The God Species Evolves: Mori Art Museum’s “Future & the Arts: AI, Robotics, Cities, Life”

The direction in which the whole of humanity currently seems to be headed towards isn’t that of prosperity or growth, but perhaps the pressure of unavoidable consequences is what is needed in order to envision and erect a new world; both a return to nature and the returning of nature. We are, as some Anthropocene theorists have put it, the newly revealed god species capable of choosing our planetary destiny. The exhibition Future and the Arts: AI, Robotics, Cities, Life - How Humanity Will Live Tomorrow which ran from November of 2019 through to March of 2020 at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo attempts to give context to the unimaginable and proposes solutions to the issues of now and those of the future. 

Future of the Arts included 64 participants with over 100 works from across the globe, ranging across mediums, processes, design phases, and content. The exhibition was divided into five sections, two of which were most impactful in visualizing our imminent future. The first of these revolved more around the unconventional, taking a more fanciful approach in resolving issues related to the environmental crisis, entitled “New Possibilities of Cities,” while the second focused on what is currently possible, what currently exists, and what is about to exist, introducing a new form of architecture meant to coexist with nature entitled “Toward Neo-Metabolism Architecture.” The term “metabolism” is used in describing a Japanese 

architectural movement and theory developed in the 1960s by Kurokawa Kisho, Kikutake Kiyonori, Maki Fumihiko and Ekuan Kenji. The term was derived from the word metabolism, based on the philosophy that architecture and city should be designed organically just as life repeats growth and change. 

Three projects from these sections best represent the artificial, natural, and metaphysical elements utilized in informing the future of our world. 

XTU Architects. "X Cloud." Design Boom. 2020. https://www.designboom.com/architecture/xtu-architects-living-in-the-clouds-to-escape-uninhabitable-earth-01-29-2020/

In “New Possibilities of Cities,” artists and architects were given the opportunity to visualize their own notions of future utopian metropolises, ignoring past and present idealizations of cities. Their projects challenge what we think is possible, surpassing limitations and welcoming the unknowns of foreign and unoccupied environments on earth. Although a true utopian environment is an unattainable concept limited to the vision of the individual, in weaving pieces of collective utopian thought and design a more inclusive architectural narrative can be established. New solutions can be discovered through the reverse engineering of the currently improbable, taking form on water, in the desert, and in the air. 

Paris-based architecture studio XTC, comprised of Anouk Legendre and Nicolas Desmazieres, transports us to the year 2050 where they revision the entirety of life on earth after its surface has become inhabitable due to “rising temperatures, increasingly volatile weather and unbreathable air.” XTC proposes the X Cloud, an “‘architecture of aerostats'’” suspended in the earth's atmosphere through the use of helium gas, which is less dense than the air surrounding an artificial cloud city composed of a network of hundreds of truncated octahedron 3D forms. 

Cloud City is based on aero-cargo technology developed at the dawn of the 2030s. Aero-cargo, inspired by the ancient zeppelins indeed provides an unprecedented solution: it hardly consumes, can carry very heavy loads, and does not require a road or permanent equipment. It chooses its altitude, and decides on the rain or the sun. Because it draws its water from the condensation of clouds, and the wind gives it its energy. A biomimetic city too, inspired by colonies of microorganisms and nature. It practices autonomy, and provides for its own needs. As in a space station, everything here is recycled, re-circulated, water, organic matter, plants, objects. Biotechnology, and living things transform waste into resources. Greenhouses in aquaponics, bacteria and microalgae recycle water and produce food. It becomes a model of circular metabolism. And soon a wild life appears in places, carried by the wind, which colonizes the structures, the terraces, draws the outline of a forest, as in a sky island. 

The X Cloud is built to be autonomous and propertyless, a place where nothing is owned and all is shared: a savior for humanity disguised as a cloud. But what ethical issues are called into question when humans begin colonizing the sky and gain control over the weather? Why is it that as we destroy the planet our superiority complex only strengthens? What happens when we become the floating entity to which we pray to? 

WOHA Architects. "Oasia Hotel." ArchDaily. 2016. https://www.archdaily.com/800878/oasia-hotel-downtown-woha?ad_medium=gallery.

Biomimetics has continually informed innovations of both past and present as humanity realigns itself with nature's intelligence. A new phase of the human to nature relationship has bloomed as we begin to collaborate with the natural world opposed to translating information into an artificial copy. This part of the exhibit presented the capabilities of sustainable building materials and construction methods, utilizing biotechnologies, 3D printers, drones, and robotics, reintroducing the notion of coexisting with nature. What could potentially be the beginning steps in the urban interpretation of the concept of re-wilding is exemplified through WOHA’s Oasia Hotel situated in downtown Singapore. Founded by Wong Mun Summ and Richard Hassell in 1994, WOHA is a Singapore based architectural practice known for its biophilic design approach, The hotel's facade is composed of a red aluminum mesh cladding that is supposed to support the lives of 21 different species of plants and attract wildlife, while the greenery also allows for spaces within the building and on terraces to be kept naturally ventilated and cooled. The buildings of the future will allow for the integration of nature and utilize its benefits in a way that doesn’t harm it. 

EcoLogic Studio. "H.O.R.T.U.S. XL." ecoLogicStudio. 2019. http://www.ecologicstudio.com/v2/project.php?idcat=7&idsubcat=59&idproj=177.

