y=mx+b

MAG

DECEMBER 2008 ISSUE 1

40 45 LEARNING FROM NOETICS What does Noetic Science have to do with the future of civilization?

Consciousness still continues to be a problem for science, and for the most part that has been shoved under the rug. The day may come when the intuitive sciences will take their place side by side with the neurosciences and the cognitive.

50 33

21

FASHION OF THE FUTURE Trying on a Better Future Olga Kharif and Sabine Imagine a handbag, one that’s built out of fourinch squares and triangles of fabric, with tiny computer chips embedded in it. Assembled together with Velcro that conducts electricity.

60 35 HYBRID Elements of a Re-mix culture by Derrick de Kerckhove The implosive tendencies of digital technology is increasingly affecting the way we live, make sense of the world, and even our identities.

Derrick de Kerckhove examines the condition that most characterizes our time.

52 43 68 21 56 55 45 15

68 21 TIME CAPSULE Three perspectives on the future Construction of urban shelters Global waters shortage New inspirations in fashion

“Human beings will become more and more refined, and then that will change the way we do things.”

Jeffery Mishlove Learning from noetics

19 21 12 77

88 67 78 36

The history of the 21st century

Future perfectors

07 13

55 77

CONTRIBUTORS The Futurists

12 18 VISIONS Past wisdom Whats moves you?

Buckminster Fuller

FUTURE PACKAGES Future life Micro home Snail shell The evolution of man Worldly over consumption Eco tip

84 66 15 19 PREDICTIONS Psychic Predictions Predictions for the Coming Century

26 21 COMING SOON The 2nd Paper revolution

CALENDAR A directory of future events in the greater galactic area

88 68 DIRECTORY Future fashion file Green’s the new black

7

CONTRIBUTORS

THE FUTURISTS

Isaac Weeber

moved from Colombia to study Communication Design in Parsons School of Design.

He enjoys exploring the vast Internets, playing bongos and writing small autobiographies like this one. He designed Visions. sakyweeber@ gmail.com

Katie Rutherford

is a student of life and design living in New York city.

In her precious downtime, She likes to take long walks with no particular destination in mind, go to farmer’s markets and pore through typefaces online she will never be able to afford. She designed Learning from noetics.

Christopher Miller

is a student in New York City, who loves white walls, claw foot tubs, and mint chocolate chip ice cream. He hopes the future will be a happy one. He designed Future packages. millec46@ newschool.edu

katiemrutherford@ gmail.com

Alison Munn

is a Junior Communication Design Major at Parsons School of Design.

In her spare time, Alison enjoys typography, sleeping, snacks (especially popcorn), and teleportation. She designed Predictions. alison.munn@ rogers.com

Ryan Quigley

is a student at Parsons the New School for Design who enjoys long walks on the lunar surface, earthsets, and conversations about intergalactic travel. He designed Fashion of the future. quigr193@ gmail.com

Sandy Destruge

is all about Fashion tech & Graphic Design.

She loves to play field hockey on her free time, is a movie buff on rainy days & is a lover of the urban life, not on rainy days though. She designed Future packages. sandy.destruge@ gmail.com

8

CONTRIBUTORS

THE FUTURISTS

Desmond Cheung

Yoon Eom

Scott Kellum

is a student at Parsons and was raised in HongKong. He is curious about cultures and he spends a lot of time day-dreaming about his other identities beyond reality. one of his random dream is to be able to think like his cat. He designed Coming soon.

is a Junior at Parsons who loves illustrations of dogs, appreciates antique revolvers, hand drawn typefaces and freshly baked cookies. She was an aspiring country singer at age 11 but that didn’t quite work out. She designed Time capsule.

is some guy who lives in Brooklyn.

He has mixed feelings about New York City and at the moment it is on his good side. He thinks Designer is a pretentious title so he tries to avoid it. Sunshine, stray kittens and someone giving someone else a helping hand warms his heart. He designed Calendar.

cheud820@ newschool.edu

yooniemoe@gmail. com

scott@ scottkellum.net

Yuchung Lim

Bernice Herera Sy

Yelena Avanesova

is a Junior at Parsons. She likes thinking about the future, walking around the central park and listening to music. She designed Table of contents and Contributors.

left Manila, Philippines, four years ago to study Communication Design in Parsons.

She misses Filipino humor, street food and green mangoes. She desgined Hybrid.

is a student at parsons. she was born in baku, azerbaijan. she likes to read and make books. her favorite food is pizza. she loves her cat. She designed Directory.

bigmoy6@ gmail.com

kinsmanofdsun@ yahoo.com

yavanesova@ gmail.com

SOLAR BOTTLE Water-purifying drinking

THE HISTORY ST OF THE 21 CENTURY “There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking. By this I mean so simply that anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it.”

– Gertrude Stein

12 | y=mx+ a thinker

BUCKMINSTER FULLER DESIGNING IN THE FOURTH DIMENSION Driven by the design philosophy of “more for less,” Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) worked simultaneously on plans for houses, cars, boats, games, television transmitters and geodesic domes, all of which were designed to be mass-produced using the simplest and most sustainable means possible.

Convinced that the way the world managed its human and material resources needed to be radically rethought, Fuller applied himself to seeking long term, technology-led solutions to some of the most pressing problems of his time, particularly in the fields of building and transport. Despite the ground-breaking inventiveness of so much of his work, it was not until Fuller’s largescale, multifunctional geodesic domes began to appear around the world in the 1950s that he really made his name.

In 1922, Fuller cofounded the Stockade Building Company to produce lightweight building materials. The knowledge he acquired there was to prove invaluable to his later experiments with design and architecture. Disaster struck in 1927 when Fuller lost his job at Stockade. At the age of 32 he found himself on the shore of Lake Michigan wondering whether to end his life there.

Fuller took a decision to devote his life to others by embarking on “an experiment to discover what the little, penniless, unknown individual might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity”.

The following year he made his first patent application for the 4D tower, a lightweight, prefabricated, multi-storey apartment tower to be delivered anywhere by airship. The towers would generate their own light and heat with an independent sewage system.

From then on, ideas and inventions seemed to flow from him in a continuous stream.

Driven by his philosophy of “more for less”, Fuller threw himself wholeheartedly into a quest for a new way of housing mankind, in “Lightful Houses” so-called because they were full of light, lightweight, delightful and so forth. This programme and his accompanying vision of a world united by the most modern means of transport and telecommunication evolved into Fuller’s philosophy of fourdimensional design. He defined this as thinking in time instead of only the three dimensions of space: thinking of consequences for humanity instead of only immediate personal gain.

Hailed at the time as the lightest, strongest and most cost-effective structure, the geodesic dome was designed to cover the maximum possible space without internal supports. The bigger it is, the lighter and stronger it becomes. The first full-size geodesic structure was completed in Montreal in 1950. Fuller’s hope was that such domes could one day be manufactured at the rate of 3,000 a day.

Recognition of the importance of Fuller’s scientific research came only after his death, by then he had registered 25 US patents, written 28 books and received 47 honorary doctorates as well as numerous other awards including a 1969 nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

A MARK IN THE WORLD geodesic dome

fly’s eye dome

dymaxion car

Domes are very strong, getting stronger as they get larger. The basic structure can be erected very quickly from lightweight materials by a small crew.

A fully equipped, air-deliverable house that weighs and costs about as much as a good automobile. This was Fuller’s view of the fly’s eye.

The car was a three wheeler, steered by a single rear wheel, and could do a U-turn in its own length. It also had a fuel efficiency of 30 miles per gallon.

We are now reaching our crusing altitude, feel free to reach out and touch the stars

14 | y=mx+ interviews

YOUTH ON THE FUTURE

We asked this question to three young students in verge of graduation. We were interested in their individual visions for the future and their motivation to fulfill them.

