared, Guardians of the Cloud. They each held a cordless neon tube powered by the immense electromagnetic field of the thousands of servers that filled the tower. The Guardian closest to the doorway also held a weapon, the barrel of which was already rising as he came into view. The vectors of these bodies – the grenade and the Guardian – shared an interstice both in time and space. Bouncing off the Guardian’s shoulder, the grenade would continue a new trajectory past the lift head, down the central column of the tower. It would pass eighty storeys of concentric server cores and detonate – immediately the ventilation shutters would snap closed, disrupting the chimney-effect that regulated the Web’s temperature. The immense heat generated by the computers would build up under the stack. Very soon the whole tower would combust, quickly setting fire to its neighbours.

But Songling would not live to see this. The fulcrum of the two bodies was precisely the same moment that the Guardian’s trigger-finger achieved critical pressure. The force of the bullet striking Songling’s shoulder caused her to turn as she fell, revealing a spinning panorama of towers, a landscape of computational infrastructure that extended out beyond the geothermal reactors to the limits of the valley. This was the New Internet, a machine that did much more than simply recollect the virtual lives of humanity. It inter-compared, analysed, synthesised, and generated abstractions. It constructed elaborate logical underpinnings and formulated its own languages to test the structure and consistency of our world. It had become an organism.

It produced idiosyncratically inconsistent and unpredictable opinions, like its creators. But what only Songling seemed to comprehend was that the Internet would not accept this grossly parasitic relationship with its parents for much longer.

For obvious reasons, the Web could not be allowed to survive.”

Strange Natures

Liam Young, 24 11 10

“Most technological breathroughs are met both with frenetic predictions of life-changing improvement, and fear and naysaying. Instead Geoff Manaugh, Tim Maly and Liam Young examine the myriad implications of future technological escalation by speculating about their consequences through believable (though fictional) examples ranging from chemical-sensitive fowl to transhuman support groups made possible by nanoengineering.” Volume. pg72. Issue 24 counter Cultures

This is one fragment from the work. See Volume no. 24 Counter Cultures for more from the Strange Natures of Nanotechnology.

A field guide to toxicity machines.
From The Macmillan Birder’s Guide to Britain v8.03.3453

Green-throated Coal-gull
Highlight: Sensitive to high levels of CO2 in the air.

Description: When in the presence of high levels of carbon dioxide, their plumage phase shifts to an extraordinary emerald color. Coal-gulls can be found in gathering around the remaining coal-burning power stations and carbon sequestration centers. Take a fire extinguisher with you to draw them out of the trees. Note that caution is necessary when calling and tracking these birds, as evidenced by the ongoing litigation against a BBC documentary team for frivolous chemical spraying.

Roseshift Starling
Highlight: Engineered to monitor atmospheric levels of nitrous oxide.

Description: Typically brown and forgettable at ground level, in the presence of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide the Roseshift Starling displays a fanned tail of extraordinary incandescent plumage that reflects in the sunlight. These rare species are best spotted in gas cloud flocks at high altitudes or over recently fertilized farmland. If you do encounter one on the ground, however, emptying a nitrous canister nearby will initiate its vivid display. These can be acquired from custom car garages or contact us for our private list of birding dentists.
NB. The guide does not encourage nitrous use for anything other than bird watching. We do not support the ‘laughing birders’ organization.

Bomb Sparrow
Highlight: designed for explosives detection

Description: Originally developed to signal the location of explosives labs, Bomb Sparrows flock in elaborate formations marking the atmospheric presence of chemically dangerous concoctions. Typically very difficult to track down, their formations are dispersed very quickly by British intelligence; making clear sightings quite rare. Your best chances are in the outer suburbs or anonymous tower blocks. If you are lucky enough to see an actual detonation, Bomb Sparrow flocks are extraordinary. But be careful: mixing your own chemical lures may result in prosecution under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.

Trumpeter Finch
Highlight: Sings in the presence of concentrations of carbon monoxide.

