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RCA
Only a small amount of the pharmaceuticals and chemicals we swallow are taken up in our bloodstream, most of them pass through our bodies into the city's wastewater. Since wastewater treatment plants are not designed to remove pharmaceuticals, the contents of our medicine cabinets eventually end up in the drinking water. This results in local differences in tap water, based on the food we eat and the drugs we take.
I branded tap water from three different areas: Notting Hill tapwater benefits from the highest density of organic shops, tapwater in the city of London is enhanced with various stimulants and Golders Green 'produces' a very fertile water due to the low concentration of people taking anti-conception pills.
This branded tap water was then sold on a sunny Saturday morning on Broadway market and people were asked to also put their tap water on the map, speculating it's special qualities. On the project website, people also added stories about their tap water to the map. The result is a new map of London, revealing potential local city-body ecologies or biotopes.
download the big map (A0)
visit the project website on www.londonbiotopes.com
Urban Biogeography is the study of the distribution of urban biodiversity over space and time. One of the techniques often used by Urban Biogeographers is "sewage monitoring". This tool allows the Urban Biogeographer to pump up a tiny amount of sewage into the little bottles and scan it for different pharmaceutical and chemical traces, all without even having to lift a manhole cover.
Using synthetic biology*, bacteria are programmed to change colour when detecting oestrogen, anti-biotics, viagra or prozac. Since synthetic biology is both open source and modular, this tool can be redesigned to detect other chemicals by any Urban Biogeography enthusiast, both professional and amateur.
Many thanks to James Chappell and Vincent Rouilly at Imperial college for the bioengineering and introducing me to the wonderful world of Synthetic Biology.
Frank Derryl produces special cells in his body. He inherited this from his father, who mysteriously disappeared after his refusal to cooperate with a big pharmaceutical corporation. When Frank finds out about his special powers, he decides to use them and becomes AntiBodyMan.
Dressed in a suit and mask that help him harvest the antibodies he produces, AntiBodyMan moves around the city to fight the engineered viruses, dna stealing parasites and other pandemics produced by his enemies.
Superheroes reflect on our interaction with the city and embody society's dreams and fears about technologies. This project explores how the technologies emerging out of laboratories today might shape the superheroes of tomorrow.
A big fan of AntiBodyMan, Isaac hardly takes his costume off, even when he goes to the supermarket.
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Thanks to Jamie Tiller for the photographs and Bali Engel for the illustrations.
Download the comic here
My City = My Body is part of ongoing research into future biological interactions with the city. The increasing understanding of our DNA and the rise of bio-technologies will fundamentally change the way we interact with each other and our environment. Today, DNA is a tool for identification, you can have your DNA analysed over the internet and we are creating new types of bacteria by reprogramming its DNA. But what does this mean for tomorrow? Will we have DNA-surveillance and discrimination? Bio-identities and communities? And what will our new interactions look and feel like?
In search for these new biological interactions with the city, I started looking into Thames Water, London's largest 'drinking water and wastewater service company'. Making use of the Design Interactions work-in-progress-show, I staged an intervention, creating a map of London which contains biological information. Offering tapwater (kindly provided by Thames Water) I have asked visitors to donate a urine sample and give me their postcode, extending my biological map of London. Collaboration or not, it was often in the questions or laughs afterwards that interesting reactions came up.
[This is a part-time project for Intel, researching and illustrating 'The Future of Money']
When you go out for dinner and you pay the bill with your card, there will always be that awkward moment where the waitress asks whether you want to leave a tip. Compare this to casually leaving the change on the table or tipping a bellboy with a folded note in your handshake. It seems as if the more our money becomes invisible, the more elaborate, orchestrated and explicit the transaction becomes. To illustrate this paradox, I made three filmclips, starring an object which allows you make your electronic transactions more subtle and bring back a bit of the comforting ambiguity of hard cash.
click 'read more' to see the films.
In 1950, Alan Turing described what later became famous as the 'Turing test': a proposal to test a machine's intelligence. It proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which try to appear human; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine has passed the test. Since the 50's, no machine or computer has ever passed the test.
Angelina sings a version of Yesterday, created through several computer-translations. Project with Catherine Kramer and Steven Ounanian.
Found on my harddrive somewhere: a small electronics project I did last year. It was an introduction in working with RFID readers and chips and together with Kenichi Okada, I built a small music machine. By placing the different figures on the turning disc, you create a little sound loop with three different sounds. You can adjust the sounds by putting the solenoids on a different surface.
How does it work? The figures have an rfid (radio frequency identification) chip on the bottom, something like an electronic barcode. Under the disc, there's a reader which reads the chips and knows which figure it is. We used two basicstamps: one for the reading and making sounds, the other one for the motor.
This project started with gathering stories. Stories of real people in extreme situations, stories of people suffering from paranoid personality disorder and paranoid thoughts. The stories were the starting point for questioning and designing new ways of mobile communication, embodied in three concepts. This was a project for O2 in collaboration with Industrial Design Engineering.
Dave Bowman always believed domestic appliances would liberate him. He thought he could use technology as a tool to control the world around him. The Story of Dave Bowman is a short-film about a man and his washing machine and wants to question our relationship with technology. Are we the master with domestic appliances as our slaves or might it be the other way around?
The stewardess just told you about the oxygen mask, the life vest and the brace position. You're in an aeroplane and you believe her, you think these things will save your life. But they can't. The only thing the brace position can do for you is preserve your dental records in case of a crash. It keeps your teeth close to your seat number and makes identification easier for the forensic team. In an aeroplane, you are totally out of control.
Larry's Pillow puts you back in control. In case of an emergency, it helps you to take the brace position and straps you up securely. If you then choose to pull the tag, the pillow will inflate and suffocate you. With that choice comes control. You're in control over life and death. You are in control.