Josh Levy

Lauren Pishna

Teresa Mozur

MEDIA STUDIES STUDENT AT EUGENE LANG COLLEGE.

MEDIA STUDIES STUDENT AT EUGENE LANG COLLEGE.

First thing I thought of was my friends, then I thought of music and the last thing is meaning, I feel like I can be pretty calculated in things that I do or that I want, so I think I take that things that have a lot of meanings and that meaning is what moves me.

People’s thoughtfulness really moves me. When people take the time to think about other people. I find myself not doing it and it sucks and so when it happens, it sort of changes me.

It’s something I definitely look up to.

Part of it is just self motivation, in the mornings to just do as much and gain from things as much as I can but on the other hand also just in general, love for life and love of living and that usually also gets me moving. I enjoy cooking and I like making other people happy.

Other people’s happiness moves me.

ADVISOR AT LOEB HALL, DRUMMER AND BABY SITTER.

WHAT MOVES YOU?

“31! That’s gross! 41 ew! I don’t even want to think about that” —Lauren Pishna, when asked about her future in 10 to 20 years

WHAT MOVES WITH YOU?

My baggage, umm… Sometimes my problems from the past? I’m trying to think of good things that move with me, umm…

The way life changes can bring new things, the way people, umm… People that I love move with me, either because we developed together, even if we are not from the same place, I feel like we are of moving. My best friends I’m close to, I feel like we are moving in the same direction.

My mom. She’s always there.

I don’t really think about it all the time but when I do, I realize that everything I do is either make her happy or try to make her feel nice I guess. I’m a lot like my mom; it’s kinda gross ha ha ha! We sort of have different personalities but we are pretty much the same person!

Consciousness? Maybe more like I wouldn’t necessarily want to say a feminist consciousness but just having that moves with me and helps me filter things that I encounter. Just having that analytical consciousness… always questioning things…

IN10 TO 20 YEARS, WHERE WILL YOU BE MOVING TOWARDS?

I have no clear concept of where I want to be in my future, uh I’ll want to be doing something that I love to do, and I want to be I don’t know, I feel I’ve changed a lot in the past few years of my life and somehow I associate being older with being more stable but I also want to be more different in 10 years but not because I’m not happy with myself right now.

31! That’s gross! 41 ew! I don’t even want to think about that…

Well by then I’ll probably have jobs and stuff. It’s weird because you are always supposed to do this and do that it’s like a time line, but right now I don’t feel like I’ll ever get married, but…

I’ll probably have kids like that… Sort of like Nicole Richie and Joel Madden. I guess just grounding my life. Finding that “rest,” at least think about finding that rest. But I’ll probably not even have it then either. 10, 20 years I hope to have grounded relationships. That’s what I want to move towards.

Stability, both location wise and mental stability as well. Just being okay with staying at one place for longer than 3, 4 years and just being okay with permanent adulthood.

y=mx+architecture | 17

HABITAT 67 Habitat 67 was designed by architect Moshe Safdie as part of the 1967 World’s Fair held in Montreal. The concept for the year was “Man and his World” and housing was one of the main themes. From what I understand, the concept with the design was so that no apartment shared common walls with their neighbors.¶ Habitat is a model community constructed along the St. Lawrence River in Montreal, composed of 354 prefabricated modules which combine to form a three-dimensional space structure. The modules, or “boxes” as they are known, are connected in varying combinations to create 158 residences ranging from 600 ft2 to 1,700 ft2. Pedestrian streets serve as horizontal circulation throughout the entire complex.¶ Habitat ‘67 was the realization of Moshe Safdie’s thesis titled “A Case for City Living, A Study of Three Urban High Density Housing Systems for Community Development” and was also the major theme exhibition of the 1967 Montreal World Exposition.”

Hello iMac.

y=mx+ predictions

PSYCHIC PREDICTIONS Sylvia Browne makes the next fifty years sound pretty amazing. Atlantis, aliens, the cure for cancer and peace in the Middle East just to name a few.

IMAGE BY CHRIS THE GENTLEMAN

1. Eradication of cancer as we know it, 9. There will be no US Presidency; our

2.

3.

4.

6.

7.

8.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

government will go back to a Greek Senate structure.

Peace in the Middle East will prevail by 2050.

West Coast goes under in 2026.

Parts of the East Coast also get inundated. Tsunamis will wipe out a large portion of Japan. The Hawaiian Islands will have upheaval and be the site of a large new landmass.

Atlantis will begin to show itself by 2023 and be fully visible by 2026.

Aliens will begin to show themselves in the year 2010, they will not harm us, they simply want to see what we are doing to this planet. They will teach us how to use anti-gravity devices again, such as they did for the pyramids.

Medicine in pill form is erradicated.

Instead we will have air injected delivery through the skin.

IMAGE BY DAVID LACHAPELLE

5.

using sound waves, photo sensitive drug therapy, and “self-addicting” cells.

Electrical cars with flotation ability for water travel to bypass freeways.

Houses made from pressed paper with plastic coatings; interchangeable walls.

Separate body parts cloned for organ transplants; not an entire body.

Diagnostic chambers which map the body’s electrical balance to predict health problems before the come.

No more surgery with knives. Some type of molecular ionization device that knows how to take out the afflicted cells then seal the wound without a single scar.

Babies will be birthed in water all the time, with music, incense, and green and lavender lights.

People will be able to simply “walk out” of their bodies upon death.

| 19 3

IMAGE BY BBC

PREDICTIONS FOR THE COMING CENTURY BAD PREDICTIONS From www.dailycognition.com Image from BBC UK

I

t will be years - not in my time before a woman will become Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, future Prime Minister, October 26th, 1969 UÊ-i à L iÊ> `ÊÀië à L iÊÜ i Ê` Ê not want to vote Grover Cleveland, U.S. President, 1905 UÊ7 Ì Ê ÛiÀÊwvÌii ÊÌÞ«iÃÊ of foreign cars already on sale here, the Japanese auto industry isn’t likely to carve out a big share of the market for itself Business Week, August 2, 1968 UÊ/ iÀiÊ ÃÊ Ê` ÕLÌÊÌ >ÌÊÌ iÊÀi} iÊ vÊ Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction. As this operation continues, those weapons will be identified, found, along with the people who have produced them and who guard them General Tommy Franks, March, 2003 UÊ i>Û iÀ Ì > > ÀÊyÞ }Ê >V iÃÊ are impossible Lord Kelvin, British mathematician and physicist, president vÊÌ iÊ À Ì Ã Ê, Þ> Ê- V iÌÞ]Ê£n xÊU

Chuck Klosterman issues his predictions for the coming century. Featuring robot wars, near annihilation, and President Tom Brady.

JULY 14, 2009: While the price of gas hits five dollars per gallon in most American cities, the value of the dollar becomes exactly half the value of the euro. World travel becomes a luxury available only to the rich; on the upside, Northwest Airlines goes bankrupt.

OCT. 4, 2010: Canada legalizes the cloning of livestock for human consumption.

NOV. 6, 2012: Obama defeats the incumbent McCain in a landslide.

However, the most curious aspect of the election is the candidacy of Digger True, a grassroots “blogucrat” who runs as an independent, solely using the Internet. True does not express any concrete views and does not participate in debates.

Instead, he produces online supercuts of patriotic aphorisms, set to the music of Collective Soul. To the surprise of many in the mainstream media, True gets 3 percent of the popular vote.

Blogucrat disciples begin petition drives advocating the elimination of copyright laws and the option of voting over the Web. MAY 18, 2013: To the chagrin of his longtime supporters, President Obama concedes that U.S. troops can’t be withdrawn from Iraq.

