we are the environment plug us in, connect us to the earth and we might start to get it
hybrid environments | making connections by jonah humphrey
1 Canadian Centre for Inland Waters (CCIW) 2 Hamilton steel mills across the harbour from CCIW 3 Land|Scope’s hybrid landscape beside the Skyway bridge. 4 Lit interactions in the ecosystems below.
2
1
displaying flows of economic and natural re- sources: a control centre for the earth’s cul- tural and ecological processes. Link the world wide web to contemporary theories of global ecology and we experience the earth as an enormous entity of organic, fluid and artificial systems interwoven in a network of physical and virtual space. Why then, with such powers of transforma- tion do we have a fundamental fear of altering the environment? We need a better understanding of the in- herent forms of feedback that already exist be- tween the world and us. As we adapt to drastic environmental change, we can measure the perceptions and preconceptions we hold of ourselves compared to the environment’s own character, state and nature. Land|Scope, a theoretical project, addresses some of these things. It defines landscape as a combined realm of ecology and culture bor- rowing ideas from Fuller’s Geoscope to find new applications for responsive technologies — systems embedded in structures that al- low them to sense, think and act within the environment. Whereas Fuller’s proposal was an enclosed, spatially separated global sys- tem of control, Land|Scope is an integrated landscape of interaction, offering a place for interpretation and reconciliation with the en- vironment. This project is sited at the Canada Centre for Inland Waters (CCIW), home of the National Water Research Institute (NWRI), which re- searches and tests natural and man-made water-based systems. CCIW sits on Hamil-
ton Harbour beside the Skyway Bridge that connects Burlington to Hamilton — a site between suburban development, industrial lands, remediated wetlands and the open wa- ters of Lake Ontario; a site quite literally at the centre of many of Canada’s leading envi- ronmental concerns, including the state, the natural environment, industrial production and pollution, and fresh water reserves. The NWRI houses Canada’s Global Environmen- tal Monitoring System for freshwater (GEMS/ WATER), part of the United Nations Environ- ment Programme. It is precisely this monitoring that Land| Scope aims to use as a basis for interpretation and response. The current monitoring done at the NWRI, as well as monitoring of new systems in a hybrid natural/industrial land- scape surrounding the site, will be brought into the architectural component of the proj- ect — a monitoring centre where our interac- tions with the local ecology can be publicly ac- cessed, showing the connectivity between the wetlands surrounding the facility, Hamilton Harbour and the biosphere. Responsive architectures — whole environ- ments of connection — have the potential to free us from the rigid ideas that we currently use to define our environment. Within new hybrid environments, we might better un- derstand phenomena present in nature and technology alike, reacting and adapting ac- cordingly as both the living creatures and the cultural beings we are. D I would like to extend my thanks to Michael Forbes, Sci- ence Liason Officer for Environment Canada, and the NWRI, for allowing me to tour the facilities, and provid- ing me with the information to make my research and design work possible.
We are altering the chemistry and biology of our world: human endeavours are not just lim- ited to the local, but now operate at the scale of the globe itself. The earth, spatially and temporally, is im- mense. We fear that our alteration of life- supporting processes will be irreversible and uncontrollable. However, when combatting environmental changes, we often react against natural transformations such as floods, earth- quakes and hurricanes. Our fear and uncer- tainty wants a kind of permanence. We try to prevent ‘natural processes’ from changing and evolving. We must reconcile our own personal spatial interactions with the new global connectivity that exists between technology, the material products of our cultures, and the natural en- vironment. Global connectivity was a twen- tieth century concept — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, Marshall McLuhan and Buckmin- ster Fuller each saw a coming hybridisation of technology and nature in new spheres of global interconnections. Teilhard De Chardin believed that our capac- ity to generate complex systems and technolo- gies of interaction mimics the evolutionary and biological development of conscious- ness. After the geosphere, and the biosphere, comes the nöosphere — a sphere of thought that now surrounds the earth. McLuhan saw this connectivity as driven by global media to the point that systems of sound and video will be so inter-linked as to form our environment entirely. Fuller demonstrated technological and biological interconnectivity in a geode- sic dome, a geoscope, the interior of which was lined with aerial images simultaneously
on site review 17
66
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator