If you’re in Paris before 24 July a spectacular exhibition called The Fertile City: Towards An Urban Nature is well worth a visit. The show’s OTT poster does not over-promise. The exhibition explores nature in the city from multiple perspectives: historical, social, cultural, botanical, ecological. Two narrative sequences overlap: an “immersion in the urban-vegetal world”, [...]
Continuing our theme of systems thinking and the need for a new aesthetics – oh, what the heck, let’s talk about taps. I have encountered many wonderful things here in Mexico, but these taps are not among them. After nearly a week, I still have no idea which I am supposed to turn them to [...]
You don’t need to know how a combustion engine works to drive your car to work. Why should you need to know anything about the programming behind the pixels just to get around the web? For Douglas Rushkoff, in his new book Program or be Programmed, the answer is that the web is different. ‘It’s [...]
Water: the bad news and the good news
A new book by Alex Prud’homme called The Ripple Effect addresses the “vast and desperately serious subject” of water. The author does not hold back: all the world’s water problems are here. The sewage, fertilizers, industrial chemicals, plastics, paint, drugs, and hand soap, among other contaminants, that find their way into the world’s rivers every [...]