Suited up for the future.

http://www.kindleproject.org/blog/2011/10/07/feature-on-flightpath-toronto/

How can a public spectacle help to shape our ideas of how we interact with nature, space and cities? Can it really offer a tangible route for creative alternatives to transportation, civic engagement and an investment in how we live with a less harmful impact on the natural world? These questions have been on my mind for years, and in the context of Kindle Project, it has recently become relevant. As we set out to explore the most current incarnations of unique collaborative efforts on the blog these past two months, we came across one such effort that got our attention. Flightpath Toronto took place on October 1 as a part of Toronto’s Nuit Blanche, where for one sleepless night the city was transformed by hundreds of artists for the sixth annual sunset-to-sunrise celebration of contemporary art.

Han Solo

Mos Eisley Cantina in Tatooine. Two robed men are looking for an escort past an Imperial blockade off the planet. They are negotiating with a smirking lowlife and hairy, bearlike creature. The older of the two men asks if the lowlife’s ship is fast. That is when the lowlife utters his famous line.

What I never got about Han Solo’s line was that a parsec is a measure of distance and not time. I thought about it from time to time until one day, I figured it out while showering.

What I understand about traveling in hyperspace is that a ship cannot pass near massive objects, as the gravity of the object, such as a sun or planet, would pull the ship off course, or worse, out of hyperspace with disastrous effect. That is why everyone says “plot a course to X”, before jumping to hyperspace, and that is why they need navigational computers. Han Solo was able to make the Kessel Run in record time because he plotted routes that edged closer to gravity wells, shortening the length of the Run. Normally this is dangerous, but Han Solo, being a gambler, probably acted on his instinct and went for it.

I was going to draw some diagrams showing a gravity well and its effect on a ship traveling at FTL speeds, but I found a cool map and a fuller explanation of the Kessel Run here.

I just want you to know that I fully put this explanation together in the shower, using knowledge gathered from Einstein’s writings on the gravitational effect on space, and Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy, in which ship-borne gravity generators are routinely used to prevent Rebel pilots from escaping to hyperspace.

There are many attempts at retconning this line to show that Solo is lying, but I stand by my explanation, and the following comment from Lucas himself bears out most of it.

In the commentary for Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope DVD, George Lucas mentions that the parsecs are due to the Millennium Falcon’s advanced navigational computer rather than its engines, so the navicomputer would calculate much faster routes than other ships could. 1

You’ve probably read about the use of binaural tracks to get people high, as well as the resulting low grade disapproval. I haven’t tried the tracks yet, so I won’t pass judgement on them, but the fact that they exist make me happy. As someone who wants to live the sci fi life here and now, iDrugs are a page right out of Snowcrash from Neal Stephenson. Though Snowcrash was a visual stimulant that locked the brain into an infinite loop, both the binaural tracks and Snowcrash are both non chemical, information based stimulants. All the moral and legal issues aside, I’m just straight nerdgasming.

Huffington Post Article

p.s. Cigarettes and booze are worse for you than idrugs in all ways except one. Smoking and drinking are both very social activities, and are very productive from a creative point of view. Do I condone drinking and smoking? Not really, but I do encourage you to pretend, and/or hang around smokers.

Hylozoic Ground, by Philip Beesley and his team, is a collection of works that explore a new kind of architecture, one that is characterised by lightness, flexibility and sensitivity, literally. The installations are made of thin transparent or translucent polymer arranged into delicate webs and appendages that not only respond to the immediate surrounding (i.e. to your presence, or moisture in the air) but also communicate this response to each other over its network, so that each stimulus response ripples out from the stimulus location. In other words, the Waterloo based architect is trying to make architecture more like a living thing, and already he has created somehing that represents a living architecture.

Videos and more images and the rest.

The motion and actuated responses to motion and presence will draw in the crowds to Hylozoic Ground, but the more interesting and important developments are happening in little flask/glands suspended in the work, which are testing two functions that will break apart our ancient/modern architecture. The first is digestion or the intake of material from the environment via a rudimentary digestive tract. The second is growth via a flask of protocells, which are chemical, abiotic constructs that exhibit some of the qualities of life: they can intake material and create a shell around themselves, they can move, react to stimulus and most importantly they can reproduce themselves.

These two experiments could lead to the development of self repairing materials by solving some of the major obstacles in the material science, the problems of transporting material to a location, and of organizing the material once it’s at the location. This means 3D printing writ large, not limited by the size of the machine or by the number of jets. I get more and more excited about the implications.

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Casey

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