Description: This species typically makes its nest along busy highways and main streets. Listen out for the high-pitched song of the Trumpeter Finch when airborne particulate levels reach toxicity thresholds. Go in an SUV convoy for the best chance—and pack a gas mask to hear their song up close.

Adventures in Cloudspotting

Liam Young, 02 10 10

This is an exerpt of the travelogue from Acres Green. See slow thoughts for the Beamer Bees, Mobile Mountains and Prosthetic Trees and more from this strange little community.  By  Anab Jain + Jon Ardern of Superflux, Liam Young + Darryl Chen of Tomorrows Thoughts Today and Chris Hand and the ‘Power of 8’ team.

At first the residents didn’t know what to call them. The once strange creatures had no name. Maybe there was a manufacturing code, or an RFID tag attached surreptitiously to their underbelly, but nothing official or as obvious as a logo like on a newly unveiled car. No motor show. No fanfare. They just arrived.

Their size was striking. Not that they were big, but that they were unsettlingly human in dimension, each specimen the equivalent mass of an adult man inflated into a rotund figure. Each displayed a great folded surface like unfurled wings spread into a complete and airtight enclosure. Manufactured with precision pleats and jointing expertly executed, the pristine body constituted an object equal to a small exploratory spacecraft or even a fine tailored suit. Its form had a quality of otherworldly beauty, but in recent years those once virgin husks were now marked with the deposits of airborne nuisances – carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, platanus acerfolia pollens and pigeon shit

A homage to the fog catchers that came and went before them, these sophisticated beings were appendages to the natural environment – microclimatic machines. Fastidious in their task of redistributing water, they were able to green small pockets of the ecosystem with workaholic obsession. Their great canopied bodies expanded to collect moisture and contracted to move more efficiently. Hovering the skies, they sought out humid air systems following low air pressure systems, collecting moisture on their outer skins and collecting them in their fuselage. They then deposited this rain – I suppose you could call it rain – on farmlands outside of cities. A promised land like an old testament morality tale. (more…)

The Imaginarium: A Theatre for Constructed Ecologies

Liam Young, 12 09 10

The Imaginarium is an exhibition co-curated by Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today and Studio Lukas Feireiss (editor of Beyond Architecture, Spacecraft and Architecture of Change etc) with Luis Berrios-Negron.  The exhibition brings together a group of architects, artists and scientists including TTT’s Liam Young, Francois Roche/R&Sie(n), Greg Lynn, Philip Beesley, Rachel Armstrong, Theo Jansen, Terunobu Fujimori, Triptyque Architecture, Ilkka Halso, Lucy McRae, Cero9, Mas Yendo, and many more to engage the prescient subject of ecological change and adaptations caused by artificial interventions into existing ecosystems.

‘The Imaginarium’ is curated as an unnatural history museum of archaeological fragments,
 botanical samples, exhibits, evidence and curiosities. 
Archived in the accompanying Catalogue of Speculative Specimens we see a jump in the fossil record, an evolutionary leap, as the interbreeding of biology and technology has given birth to a strange new nature. The Imaginarium forms part of the exhibition Examples to Follow: Expeditions in Aesthetics and Sustainability curated by Adrienne Gohler. and is open from 3.09.10 – 10.10.10 at the Uferhallen in Berlin. See more photos and videos below.

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New Synthetic Pollinators: Beamer Bees

Liam Young, 11 03 10

This is the second installent of a series of projects to come out of our Power of 8 research trip to ‘Acres Green: The Way Life Should Be’.

…the hypnotic dance patterns of small, glowing insects against the warm colours of the dark sky left us in awe, and we wanted to know more. We stopped two people dressed in large netted clothing walking down the street. They introduced themselves as ‘hivers’ and told us the story behind these mysterious creatures:

These glowing creatures were the Beamer Bees or Beamer Signum Apis Melifera, formulated by a community of biologists and hired bio-hackers to service under-pollinated trees, plants and vegetables due to the disappearance of honey bees.

The Beamer Bees are guided by radiowaves and electromagnetic landscapes to crops requiring pollination. They are produced in a limited number each year, and their interactions with the bumble bees and other creatures are tightly monitored. It seems that the Acres Green residents can buy licenses to call the bees. License holders use the bugles or other personal mobile devices which transmits radiowaves that the bees can detect. The bees follow the waves to their source.