DEC. 31, 2014: Billed as “the floating Dubai,” the inaugural space hotel opens its doors.

Financed by Google, the cost is $2 million per room, per evening. Kanye West performs in the ballroom on opening night.

JUNE 15, 2015: The Paris Libertines defeat the London Plesiosaurs in the first NBA championship series featuring no American franchises.

SEPT. 12, 2016: Digger True enters the presidential race less than two months before Election Day, this time campaigning with wordless, randomly generated photographs of voters (aggregated from social networks and displayed in rapid, continuous succession on his Web site).

Despite never appearing in public, True gets 22 percent of the vote, but Obama wins reelection.

AUG. 20, 2017: The first mainstream use of artificial intelligence becomes popular with consumers -- the ability to have realistic phone sex without another person.

JUNE 2, 2018: Summer movie audiences are entranced and titillated by Lars von Trier’s

y=mx+ predictions

Asking for It, an erotic thriller starring Christian Bale and Scarlett Johansson, set on the 110th floor of the World Trade Center on the morning of 9/11.

APRIL 15, 2019: No longer able to attract voters under the age of forty, the GOP absorbs the blogucratic faction and makes Digger True the de facto Republican candidate for 2020. True announces his reinvention on YouTube 3.1 by uploading a 4-D image of Abraham Lincoln copulating with a MacBook, synchronized to a live version of “Smack My Bitch Up” from the recent Prodigy reunion tour.

Congress makes online voting legal in all fifty states.

NOV. 3, 2020: True becomes the first president of America’s postliterate era. The outcome is bemoaned by The New York Times and The Washington Post, the only U.S. newspapers still printed on paper. President True does not appear in public for his entire tenure, communicating all public policy via screen grabs of Dakota Fanning, delivered through his Tumblr account.

AUG. 14, 2021: The final performance by the Rolling Stones in Wembley Stadium. Ticket prices start

Way,” a fourteen-minute song explicitly explaining the details of his 1966 motorcycle crash, his brief conversion to Christianity during the seventies, and what it was like to have sex with Joan Baez. When asked why he chose to release such personal material at this point in his life, Dylan cryptically replies, “That seems like a question you should be asking Bob Dylan.”

MAY 8, 2030: A deathbed confession by George W. Bush reveals that JFK was, in fact, assassinated by the CIA.

without oxygen, totally naked.

JUNE 15, 2027: A startling revelation comes in the form of Obama’s postpresidential autobiography, Cutting Backdoor: He admits that the decision to keep troops in Iraq was forced upon him by the Bilderberg Group, a secret society of world leaders who control the global economy. The book explains

JUNE 14, 2024: Chinese researchers find a cure for AIDS. at $18,200, ultimately netting the band $1 billion.

DEC. 31, 2023: The U.S. relaxes after the hottest year in history, contributing to the death of more than eighty thousand citizens.

JUNE 14, 2024: Chinese researchers find a cure for AIDS. AUG. 13, 2025: A surprising announcement comes from Johns Hopkins University: As it turns out, smoking cigarettes is kind of good foryou.

SEPT. 25, 2026: A new folk hero captures the worldwide imagination when twenty-five-year-old British hand model Gretchen Tobias scales the east face of Mount Everest,

how Bilderberg’s leadership concluded that the U.S. would not be prepared for a post-oil society for at least forty years; the only solution was to establish an American presence in the Middle East that provided unlimited access to petroleum, thereby staving off worldwide economic collapse. Three months after the book’s release, Obama disappears in a mysterious boating mishap.

NOV. 7, 2028: Tom Brady (R-Michigan) defeats Will Smith (D-California) in the race for the Oval Office.

MAY 24, 2029: Eighty-eight-year-old Bob Dylan celebrates his birthday with the online release of “Oh, By the

SEPT. 2, 2031: A mysterious multiracial seven-foot man who refers to himself only as “B” shows up at NASA in Houston. He claims to be from the year 2131 and possesses blueprints for a time machine that will take a hundred years to build. After a closed-door twelveminute meeting with President Brady, construction begins immediately.

| 21 5

APRIL 5, 2033: In a moment reminiscent of Texas Western’s 1966 victory over Kentucky, the all-black Kentucky Wildcats are upset in the NCAA basketball championship by the University of Portland, a school whose squad is composed entirely of Asians.

SEPT. 2, 2034: Another multiracial seven-foot man (this one calling himself “C”) arrives at NASA and begs scientists to discontinue work on the time machine. He cannot explain why. The decision falls to President Brady, who ultimately concludes that the very presence of “B” and “C” dictates that the machine must be completed.

FEB. 14, 2036: Faced with the notion of “potential mammalian annihilation within fifty years,” all First World nations agree to make climate change the lead focus of their scientific inquiry. Fearing this will slow down completion of the time machine, “B” anecdotally submits a process that could replenish the ozone layer. Soon after delivering this information, “B” murders “C.” “B” chooses not to defend himself during his trial, saying only, “I have no regrets, except for those of all mankind.”

He is sentenced to prison and spends the next ten years writing his memoir, a manuscript he eventually destroys.

DEC. 25, 2038: Working off the rudimentary plans explained by “B,” scientists begin to molecularly stitch the ozone hole above the Arctic Circle.

JULY 11, 2039: Bill Clinton, ninetytwo, dies on the same day Chinese Democracy II is released.

NOV. 2, 2040: Dana Dukakis (D-New Jersey) becomes the first open hermaphrodite to win a gubernatorial election.

JUNE 11, 2041: In a matter of weeks, the entire Internet is replaced by “news blow,” a granular microbe that allows information to be snorted, injected, or smoked. Data can now be synthesized into a water-soluble powder and absorbed directly into the cranial bloodstream, providing users with an instantaneous visual portrait of whatever information they are interested in consuming. (Sadly, this tends to be slow-motion images of minor celebrities going to the

bathroom.) Now irrelevant, an ocean of Web pioneers lament the evolution.

“What about the craft?” they ask no one in particular. “What about the inherent human pleasure of moving one’s mouse across a hyperlink, not knowing what a simple click might teach you? Whatever happened to ironic thirty-word capsule reviews about marginally popular TV shows? Have we lost this forever?” “You just don’t get new media,” respond the news-blowers. “You just don’t get it.”

APRIL 3, 2042: Scientists declare that repairs to the ozone layer are a complete success. Polar bears, now extinct in the wild, are reintroduced to their natural habitat.

JUNE 22, 2043: As predicted by Arthur C. Clarke in 3001: The Final Odyssey, the orbiting luxury hotel is connected to Earth by a massive space elevator.

Hyperstrong cables anchored to the earth near the equator (as required by physics) stretch 100,000 kilometers into the sky, rising into the hotel’s lobby.

DEC. 1, 2045: A report from the American Medical Association expresses fear over the proliferation of news blow. “It appears,” the report concludes, “that prolonged consumption of news blow renders the user incapable of relating to any person not engaged with an identical strain of the substance.”

Society is no longer separated by geography, culture, or language. Humans now group themselves solely through the shared use of specific info drugs.

A divide emerges between Americans on the West Coast (who primarily smoke news blow synthesized in rural California) and people living in the East (who snort a more potent strain developed in Baltimore). Over time, people in New York and Los Angeles find themselves unable to communicate about anything -- they now understand the most basic building blocks of information in totally different ways.

JUNE 22, 2046: At the World Games in Helsinki, U.S. sprinter Zeb Lovelace runs the 100 meters in an astounding 8.99 seconds. His record is later disqualified when testing proves that Lovelace had been injecting himself with self-duplicating DNA taken from the bone marrow of cheetahs.

