1

Vol

um

e 3

5

1:04 PM, 20 Jan 13 The weird way to eliminate or evoke phantom limbs

2 Editorial Arjen Oosterman and Brendan Cormier4 Glossary of Terms6 Miracles and Monsters Urte· Rimšaite·

Convergence →←11 Verging on Convergence Rinie van Est and Virgil Rerimassie interview15 Why Don’t You… Brendan Cormier 16 Artifice Earth Adam Rutherford interview20 Same As It Ever Was Timothy Morton

Feedback ←25 It’s All Here: Pardisan and Zoopolis Adam Bobbette and Seth Denizen30 A Performance of Bodies and Architecture Seth and Ariane Lourie Harrison36 This Will Never Last Jamie Campbell40 Watching You, Watching Me Michelle Kasprzak42 A Stroll Through the Bubbles of Chemicals

and Men Etienne Turpin

Current ↓49 The Prefuture of Synthetic Biology Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg52 Generating Community Oliver Medvedik interview 56 Mounds at Work Julie Bogdanowicz60 Living Among Pests Joyce Hwang

65 Structuralism insert Dirk van den Heuvel, Salomon Frausto

97 Synthetic Dementia Kas Oosterhuis interview101 Assimilation Dillon Marsh

Feedforward →105 Nature through the Windshield Koert van Mensvoort interview110 Coming to Terms with Synthetic Biology Rachel Armstrong118 Exploring the Invisible Simon Park124 How to Build a House:

Fairy Tale of a Sustainable Future Simone Ferracina and Melka Myers132 Hackerspaces and the Act of Making Mitchell Joachim and Melanie Fessel136 Air Mines Angel Borrego Cubero and Natalie Jeremijenko140 On the Surface of a Dust Particle César Reyes Nájera and Ethel Baraona Pohl

144 Colophon

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Volume 35

On the S

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Fig. 01 The memorial plaque on the house in Varna where

Fritz Zwicky was born.

Fig. 02 A 3D map of the large-scale distribution of dark matter,

from measurements of the Hubble Space Telescope.

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Volume 35

3:32 AM, 12 Jan 13 Nachos in space! Astronaut tweets pictures of his food

“The rotation velocity curves of stars in galaxies,

the behavior of galaxies in clusters and super-

clusters, and the lensing e9ects of galaxies

and galactic clusters on photons reaching

us from the most distant parts of the universe,

all indicate that the universe contains predom-

inant quantities of non-luminous matter whose

in=uence is felt only through its gravitational

e9ects. Yet despite 65 years of study the

nature and origin of this dark matter remains

unresolved.”

– A.D. Ernest3

The cosmos is mostly formed by dark energy and

dark matter. Although virtually imperceptible, it

is be lieved that dark matter constitutes approximately

83 percent of all matter in the universe. Dark matter pulls

things together, generates attractive gravity, and even

suggests new particle species. To understand the largest

struc tures in the cosmos we should understand the

structure of its smallest particles, going from outer space

to inner space, as if taking the journey suggested by the

Eames’ Llm Powers of 10. Although most matter in the

universe is dark, we only perceive its gravitational e9ects.

Matter as we know it is just a thin network of threads

connecting clusters of dark matter. Within these nodes

dark matter accumulates and galaxies are formed. Fig. 02

Nobody knows exactly what dark matter is made

of. The Cold Dark Matter hypothesis posits that they are

‘weakly interacting massive particles’ (WIMPs) because

they can pass through ordinary matter without any e9 ects,

yet they have mass. A few hypothetical WIMPs have

been suggested including neutrinos, axions, and neutral-

inos. A neutrino is an electrically neutral elementary par-

ticle that is able to pass through ordinary matter almost

undisturbed. Neutrinos have a minuscule, but nonzero

mass. Axions are particles with minimum mass that would

have been produced abundantly in the Big Bang. They

have been proposed to explain why the neutron is elec-

trically neutral. Neutralinos are massive particles – they

may be 30 to 5000 times the mass of a proton.

Scientists are already exploring the occurrence of

these particles, deep underground and way out in space.

A good example is the CERN particle physics laboratory,

sit u ated in the northwest suburbs of Geneva on the

Franco-Swiss border, with the Large Hadron Collider

tunnel located one hundred meters underground in

the region between the Geneva airport and the nearby

Jura moun tains. There is also the Lake Baikal Neutrino

Tele scope, now being constructed for deep underwater

neutrino re search. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory,

is the largest neutrino telescope in the world and there,

a team of pioneering researchers have buried thousands

of sensors miles deep into the ice at the bottom of the

earth, all in an attempt to catch the rare neutrino, from

atmos pheric and astrophysical sources, crashing into

atoms of ice.

Recent theoretical proposals reveal interesting

paths: one physicist in the US has calculated that dark

matter could arise in a simple generalized quantum theory

of gravity.4 Other theories, like from Maxim Pospelov,

posit bubble-like structures called domain walls which

could be detected with a network of magnetometers

situated strategically around the world.5 If such proposi-

tions prove feasible new observations about dark matter

could be found, inviting input from di9erent disciplines –

design being one of them.

“Dear Radioactive Friends,

today I have done a terrible thing

for a theoretical physicist, that is,

to introduce a new particle that

nobody will ever be able to see.”