We realised how the Beamer Bees had became central to the Acres Green ecosystem and people seemed to be able to live in harmony with them. We see a glimpse of one family’s everyday interactions with the new creatures. Practical, yet stylish netted fashion ensured comfort on the way to a party, Gardeners who missed out on licenses opportunistically used wifi routers to attract bees to their plants. (more…)

Specimens of Unnatural History: the Electric Sky

Liam Young, 09 03 10

The first installment of an ongoing project.  Chapter 1: the electric aurora.

In the preface to his 1957 bestiary ‘The Book of Imaginary Beings’ Jorge Luis Borges describes a child’s first visit to the zoo. With wonder and joy the child marvels at the strangeness and mysteries of the unfamiliar creatures that they have never before seen. This encounter with a zoo of the real sits within the catalogue of a zoo of mythology, inhabited by ‘necessary monsters’ which are imbued with the dreams and fears of those who conjured them. (more…)

Specimens of Un Natural History: the Bioluminescent Billboard, the Roving Forests and an Augmented Ferret

Liam Young, 08 03 10

Darting to the safety of the shadows a biotech ferret munches on its prey…

The fourth installment of an ongoing project.  Chapter 4: the Bioluminescent Billboard, the Roving Forests and an Augmented Ferret. (more…)

MBL.MTN [The Mobile Mountain]

Darryl Chen, 04 02 10

Urban heat islands? Sink estates? Windswept alleys? The Mobile Mountain solves all your urban problems… for a limited season only! Read on to explore TTT’s latest riff on microclimate infrastructures…

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Productive Dystopia

Darryl Chen, 07 11 09

A full house at TINAG’s Festival of Urbanism witnessed a healthy debate over whether dystopia offers us a productive way of looking at the future. Chaired by Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today’s Darryl Chen, a strong cast of emerging and seasoned urbanists responded to the topic with an incredibly broad range of projects. Click the vid for an introduction to the theme. Full documentation will be included in a forthcoming Critical Cities volume. But for now, here are some (out of context) highlights from the discussion: (more…)

Postcards From A Green Future Part_4 of 4

Darryl Chen, 04 09 09

This project witnesses the result of the London Borough of Sutton’s desire to form England’s first “sustainable suburb” in the outer reaches of Greater London. What was first a twinkle in a councillor’s eye led to Sutton’s local government to write a policy document safeguarding Hackbridge as a showcase of carbon-positive living at the scale of the urban district. Sped by compulsory purchases and decanting of a small handful of resistant residents, the process gained more and more momentum until the milestone formation of the Green Grass Management Trust. First functioning as a para-governmental management arm of the fledgling district, the Green Grass MT gained in stature to be a renegade local government in its own right. As more and more people signed up to live within the confines of the newly established urban Ring, the Green Grass MT became less reliant on government subsidies and eventually became untouchable as a political entity, much to the quiet chagrin of local planners and councillors. Officially a special policy area under the umbrella authority of the borough, the Ring is now in actuality independent and self-sufficient in all respects.

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Postcards From A Green Future Part_3 of 4

Darryl Chen, 03 09 09

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Postcards From A Green Future Part_2 of 4

Darryl Chen, 02 09 09

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Postcards From A Green Future Part_1 of 4

Darryl Chen, 29 08 09

“Where The Grass Is Greener” documents a radical alternative in contemporary living, an urban infrastructure, a social experiment, a political statement…. Three thousand residents and counting. In London’s outer suburbs, a community has gathered walling themselves off from the rest of society. These postcards bear testament to their vision. (more…)

The Menagerie: A Parasitic Architecture School

Liam Young, 21 05 09

During the course of the 07/08 academic year a new school of architecture was formed in London. It was not celebrated in the university guides, it was not visible as a player in the end of year exhibition circuit but it was there lurking below the surface.  In this year Liam Young from Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today taught a design studio in 4 separate universities, choosing each studio so that together they covered every year of architectural education from first year to final year.