JUNE 5, 2070: Wolves in Canada begin hunting humans at an alarming rate. Shark attacks increase 40 percent. Jungle animals begin successfully infiltrating urban areas; a panther kills at least nine people in downtown Dallas. “I don’t know why the animals are getting smarter,” says zoologist Eli Sperle-Cho, “but it’s definitely happening.”

IMAGE BY HOIHOIHOI ON FLICKR

IMAGE BY HOIHOIHOI ON FLICKR

y=mx+ predictions

COMME des GARÇONS

| 7

3424 | y=mx+ coming soon

THE 2ND PAPER REVOLUTION Thirty-five years in the making, e-paper is now closer than ever to changing the way we read, write, and study

FUJITSU’S BENDABLE PAPER. CAPABLE OF CONTINUOUS DISPLAY OF THE SAME IMAGE WITHOUT THE NEED FOR ELECTRICITY

AN INTERVIEW WITH NICK SHERIDON, FATHER OF E-PAPER In the 1970s, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC) was a powerhouse of innovation. Many aspects the modern computer, namely the mouse, laser printer, Ethernet, GUI, computer-generated color graphics, as well as a number of important computer languages, were invented at PARC around that time. Yet another development, nearly lost among those important breakthroughs, was invented in 1974 by PARC employee Nicholas K. Sheridon. The Gyricon, a Greek term for rotating image, was to be new display technology for the Alto personal computer; eventually, it became the basis for modern e-paper technology.

SO HOW WAS E-PAPER BORN? I realized the need for e-paper in 1989. At Xerox PARC, we had long predicted the advent of the paperless office, with the wide-

spread adoption of the personal computer we pioneered. The paperless office never happened. Instead, the personal computer caused more paper to be consumed. I realized that most of the paper consumption was caused by a difference in comfort level between reading documents on paper and reading them on the CRT screen. Any document over a half page in length was likely to be printed, subsequently read, and discarded within a day. There was a need for a paper-like electronic display — e-paper! It needed to have as many paper properties as possible, because ink on paper is the “perfect display.” Subsequently, I realized that the Gyricon display, which I had invented in the early 70s, was a good candidate for use as e-paper. I set about developing a manufacturing process for the Gyricon and solving its early problems.

y=mx+coming soon | 35

3626 | y=mx+ coming soon

WHY DO YOU THINK IT IS TAKING SO LONG TO ENTER THE MARKET? E-paper has entered the market, but not yet in a big way. Gyricon sold message signs, and E Ink Corporation provided the e-paper for the Sony Reader sold in Japan. Kent Displays is also selling signs.

No technology is yet sufficiently paper-like to grab the huge latent market widely recognized to be there. This is a lot like the early days of television development, when everyone knew what was needed but getting the technology right was tough.

Organic thin film transistors, or TFTs, will provide flexible addressing at a low cost, and other technologies show promise, but none of these are quite ready.

HOW DO YOU SEE THE FUTURE OF E-PAPER?

I like to tell people that the holy grail of e-paper will be embodied as a cylindrical tube, about 1 centimeter in diameter and 15 to 20 centimeters long, that a person can comfortably carry in his or her pocket.

The tube will contain a tightly rolled sheet of e-paper that can be spooled out of a slit in the tube as a flat sheet, for reading, and stored again at the touch of a button.

WHAT DO YOU SEE AS THE Information will be downloaded—there OBSTACLES FACING MASS ADOPTION OF E-PAPER will be simple user interface—from an overhead satellite, a cell phone TECHNOLOGY? network, or an internal memory chip.

No technology is sufficiently paper-like, yet. By this, I mean a display medium that This document reader will be used for is thin, flexible, capable of storing readable e-mail, the Internet, books downloaded from a global digital library that is curimages without power consumption, rently under construction, technical highly readable in ambient light, and manuals, newspapers, magazines, and has good resolution, high whiteness, so forth, anywhere on the planet. and good contrast . A big part of this equation is the addressing electronics.

“It will cost less than $100, and nearly everyone will have one!”

HOW E-PAPER WORKS A completely different solution for creating e-paper, known as cholesteric liquid crystal (ChLCD), is being developed by such companies as IBM and Philips, as well as HP and Fujitsu, which have demonstrated actual devices. ChLCD technology is based on the well-known and widespread technology of liquid crystal displays (LCDs), which work by applying a current to spiral-shaped liquid-crystal molecules that can change from a vertical to a horizontal position.

Although other potential technologies for developing advanced color electronic paper exist such as photonic crystals (P-ink), many analysts believe that ChLCD

technology could become the dominant e-paper technology of the next decade.

This assessment relates to the high level of maturity exemplified by the current LCD industry, as well as to the fact that ChLCD technology currently offers what many analysts see as the ideal list of features for e-paper: flexibility and even bendability; thinness, at approximately 0.8 millimeters; lightness; a bi-stable nature, requiring no power to maintain an image and very little power to change it; good brightness, contrast, and resolution; as well as vivid color and a decent refresh rate capable of displaying animation and possibly even video.

A COLORFUL ILLUSTRATION OF THE WAY CHLCD TECHNOLOGY WORKS (CREDIT: FUJITSU)

y=mx+coming soon | 37

3828 | y=mx+ coming soon

APPLICATIONS OF E-PAPER Clearly, great progress has been made in the field of e-paper since the invention of Gyricon. Companies such as E Ink, SiPix, and Polymervision, as well as such giants as Sony, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Philips, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Siemens, Epson, and many others, are continuing to develop e-paper technology.

Founded in 1997 and based on research begun at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, E Ink developed proprietary e-paper technology that already has been commercialized by a number of companies, including iRex Technologies and Sony, both of which already have commercial e-paper readers on the market. At this stage, some of the products based on E Ink’s technology are little more than expensive gimmicks, such as Seiko’s limited-edition e-paper watch (priced at over $2,000). Other products to be marketed have more substantial applications. E-paper thin color displays for packaging, currently under advanced development at Siemens, could display prices on products dynamically, instantly altering a product’s price when necessary (using such low-power wireless technology as radio-frequency identification, or RFID, for example). A dynamic expiration date, which would graphically display the amount of time remaining for food and drug consumption, is another potential application.

Moor: developed wafer-thin color displays that can be printed onto paper or foil. They can be manufactured very inexpensively, compared to LCDs. Wafer-thin displays offer great market potential in the area of future advertising and information provision by means of interactive packaging. Displays could provide selective information about a product or operating instructions for a device directly on its packaging. A drug box could, for example, display administration instructions that appear in several languages at the press of a button. Color displays could in the future display information practically everywhere—on cardboard foodstuff containers, drug boxes, or even admission tickets.

Potential applications of e-paper technology is staggering. In addition to a new method for labeling foods and

drugs, it could be used to label anything from shelves to office binders. One of the original uses of the Gyricon e-ink was in advertising and billboards; the bi-stable nature of the technology made the Gyricon a useful and cost-effective billboard technology. E-paper displays can also be used as low-power digital screens for a variety of electronic appliances, from microwaves to MP3 players.

Although many potential applications for e-paper technology exist, one of the more exciting products is the e-paper reader, which may soon replace the ageold newspaper and possibly even certain types of books; some technical literature may be perfectly suited for e-paper. The next generation of e-paper readers will add color, include improved hardware that can refresh pages more quickly, and have more advanced wireless capabilities.

Existing readers from Sony, iRex, and a number of other companies are still quite expensive and suffer from some of the problems that plague early technology models. The next generation of readers will also be flexible, making such applications as digital maps an attractive option, especially when connected to GPS hardware and software. Although e-paper readers like iRex’s iLiad, are already equipped with wireless Internet communication, they are not well suited as generalpurpose Web-surfing devices. Electronic readers of the future will one day become the ultimate handheld devices.