EcoLogic Studio has a different approach to the same concept of coexistence. The studio is composed of Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto, and in collaboration with Synthetic Landscape Lab at the University of Innsbruck conceived of H.O.R.T.U.S. XL, “a large scale, high-resolution 3D printed bio-sculpture” capable of growing and sustaining both human and non-human life. Through H.O.R.T.U.S. XL, 

The notion of ‘living’ takes on a new form of artificiality. It is developed in "collaboration" with living organisms. With a digital algorithm we can simulate the growth of a substratum inspired by collective coral morphogenesis. This is physically deposited by 3D printing machines in layers of 400 microns, supported by triangular cells of 46 mm and divided in hexagonal blocks of 18.5 cm. Photosynthetic cyanobacteria are inoculated on a biogel medium into the individual triangular cells, or bio-pixel, forming the units of biological intelligence of the system. Their metabolisms, powered by photosynthesis, convert radiation into actual oxygen and biomass. The density-value of each bio-pixel is digitally computed in order to optimally arrange the photosynthetic organisms along iso-surfaces of increased incoming radiation. Among the oldest organisms on Earth, cyanobacteria's unique biological intelligence is therefore gathered as part of a new form of bio-digital architecture. 

The H.O.R.T.U.S. XL exists in a very different form than WOHA’s Oasia hotel. Both constrain their co-collaborator, nature, yet both also embrace certain untamable aspects of reintegration. The opportunity to create a better world has been replaced with the opportunity of creating a livable world through technology and concepts such as these. It’s an interesting juxtaposition, that the same prospect of technological innovation that has essentially gotten us to this point of crisis could also potentially be our savior. 

 

Left: Jazvac, Kelly. "Plastiglomerate." MSU Broad. 2018. Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum . https://broadmuseum.msu.edu/exhibitions/kelly-jazvac-plastiglomerate. Middle and right: Jazvac, Kelly. "Plastiglomerate." Dezeen. 2019. The XXII Triennale di Milano, Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival. https://www.dezeen.com/2019/04/21/kelly-jazvac-plastiglomerate-milan-triennale/.

Kelly Jazvac is an associate professor at Montreal’s Concordia University. Her work takes the form of sculpture, installation, and collage, reworking found images from advertisements onto these varying mediums. Jazvoc’s work revolves around materialist obsessions, pollution, environmental waste, and a future beyond that of humanity, describing her practice as “the way objects and human bodies coexist in the world.” She is a part of the plastic pollution research team The Synthetic Collective, a group composed of scientists, artists, and writers. 

It’s an inherent part of human nature to envision our own individual impact on our surroundings and on the world. As the awareness of our changing environment continues to grow, this focus on the impact of oneself has shifted towards the impact of the collective self. Opposed to questioning our own legacies, we question that of humanities as the inevitable extinction of our species looms. What will remain of us when we no longer exist? Kelly Jazvac, a Canadian based artist, explores this question through her work and findings of “Plastiglomerate.” The term plastiglomerate is defined as “hybrid stones—fusions of molten plastic debris and beach sediment such as sand, rock, coral, and wood,” deemed the fossil of the future. 

This project is composed of Jazvac, as well as geologist Patricia Corcoran and oceanographer Charles Moore. Moore initially found this specimen of rock on the Hawaiian beach of Kamilo, a beach known for its accumulation of litter from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, in 2006, and later returned along with Corcoran and Javac in 2013 to further collect and study this new kind of stone. This fusion of plastic with beach sediment is due to the natural generation of heat from volcanic activity and heat from human made bonfires; adding an additional layer to this nature - human relationship. These pieces of chance sediment are a marker and signifier of our current geological era, the Anthropocene, or perhaps more accurately the Capitalocene as plastic is, in a way, a direct by product of the fossil fuel industry, thus capitalism. Fossil returning to fossil, as the participants involved in both its creation and destruction return to the dust from which we came. 

These ready made artifacts are the physical embodiment of the waste cycle, visualizing production, consumption, and disposal in a single tangible object. Plastiglomerate’s appropriation and categorization as solely art is controversial, but through this lens it becomes a more accessible concept, allowing us, the viewer, to be more contemplative rather than being confronted with anxiety inducing factuality. 

Plastiglomerate visualize the dense entanglement of human consumption and the environments that necessarily adapt and react to our overwhelming presence. Due to their greater bulk density, plastiglomerate are more likely to be buried and preserved in the rock record than plastic-only particles. Will plastiglomerate, which are neither industrially manufactured nor geologically created, become a future stratum (a sedimentary rock layer in the Earth’s surface)? And what does it mean to understand part of the geological record as an aesthetic art object?” reads the exhibition text from Jazvac’s show at Michigan State University’s Broad Art Museum. Her work was also involved in the XXII International Exhibition of La Triennale di Milano in Milan, Italy, a part of the exhibition Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival. The exhibition, which ran from March 1, 2019, through to September 19, 2019, aimed to demonstrate the importance of design in repairing our connectivity to all beings and environments, promoting the importance in the cross pollination of sciences, art, design, and architecture. These are not only tools that can be utilized to cope, but can also be used to facilitate the restoration and reinvention of certain aspects of our coexistence on earth. We have the ability to reshape the narrative of the present day, encouraging new behaviors through the objects we choose to design and how we do so. The devising of innovative solutions are made possible through defining and undefining our species relationships with our surroundings, shifting towards restorative design. The world we know will one day, whether in the near or far future, meet its unavoidable demise, but through both design and art we are able to make better sense of our circumstances and form connections with what we have left. The curator of Broken Nature, Paolo Antonelli, best describes the importance of design, in saying “design presents the means to plan a more elegant ending. It can ensure that the next dominant species will remember us with a modicum of respect: as dignified and caring, if not intelligent, beings. 

(ES)

https://www.dezeen.com/2019/04/21/kelly-jazvac-plastiglomerate-milan-triennale/