Archive

Architectures of Quarantine & Containment

One very inter­est­ing addi­tion to the pub­lic space is how we are con­di­tion­ing and defin­ing the pub­lic space with regards to even­tu­al attacks. And it’s chang­ing the land­scape rad­i­cal­ly. And the very first knee-jerk reac­tion was con­crete blocks in front of many insti­tu­tions. Now they’re try­ing to design these con­crete blocks so they seem some­thing which is part of the land­scape but the pres­ence and the robust­ness is still so vio­lent that it’s hard to hide the intention.

The Conversation #37 — David Keith

There are biol­o­gists who’ve spent their careers work­ing on some species of bee­tle in the trop­i­cal rain­for­est, and they just love the rain­for­est in their bones And they feel that when they go tes­ti­fy in Congress to some com­mit­tee, that they can’t just say, I love it in my bones and you guys will love it too, if you share it with me.” They have to say, Oh, we’ve done all this math and com­put­ed that there’s an ecosys­tem ser­vice here.” And I think that that has real­ly impov­er­ished our debate about envi­ron­men­tal issues.

The Conversation #27 — Patrick Crouch

My think­ing is how do we design sys­tems that pro­vide for every aspect of our human­i­ty? How do we design a city that cares for all of our needs? You know it’s not just think­ing about shel­ter, but it’s think­ing about our food and our air and so, obvi­ous­ly the types of indus­try we have are very dif­fer­ent, because we have to make sure that our air and our water is clean. And that our food is read­i­ly avail­able, and that we have spaces for con­tem­pla­tion and reflec­tion. And that we have places for com­muning with each other. 

The Conversation #25 — Frances Whitehead

Some of my artist friends think what I’m doing isn’t art, and I’ve giv­en up on art. It’ll take care of itself. You know. I mean it’s always been there, it will always be there, and we always know that new art nev­er looks like art at first, ever. So why should this be any dif­fer­ent? We just have to trust the process. And I would say that must be true for every oth­er discipline.

The Conversation #24 — Synthesizing Themes

We feel that this is a good point to sort of take stock, do sort of a quick pré­cis, if you will, of where we’ve got­ten so far. Because I think we’ve got some real­ly inter­est­ing places we weren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly expect­ing to get. And we’re see­ing some inter­est­ing poles between dif­fer­ent large groups of thinkers that we weren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly expecting.

The Conversation #10 — Timothy Morton

I don’t think eco­log­i­cal aware­ness is a sort of hap­py hap­py joy joy, we are all earth­lings” thing. I think it’s actu­al­ly a kind of uncan­ny real­iza­tion. On the one hand there’s no away, on the oth­er hand what the hell is this? This is not my beau­ti­ful waste. This is not my beau­ti­ful toi­let. This is not my beau­ti­ful Pacific Ocean.” You know, all of a sud­den these things become some­how not exact­ly what we thought they were.

The Conversation #8 — Chris McKay

Everything we know about bio­log­i­cal sci­ences, med­i­cine, agri­cul­ture, dis­ease, what­ev­er, is based on study­ing one exam­ple of life. Life on Earth. Life as we know it. If we find anoth­er exam­ple that’s dif­fer­ent, a sec­ond gen­e­sis, and inde­pen­dent ori­gin of life, com­par­ing those two might enable us to answer ques­tions that we would nev­er be able to answer if we only had one exam­ple to study. That could pro­vide prac­ti­cal ben­e­fits for humans as well as bet­ter under­stand­ing of how to man­age ecosys­tems, etc.