Having mentioned in this article a number of potential applications for e-paper, it is possible that the most important applications of this technology have not yet been invented. In the same way that Theodore H. Maiman did not foresee the DVD player when he invented the first laser in 1960, so might we still be in the dark as to the true potential of e-paper technologies. b

TOP TO BOTTOM: SEIKO E-WATCH (CREDIT: SEIKO) SONY PRS-505 E-READER (CREDIT: SONY) E-CLOCK (CREDIT: FUJISU)

y=mx+ coming soon | 39

USB 5.0 NOW IN 400GB

UIF!OPSUIFSO!DBOBEJBO! TBOE!EVOFT

y=mx+ predictions

WHAT IS THE FUTURE? We’ve been thinking a lot about the future lately.

Here are what a few of the creators of y=mx+b think is up next for us. We’ve paired these futuristic thoughts with some retro photos and patterns developed especially for this magazine. Enjoy.

| 9

The future is written...

y=mx+ predictions

and unwritten.

Bernice Herrera Sy

| 11

The future is our chance to make up for the past.

Katie Rutherford

y=mx+ predictions

y=mx+b speaks to change as inevitable, impact as undeniable, and possibility as immeasurable. you do the math.

Christopher Miller

| 13

The future is a question.

Ryan Quigley

y=mx+ predictions

The future is stressing me out.

Alison Munn

| 15

The future is an infinite expanse that we punctuate and plan by arbitrary measures of time.

The future is this afternoon, next Monday, or 3015.

Yelena Avanesova

40

000 // y=mx + b

41

LEARNING FR M NOETICS Dr. Willis Harman, the President of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Sausalito, California converses with television show host and parapsychologist Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove about defining noetics and the benefits subjectivity has to offer traditional science.

Dr. Harman is author of numerous books, including Global Mind Change, An Incomplete Guide to the Future, and Higher Creativity. Dr. Mishlove is the only Parapsychologist to hold a degree in Parapsychology.

JEFFREY MISHLOVE: You know, I would imagine and I think in general scientists don’t think the

that many working scientists today might feel a little surprised to think that there are metaphysical foundations to science. I suspect that many scientists sort of assume that science and metaphysics are unrelated to each other.

WILLIS HARMAN, Ph.D.: I think that’s right. I took a lot of science courses, and nobody ever suggested that it was based on some metaphysical assumptions,

philosophy of science has much to do with their activities.

JM: But in effect metaphysics is implicit, even if it i s not explicit, in science.

WH: It certainly is. You have to start from somewhere. You have to start from some assumptions about how you’re going to test knowledge, how you’re going to decide that now we really know something

y=mx + b \\ 000

42

they agree far less on where it is we’re headed.

WILLIS HARMAN, Ph.D.

JM: And I suppose even though one might think of

PRESIDENT OF THE INSTITUTE OF NOETIC SCIENCES

the kind of positivist-behaviorist science we have been describing, where everything is sort of mechanistic and cut and dried and objective, as being something that we’ve left behind, it still remains sort of the orthodoxy of the scientific priesthood, or the upholders of the status quo.

WH: Well, I think you sort of have to identify two different revolutions that are taking place, I think simultaneously. One is a revolution within science— quantum physics, for example; chaos theory. A lot of things are being reassessed in the light of those frontier areas of science. The other revolution is a revolution of science, where for the first time in the history of science a few scientists and philosophers are saying the time has come when we have to go back and look at those very basic assumptions, and the fundamental driving thing here is the realization that we have to incorporate consciousness in somehow.

JM: Consciousness has always been a problem for science, and one, I think, for the most part that has been sort of shoved under the rug.

WH: That’s true, and I think it was really quite a landmark conference that was held at the University of Arizona in 1994, where for the first time, as far as I’m aware, you had this whole spectrum of people, from the ones that are pretty strongly positivist and reductionist, to the ones that are out in the area of phenomenology and transpersonal psychology and the very soft areas, and the point was for all of these people somehow to learn to talk with one another.

JM: I suppose while this conference was an important one, the debate goes back nearly a hundred years.

WH: Debate goes back a long time, and it really was very closely related, of course, to the debate between science and religion. But by the time you get to the middle of this century, it became pretty clear that science has won and religion has lost and the debate’s over. And then that’s why it becomes so fascinating to see that since then the movement has been in the direction of somehow including spirit into the scientific world view. Now admittedly, it hasn’t gone very far, but you can see the direction.

JM: Well, there are some interesting words that have now come up, challenging sort of the orthodox scientific metaphysics—spirit, consciousness.These words, which most people can identify with at one level or another, have been excluded. And it is striking to me that scientists, who use their own consciousness, and very often their own deep intuitions, to develop their

“Something as quiet as a change of mind is bubbling up out of the unconscious depths, spreading around the world, changing everything.”

that’s what’s called epistemology. And then you also have underlying assumptions about the very nature of reality—ontological assumptions.

JM: Most people, and I suppose even scientists, think of this as no more than common sense.

WH: Well, they think of it as having been settled centuries ago. What was common sense in the Middle Ages was different from common sense in the modern world. But certainly for the last three centuries or so we assume that not only has science been operating from the same assumptions, more or less, but furthermore those are the only appropriate assumptions for science to be based on.

JM: Well, I think we ought to look at two things: what are these assumptions, really, and why is that they seem to stick to science?

WH: Well, the assumptions are essentially what we usually think of as scientific method. That is, the data that you really trust is the data of the physical senses and the data of various instruments that inform the physical senses; and that essentially everything can be ultimately explained reductionistically in terms of fundamental phenomena; that the universe obeys scientific laws, and if you only knew what those are you could at least statistically predict, because those laws are not violated. It is assumptions of that sort which, as you say, are just the everyday assumptions of the working scientist.

JM: For example, that there is an objective reality out there that we can measure and know scientifically that it’s not magical.

WH: Um hm. And that the best way to know it is to stand at a distance and shoot various kinds of probes in and see what you can learn, and that what the scientist is not supposed to do is in some way identify subjectively with what’s being examined. Now of course all of those have been challenged quite a bit in the last half century or so. That is, we went through the behaviorist-positivist era in science, and most scientists would say that we’ve left that behind. But

000 // y=mx = b

43

theories, have operated on assumptions that deny the very existence of those intuitions.

WH: Well, we all have a certain amount of ability to shut out certain kinds of experience while we are involved with others. But while you raise these questions, it’s in no way denigrating the kind of science that we have and the things that it can do. But we have a science that was dedicated to prediction and to control and to devising manipulative technologies, controlling the physical environment, and for that purpose it’s absolutely superb. But the mistake was made, largely by the non-scientists, I think, in elevating that kind of a world view into the position of a world view by which you try to guide your life, and in particular guide the powerful institutions of society.

JM: I would like to go back to William James, one of the founders of American psychology, who took the notion of empiricism, which is one of the foundation words of science, and developed it—I guess he thought he would carry it as far as it could be carried, and he developed what he called radical empiricism.

Could you talk about that?

WH: In fact he played it safe and the material wasn’t even published until after his death, or at least it wasn’t gathered together into a book. But the basic principle of radical empiricism is simply yes,empiricism is how we find out. We try things, we observe, we gather all the data that we can. But radical empiricism has two principles. One is that you don’t leave out anything; especially you don’t leave out anything on the basis that it couldn’t happen because our scientific law says it couldn’t happen. And the other part of it is that you include nothing but experience; that is, your science is based totally on experience. But it’s external and internal experience.

Consciousness still continues to be a problem for science, and for the most part that has been shoved under the rug.