– Wolfgang Pauli, 1930s

It’s been said that we are a geological force. Over the

short history of humankind we have learned to trans-

form materials from the biosphere to our convenience.

Tech nicians have been trained in the art of transforming

rocks into square-shaped hills for us to inhabit. Com-

munica tion technologies have also contributed to the

formation of new landscapes on our planet’s surface.

Recent e9orts in science have attempted to develop

design methods and tools towards an integrated

biologically-engineered environment, and synthetic

biology is emerging as a promising Leld towards a soft

and evolutive process of integration with nature. We

are now able to engineer matter itself. But according

to astrophysics such matter and all visible matter in

our immense universe scarcely represents four percent

of what’s out there.1 The remain ing is dark to us. Indeed

it’s called dark matter.

Can designers explore ways of understanding

and interacting with dark matter? To what degree is it

feas ible to modify visible matter and even address

challenges un reachable within our current production

model? Although seemingly audacious to address – after

all, no one took Fritz Zwicki very seriously when he Lrst

sug gested the existence of dark matter back in 1930s

Fig.01 – dark matter is a substantive hypothesis, and

speculating on its potential for design could help unlock

the conLnes of design and its subsequent realities.

“If I had a world of my own,

everything would be nonsense.

Nothing would be what it is,

because everything would be

what it isn’t.

And contrary wise,

what is, it wouldn’t be.

And what it wouldn’t be,

it would. You see?”

– Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass,

and What Alice Found There

Engineers dabbling with biology, and designers

exploring future materials isn’t speculation, but real

current practice.2 The frontiers of design have

been made possible by the con=uence of technical

advances and increasing collaboration between

di9erent knowl edge Lelds. Today, bio-engineered design

products are tested in laboratories, as designers become

accustomed to inter acting and exchanging ideas with

biologists, material scien tists, biological engineers, and

even bio-programmers.

We’ve arrived at the stage where we can manip-

ulate the very stu9 life is made of: the cell. Formed

by molecules of atoms joined by energy, further broken

down into conLgurations of protons, neutrons, and elec-

trons, living things are made up of the same chemical

components as non-living things; and they all obey the

same physical and chemical laws at the macroscopic

level. Astronomers refer to this as ‘baryonic matter’.

In looking to dark matter, we step into the little-known

world of ‘non baryonic-matter’.

The G

enetic M

anip

ulation of Known M

att

er

Dark

Matt

er as the R

ule in the C

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142

Volume 35

3:20 PM, 11 Jan 13

Is it feasible to design with dark matter? Is it pos-

sible to interact with and even manipulate things

we are not able to see? Designing perception might

be the :rst place to start. Artist Neil Harbisson

has already pointed to new ways of exploring per-

ception, by wearing a device that allows him to hear

colors. Following Maxim Pospelov’s suggestion,

we could start by searching for devices that expand

our range of perception of the matter spectrum.

In the same way that François Dallegret proposed

the Astronef 732 Space City in 1963, to study the

reactions of younger generations to conditions of

extreme crowd ing in relation to speed, in the future

it might be feasible to propose testing human reac-

tions to dark matter.

The :rst step would be an open research plat form

linking all the ePorts carried out individually by

diPerent disciplines. Transdicisplinary workshops

and spaces could be established taking advantage

of new forms of fabrication already practiced by

community biology labs like GenSpace or bioCurious.

CERN already has an intern ship program allowing

a 3-month artist residence. This new collective

creativity could imagine new devices in order to

experiment with matter at a quantum level, from

quantum biolasers7 to models of new interstellar stations

constructed with non-carbon materials and quantum

displacement by means of teletransportation. These labs

could explore methods for the construction of distant

planets with no terrestrial materials and evolving forms

of human cyborgs adapted to such conditions.

Quantum theory has demonstrated that the cross-

roads between physics and consciousness at atomic

levels can be applied to all; even the entire universe.8 It

is possible that new unimagined devices collectively cre-

ated, could lead us to start perceiving and manipulating

neutrinos and other subatomic particles, and from there

start programming atoms, just as today we are able to

program cells. Sculpting dark matter at an atomic scale

would lead us to con:gure new atomic patterns, which

could allow us to rewrite laws of physics. And once we’ve

developed new habitats in distant planets, we would

be able to go there through wormholes excavated in dark

matter traveling at entangled states accompanied by

Schrödinger’s cat.

1 What is the Universe Made Of? http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/

universe/uni_matter.html

2 We’re talking about transdisciplinary teams dealing with things

such as protocells, bacteria, fungi and even DNA cell manipulation

and creating of new biological systems from scratch.

3 A. D. Ernest. A QUANTUM APPROACH TO DARK MATTER.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0406139.pdf

4 Jon Cartwright. Dark matter could come naturally from quantum

gravity. http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2009/apr/21/

dark-matter-could-come-naturally-from-quantum-gravity

5 Lisa Grossman. Earth may be crashing through dark matter walls.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23094-earth-may-be-

crashing-through-dark-matter-walls.html [link viewed on

February 3th 2013

6 See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrödinger’s_cat

7 This project is currently under development at GenSpace Biolab:

http://genspace.org/project/Quantum%20Dot%20Biolaser

8 Bruce Rosenblum, Fred Kuttner. Quantum Enigma: Physics

Encounters Consciousness,(Oxford University Press 2011).

A S

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for Schrö

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