Although wildly unqualified for such an administrative position Liam had in effect become the head or dean of a school, albeit a new school parasitically embedded in an array of host institutions.  The school has been titled ‘The Menagerie’.  Pictured is its own end of year catalogue made from the stitched together unit pages printed from the host universities own publications. It is planned to celebrate the end of the year with a graduation roller disco.

Perhaps this is a new model for the institution, one that is exploded into fragments, camouflaged within the fabric of the city, co ordinated through blogs, txt messages and the 140 character haikus of twitter.

Make me a Mountain!

Liam Young, 20 04 09

The role of landscape is evolving. Developing from a historical position based in conservation and preservation the ‘nature’ of ‘nature’ can now be seen as both generative and dynamic, offering the potential for new ways of engaging with the environment. The distinctions between technology and biology or the natural and artificial are dissolving to the point where they have now become outmoded terms.

Developing from Tomorrows Thoughts Today’s urban proposal ‘City Zoo’, ‘make me a mountain!’ is a standalone infrastructural landscape project.  Whether deployed in a backyard, on a football pitch or a fragile wetland the building mutates from its context to create a habitable ecosystem that (e)merges into and out of its site. More a wilderness than an architecture, ‘make me a mountain!’ operates as a synthetic organism, reinforcing the metabolic and symbiotic conditions found in the surrounding landscape.

In its first iteration the project is tested as a Bathouse, Visitor Centre and Research Station for a London Wetlands site. Like a scuttled ship molded fiberglass shells containing observation, education and research spaces perform as an artificial reef. Glistening from within the rough and lively rock of the artificial mountain is this intertwined set of sinuous and smooth public spaces. This is a dark, discovered, augmented wilderness embedded with technology for remote virtual bat viewing and arranged for intimate but unobtrusive onsite observation. (more…)

…Where The Grass is Greener!

Darryl Chen, 06 04 09

In the outer suburbs of London, a population has voluntarily separated themselves from the rest of society, and has taken up the mantle of sustainability in an extraordinary way. Driven by a set of ethics that places them in sometimes radical opposition to the rest of London, they have adopted a lifestyle that effectively makes them a carbon sink for the remainder of the city.

Postcards bear witness to how existing geographical patterns have been consolidated to create a giant infrastructural ring containing a series of productive and social programmes. Comprised of terraforming, hybridised architecture, natural obstructions and electronically surveilled barriers, this sophisticated urban crust is a new kind of urbanism – a fortress that protects a community of carbon-positive altruists, and reserves a place within the disorderly fabric of suburban London for pure ideology… where the grass is greener.

‘…where the grass is greener’ by Tomorrows Thoughts Today will be published in full shortly.

Specimens of Unnatural History: the Silk Factory

Liam Young, 08 12 08

The third installment of an ongoing project.  Chapter 3: the Silk Factory.

Pulled by moths an automated nomadic silk factory is spinning its glistening web under a lonely streetlamp. (more…)

Specimens of Unnatural History: the CO2 Scrubber

Liam Young, 02 11 08

The second installment of an ongoing project.  Chapter 2: the CO2 Scrubber (more…)

Barbicanism and its Errant Child

Darryl Chen, 27 07 08

Barbicanism and its Errant Child refers to the critical process of urbanism as the city makes and remakes itself, and more specifically to the Barbican as a potent reference point. This project is for the Bishopsgate Goodsyard, a long vacant site in London’s inner city. The Barbican’s own ideals, aspirations and current state of post-pubescent maturity indicate how one might go about developing a large brownfield site on the fringe of the highest concentration of financial capability in the world. (more…)

City Zoo

Liam Young, 21 07 08

Contemporary cities are no longer just accidental homes for animals that have been displaced from their natural habitat. They can now be seen as hotbeds of evolutionary change, shaping the adaptations of their resident fauna and providing an ideal theatre in which to see behaviour evolving at a pace rarely seen in the wild.

As we begin to view our cities as worthwhile ecosystems this project investigates the possibilities of a symbiotic relationship between two different systems of organization- technology and nature. (more…)