GUT FEELING Yoga Instructor & Filmmaker, Tanya Kaps is Betting on a Bright Future Everybody has a theory, and they are as vast and varied as the futurists who create them. One aspect that tends to be agreed upon is that we are at a tipping point. Simply speaking it means that due to the unsustainability of our way of being and all inherent systems, more pressure/friction is placed on the system until at some point the smallest additional pressure may cause that to tip.

A tipping point implies that, once reached there will be a bifurcation. Our current systems as we know them cease to exist and a fundamentally new system, unrecognizable from its predecessor emerges. The big question of our time is—which direction will the bifurcation head to— a more destructive (devolution) or a higher order emergent (evolution) system?

I am in the optimist camp. Not that I do not acknowledge the possibility of a breakdown, but I believe that in advocating, and continually and mindfully working to embody higher order, creative, sustainable, compassion and wisdom driven ways of being . It is my hope that we will be living in a world that inherently knows wholeness and interconnectivity that manifests sustainable behavior based on that knowingness, one that values community, and self actualization of individuals as well as the organizations they create. As we move to balance our mind dominated way of viewing and operating in the world and begin to integrate the heart we will all live and experience life with greater richness and authenticity. I believe there is an untapped potentiality that once released will create a world that operates on a paradigm that is currently beyond the realm of our understanding.

y=mx = b \\ 000

44

JM: In other words, if conventional science maintains that all of our knowledge comes through our senses the radical empiricist says, “Yes, but what does it mean to obtain knowledge through the senses? Isn’t there a consciousness in there?”

WH: Yes, I think that the radical empiricist would probably agree with that.

JM: And in many ways the current debate is one in which scientists from many disciplines, from anesthesiology to quantum physics to psychology and computer science, are trying to understand exactly what is the role of pure experience, of consciousness, of intuition, in science.

WH: I think that’s exactly right. There really are two fundamental approaches to this, it seems to me. One is to say science must be right because it has been so effective so far, so therefore there must be ways that we can patch up things through quantum physics, chaos theory, holographic theory, or whatever; we must be able to get consciousness in. The other approach is to say, “Whoa! If we go back now and look at the fundamental assumptions,”and quantum physics helped here. Quantum physics showed that you couldn’t leave out the consciousness of the observer. Well then you would think then that the rational thing to do at that point is say, “Well, let’s go back and reexamine how we started, and how consciousness got left out.” That’s of course not what happened, by and large, but what happened was to increase the faith that somehow if we push quantum physics a little farther, we’ll find the rest of consciousness. But consciousness was left out in the basic founding assumptions of science.

JM: And if we were to go back two or three hundred years ago to Newtonian science, or the writings of Francis Bacon, we’d see a world view in which there’s the observer and the observed, and the two are separate; the observer does not influence or partake of that which is observed, typically.

WH: Well, I think if you go back that far, what you’d

TANYA K APS FILMMAKER

It is my hope that soon we will be living in a world that inherently knows wholeness and interconnectivity.”

000 // y=mx + b

find is that this was an expedient thing to do. It was a way to get started. It was a way to start an empirical science, and from a political standpoint it was a way to start an empirical science without running afoul of the powerful church, because the church had staked out the mind and consciousness and spirit as the church’s territory. So it made all the sense in the world for science to start that way. It’s just that by the time we get to the end of the twentieth century it’s time to broaden the window.

JM: Today we have a notion coming from many different fields—from biology, from ecology, even in quantum physics—the notion of holism—that the universe is whole at its deepest level.

WH: That’s right. Now, that brings up a very, very interesting point that science is all about cause.

That’s why you have science; you’re trying to find the explanation, the causes, for the phenomena. Now, if really everything is connected to everything, if there really is only a oneness, everything then affects everything, and everything is the cause of everything in a certain sense, so that the whole idea of causality has to be revised.

JM: And if I as a scientist am to accept that my own consciousness, the way I think, my values, I might begin to think differently about what I’m doing to begin with.

WH: I think for the typical scientist this is a whole succession of shocks. That is, the first shock is to realize that there’s a bias introduced just in the way you create the experiment, even deciding to do it; and then there’s a bias that comes in the perception, because we now recognize how powerfully the contents and the processes of the unconscious mind affect the way we perceive, not just with our eyes but in every sense. And even though we all know that, it has never been applied to the studying again of how we go about science. We act as though scientists didn’t have an unconscious mind; everybody else does. But then, when you pursue the holism even further, then you find there are even more subtle ways than perception and ESP in which things are connected, and you just can’t create an experiment which is isolated, even though of course you can come reasonably close, and that makes the kind of science that we have now so extremely useful.

JM: In other words, conventional science still offers us what appears to be a pretty good approximation of what we know reality to be.

WH: It’s not about to be displaced for scientific work.

But it probably is going to be displaced in terms of a

45

Human beings will become more and more refined, and then that will change the way we do things.

y=mx + b \\ 000

46

cosmology and a world view that will guide us.

JM: One of the major areas of your own work is to look, I think, at the perennial philosophy, the mystical traditions, the work that’s going on in transpersonal psychology and in psychic research, and to say, let’s see what these traditions, where very serious people have been exploring consciousness in many different ways, what do they have to contribute to the scientific endeavor?

WH: Well, if you’re going to study consciousness, it only makes sense to turn to the ones who devoted their lives to that. And so you do pay attention to the mystics and the spiritual philosophers and especially to the core esoteric traditions of the various spiritual traditions of the earth.

JM: And of course they are asking questions themselves that are very relevant to science, one being the question of epistemology: how do we know what we know?

WH: That’s right. That is, the best of the mystics in all of the traditions tested their knowledge just as rigorously as scientists test their knowledge. Now, it sounds different because it was in a totally different framework, but they knew just as well as we know that you can fool yourself with optical illusions, and you can fool yourself with inner vision. And you have to keep testing, and therefore you are never sure.

The day may come when the intuitive sciences will take their place side by side with the neurosciences and the cognitive sciences.

000 // y=mx + b

JM: You seem to be suggesting that we may be able to develop a new epistemology by looking at some of the spiritual disciplines, intuitive disciplines.

WH: I think that’s right, and we tested it out. We gathered together a couple of groups of scientists of all sorts and some philosophers, people who were willing to take seriously this question: if we’re going to take the challenge of consciousness seriously, then what kind of an epistemology do we need in order to deal with it within the spirit of scientific inquiry? And we put them in a retreat setting. We got away from all the telephones and the meetings and the paperwork, and furthermore we asked them to forget that they were experts and academicians, and to just explore together as human beings these very, very fundamental questions, then bringing in later their scientific or philosophical expertise. And we did come up with a set of nine characteristics of an epistemology which doesn’t say, “Here’s the end result. Here’s the epistemology.” It does say that as we finally agree upon an epistemology in the scientific community—a certain set of rules of evidence, as it were —as we finally agree on that, it will probably have these nine characteristics.

JM: Well, I certainly won’t ask you to enumerate each of the nine characteristics now.

WH: The first one is the radical empiricism that you hadpreviously mentioned.

JM: I would imagine that the thrust of all of this is to say that there is a legitimacy to exploring the universe by using our own consciousness, our own direct awareness of the universe, as our tool.

WH: That is a part of it. That seems to be one of the characteristics—that it’s going to pay primary attention to subjective experience, subjectively experienced data, and it’s going to test that, and it’s going to have some consensus about how you test that. But that’s definitely a part of the picture.

