Avena+ Test Bed, by Benedikt Groß

Huh. I guess, as a society, we’re learning more about how crops work, and we’re seeing that big monocrops are not the smartest way to plant. Which begs the question, what is? Apparently it’s now possible to plant things in a pretty precise pattern.

This struck me as particularly neat, for a couple reasons. I guess it’s the next stage of the large-scale 3D printer. It feels useful, of course, as we try to get used to feeding 9 billion people in sustainable ways. But it’s also beautiful; or it could be, at least. For example, look at the little smiley face there. Our next field could be an artwork, or rather, our next artwork could appear on a field, and feed us too.

This also makes me wonder about food and technology. So far, a lot of technology applied to food has been unsustainable – pesticides, factory farming, etc. But stuff like this, with no obvious downside to me, makes me wonder if it might just come back around to be helpful after all.

Oil, by Dmitry Morozov (::vtol::)

Visitors put in a small object, a hydraulic press crushes it, and then that sound, slowed down, becomes the artwork. Cool because it’s sort of haunting, it exploits the fact that anything slowed down enough sounds good. Ultimately, it’s ephemeral – it turns your object into sound. It feels like it’s really playing with time; smearing an object along the 4th dimension, if you will. Similar to those companies that let you turn people’s ashes into a diamond, changing the form of something can really change the way you experience it.