And that leads to something else—well, it leads to

47

a number of things. It leads to realizing that any models or equations or metaphors that we use—and that’s what science is, is a collection of those things— but whatever that collection is, it has to always be tentative, and it has to always be specific to a certain purpose. You use one metaphor for consciousness for one purpose, and you use another metaphor for another purpose. But let me go on just a minute, if I may, because one of the other characteristics becomes a real sticking point, and that is that once you recognize the power of the unconscious to affect our perceptions, then you recognize that as the scientist continues to explore further and further, lo and behold, the scientist is going to change, because he or she also is exploring their own inner working, and so one of the characteristics of the epistemology is that it won’t stand still. As the scientific culture changes, the consensus about the epistemology is going to change.

JM: In other words, just as all computers and telescopes, the tools of science, as they become more and more refined for further use, as we consider consciousness itself a scientific tool.

WH: That’s right. Human beings will become more and more refined, and then that will change the way we do things. But what that means, of course, is in the education of a science, that the personal transformation is definitely a part of the education, not something that you can do in your off hours somewhere.

JM: Epistemology is a tough one. It means: how do we know what we think we know? And ontology, another branch of philosophy, asks the question: What is it that is ultimately real?

WH: Yes; what are your assumptions about ultimate reality? And of course the assumptions of the Middle Ages were one thing, and the assumptions of the present-day scientist are quite different, and the assumptions of science by and large—and there are always exceptions to these fine generalizations— but the assumption by and large is that the universe follows certain regularities which can be studied, and that ultimately a nomothetic science—there’s another one; nomothetic, that is, a science about laws—will ultimately completely describe the universe and all the creatures in it. Whereas the emerging point of view, I think, is that that has to be tempered—that scientific laws hold under certain conditions, one of the conditions being that consciousness is not intervening somehow in the experiment.

JM: Well, the traditional scientific ontology is I guess what one might call materialism—monistic

materialism. Everything is made out of particles of matter, or particles of matter and energy. Now I think we’re looking at a larger view, in which we say yes of course, matter exists, particles exist, but there are other levels. There are in fact several levels of consciousness, and levels of culture, and levels of biological systems, that cannot be reduced to the interactions of billiard-ball-like particles.

WH: Yes, I don’t want us to caricature the scientists.

They aren’t necessarily one hundred percent pure materialists. Scientific law is something real, but it’s not material. So there is a certain amount of idealist philosophy that comes into science too. But there has not been clear thinking about it on the part of the scientists, and there hasn’t been clear thinking about it on the part of the philosophers either, it seems to me, because they’ve gone off and gotten involved with other subjects, and they haven’t had much wise to say about this recently. So there is an opening up to the possibility, let’s say, of multiple vantage points.

You can look at the world in its physical forms and you can learn certain things. You can look at the world taking as part of reality biological organisms, and they have certain characteristics that you can’t reduce to simple physical things. And then you can look at the world from the standpoint of, say, humanistic studies, and then consciousness comes in in a way that it didn’t before. Then you can look at the world in a mystical-spiritual way, and then some new elements come in. And no one of those denies the rest. They all have a certain validity.

JM: I know you are particularly interested in the field that’s been called transpersonal psychology, which is the attempt to take the mystical-spiritual approach to life and translate it, not into a religious metaphor, but into a psychological understanding.

WH: That’s only one of many labels I have, but we talk in terms of that one. Yes, it seems to me that that’s an end of the spectrum that’s been neglected,

EDGAR MITCHELL, PH.D. FOUNDER OF THE INSTITUTE OF NOETIC SCIENCES

“We are advancing the science of consciousness and human experience to serve individual and collective transformation.”

y=mx + b \\ 000

49

and that we’d better pay attention to it. As you may know, there’s just been a flurry of conferences on science and consciousness recently, and I presume that they will go on, a number of them each year, and they reflect the fact that we have come to the point in history where we have to raise this question very seriously.

JM: Well, it’s an important time to do it. I think the irony is that if we go back in history just a few decades, consciousness was a taboo word in science. People would be afraid of losing their research grants or not getting tenure if they spoke too vociferously about the mind.

WH: Well, the conscious awareness of the scientist was of course recognized as something that was there. But it was assumed that some day we will have an explanation for that in terms of the processes within the central nervous system or somewhere.

And in fact you can still hear scientific papers on occasion that are on the subject of where do we locate consciousness in the human body. I think it will turn out to be a nonsense question.

JM: Well, I suppose it’s fair to say that the mainstream of the scientific community still sort of holds the faith that the neurological sciences will ultimately provide us the foundation of consciousness.

WH: Well, again, there is an evolution taking place.

Some years ago the Sloan Foundation put up a

good big sum of money to develop what came to be known as the neurosciences, which didn’t exist; it was a lot of separate disciplines that were brought together. And then later on they did the same thing with regard to what came to be called the cognitive sciences. And I think now it’s time for some foundation to come forth and say, “We’ll put up some money to develop consciousness research as a valid, legitimate field of inquiry,” which it has not been, as you observed.

JM: So the day may come when the intuitive sciences will take their place side by side with the neurosciences and the cognitive sciences.

WH: Without feeling ashamed.

JM: Well, Willis, it’s been a pleasure pursuing this exploration with you. It strikes me that what you’re doing is waving a banner for people to say, look what’s going on. The age is changing. The old assumptions are dying, and we have to allow all of the serious thinkers, and maybe even some of the not so serious thinkers in our society, in on the discussion, because reality itself is evolving in a way, or certainly our understanding of the fundamentals of reality are evolving.

WH: I think that’s right, and so far of course we’ve only talked about embodied consciousness.

JM: Well, we’ll have another conversation and look at disembodied consciousness as well.

JEFFREY MISHLOVE, P.H.D. PARAPSYCHOLOGIST

“Our idealized image of objectivity (especially in science) receives its most severe challenge from neither mystics nor psychics—but from the growing critical literature within the philosophy and sociology of science itself.”

y=mx + b \\ 000

Givenchy

TRYING ON A BETTER FUTURE Olga Kharif and Sabine imagine a handbag: One that’s built out of four-inch squares and triangles of fabric, with tiny computer chips embedded in it.

Assembled together with Velcro that conducts electricity. These pieces form a bag that looks, feels, and weighs like your typical leather purse. That’s where the similarities end:

THIS BAG CAN WIRELESSLY KEEP TABS ON YOUR

belongings and remind you, just as you’re about to leave the house, to take your wallet. It can review the weather report and suggest that you grab an umbrella—or your sunshades. This purse can even upload your favorite songs onto your scarf.

A computing purse and scarf set may seem like the stuff of science fiction but these devices are part of the next generation of wearable computers and will be commonplace within a matter of years.

Powering this market are advancements in design and in fabric-embed

52

7

TECH TERMS OF THE FUTURE OF FASHION

Photographs via Syle.com

1

NANOTECHNOLOGY AND MICROFIBER

Operates on a molecular level.

Nanotubes can provide thermal and electrical conductivity while allowing the textile to maintain the touch and feel of a textile. Manipulated the molecule creates microfibers. Microcapsules in microfibers can contain a variety of agents: medication, vitamins, antibacterial products or moisturizers.

000 // y=mx + b

real time whether new treatment.

BodyMedia, a Pittsburgh company Because of the volume of data it colthat makes a special “smart band.” It’s worn on the upper arm and collects data lects, the shirt can significantly reduce the number of participants in trials, as on the wearer’s physical state, such as the way the body releases heat. The band well as the trials’ duration. In the case was created for auto makers to help them of one study for a sleep drug, traditional methods like hooking up patients to determine stress levels in drivers. Apex various machines at a special sleep lab Fitness Group distributes this fitness product, calling it the Bodybugg to “would have been at least 10 times more expensive and would have taken 10 about 1,200 health clubs promoting the times longer,” says Steven James, a San band for consumers as a 24 hour fitDiego consultant to pharmaceutical ness & weight-loss monitoring device. companies. During this trial, 15 patients People who tested the product “say it’s simply wore the shirts at home overlike cheating,” says Neal Spruce, Apex night. VivoMetrics sells a set of six shirts president and CEO. “It’s too easy to diet. and related software and data recordIt’s the best tool we’ve ever found.” By ers for $15,000. telling them exactly how many calories VivoMetrics has also released a Vivothey expend, the device helped users.

Responder chest strap for emergencyOther wearable computers help adservices workers, such as firefighters. It dress more severe health problems. A wirelessly alert commanders that a firespecial shirt developed three years ago fighter’s core body temperature or stress

by VivoMetrics in Ventura, California, is already used in most of the country’s top levels are reaching critical levels. VivoMetrics also expects to introduce an unmedical schools and drug companies der-$500 shirt for the consumer market, The garment, which collects and analyzes its wearer’s respiration flow, heart rate, says President and CEO Paul Kennedy. and other key metrics, can allow to see in Such a product would let a mother mon

Viktor & Rolf

Hussein Chalayan

Photographs via Syle.com

...High Fashion however is less functional. It is a true battle of functional fashion versus expressive fashion, however, wearable computers have made it possible for both of these worlds to collide.

y=mx +b // 000

Basso and Brooke

Photographs via Syle.com

Gareth Pugh

55

“A computing purse and scarf set may seem like the stuff of science fiction but these devices are part of the next generation of wearable computers and will be commonplace within a matter of years.”

2

GARMENT CONSTRUCTION

Design consideration:body ergonomics and wearability, placement, human movement, sizing, attachments, weight, heat, body shape, comfort, cut of garment, compartments, location and accessibility.

This bag can wirelessly keep tabs on your belongings and remind you, just as you’re about to leave the house,to take your wallet. It can review the weather report and suggest that you grab an umbrella—or your sunshades. This purse can even upload your favorite songs on-to your scarf.

A computing purse and scarf set may seem like the stuff of science fiction but these devices are part of the next generation of wearable computers and will be commonplace within a matter of years.

Powering this market are advancements in design and in fabric-embedded electronics. Over the last two years, DuPont created new fibers called Aracon, made of Kevlar, that are superstrong, can conduct electricity, and can be woven into ordinary-looking clothes. And chipmaker Infineon developed chip packaging allowing wearable computers to be washed, even in the heavy-duty cycle.

As a result, these new wearables are a far cry from the clunky and downright silly versions of the recent past, which often

required users to be wrapped in wires, type on their stomachs, and sport an unseemly display on their foreheads. “Cyborg computing was very clunky, very bulky machines that people didn’t want to carry around,” says Nanda, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. “Our bags feel and look like bags.” Unlike their predecessors, these new wearable computers also make economic sense.

Here’s how the bag works: You place a special radio-signal-transmitting chip into your wallet. A similar radio in your purse picks up the signal and notifies you that you’ve forgotten to take your wallet. In turn, sensors on your purse’s handles will notify the computer that you’ve picked up the purse and are ready to go.

While cyborgian wearable PCs will remain a niche, says IDC analyst Kevin Burden. Already, these new kinds of wearables are being adapted for use in markets like auto repair, emergency services, medical monitoring, exercise and even current trend in High Fashion.

3

ENERGY

Usable interaction with system, inputs and outputs, of the wearer’s control.

y=mx + b // 000

56

4

TECHNOLOGY

Ubiquitous computing, sensor technology, embedded system design, physical computing.

“Fashion Wearables” as they are called are designed garments, accessories, or jewelry.

5

ELECTRONIC TEXTILE

A textile substrate that incorporates capabilities for sensing, communication, power transmission and interconnection technology to connect sensors and microprocessors to allow such sensors and information to be networked together within a fabric.

000 // y=mx + b

Wearables do not only come in forms of medical devices, they are a high rise in the Fashion Market. Designers are no longer a form of fine artist but instead are teaming up with engineers and scientists. “Fashion Wearables” as they are called are designed garments, accessories,or jewelry that combine aesthetics and style with functional technology. Fashion wearers are mediators of information and amplifiers of fantasy, it is now more Clothes have new functions. Where they used to be products worn for material and physical function in order to protect, conceal and attract others to oneself.

Because of the volume of data it collects, the shirt can significantly reduce the number of participants in trials, as well as the trials’ duration. In the case of one study for a sleep drug, traditional methods like hooking up patients to various machines at a special sleep lab “would have been at least 10 times more expensive and would have taken 10 times longer,” says Steven James, a

San Diego consultant to pharmaceutical companies. During this trial, 15 patients simply wore the shirts at home overnight. VivoMetrics sells a set of six shirts and related software and data recorders for $15,000.

VivoMetrics has also released a VivoResponder chest strap for emergencyservices workers, such as firefighters. It wirelessly alert commanders that a firefighter’s core body temperature or stress levels are reaching critical levels. VivoMetrics also expects to introduce an under-$500 shirt for the consumer market, says President and CEO Paul Kennedy.

Such a product would let a mother monitor an asthmatic child.

Wearables do not only come in forms of medical devices, they are a high rise in the Fashion Market. Designers are no longer a form of fine artist but instead are teaming up with engineers and scientists. “Fashion Wearables” as they are called are designed garments, accessories, or jewelry that combine aesthetics and style with functional technology.

Fashion wearers are mediators of in-

Hussein Chalayan

58

6

FUNCTIONALITY

Usable interaction with system, inputs and outputs, of the wearer’s control.

7

MATERIALS

Interactive, reactive materials, electronic textiles, washing, cleaning shielding and durability.

000 // y=mx + b

formation and amplifiers of fantasy, it is now more than mere fashion.

Clothes have new functions. Where they used to be products worn for material and physical function in order to protect, conceal and attract others to oneself, they’ve now have adapted to new functions. The functions of fashion as we know it are called Cultural Functions. Cultural Functions are social and psychological functions such as communication, individualism, expression, social and/or economic status, political or religious afflictions.

High Fashion however is less functional. It is a true battle of functional fashion versus expressive fashion, however, wearable computers have made it possible for both of these worlds to collide.

There are currently various types of wearable technologies all with the common idea of exploring fashion through one of the 5 senses: Sound, Touch, Visual, Smell & Taste. A few example of these elements are: LED, thermochromic inks and E-ink, examples of visual technology. Speaker and buzzers are sound.Touch can be

made with motors, shape memory,alloy and conductive yarns & fabrics. Lastly smell and taste can be captured and entertained by scent capsules.

Fashion wearables can be considered “ ubiquitous computing”, they now can integrate things like Bluetooth, GPS, Cell triangulation, WIFI ,Universal Mobile Telecommunications System(UM TS), infrared and General Packet Radio Service .These systems have features that can do anything from locating you or others to heat sensors.

It is now the fast paced movement that we’ve been waiting for when technology and fashion can fully integrate gradually into our societal lifestyles. As quoted in Fashionable Technology by Sabine Seymour, Parsons professor, author and wearables designer,” Basic our interaction with conductive metal based on buttons, zippers and hooks has become intuitive and these items can be easily modified to act as switches that close or open an electronic circuit. " Hence wearables are taking the ordinary and making them extraordinary with the help of fashionable technology.

Hussein Chalayan

The implosive tendencies of digital technology is increasingly affecting the way we live, make sense of the world, and even our identities.

Derrick de Kerckhove examines the conditions that most characterizes our time.

62

THE FIRST HYBRID IS THE HUMAN. A mix of mind and matter, a translating device, a handshake from mind to matter and viceversa, humankind is in a permanent state of hybridization, consciously and unconsciously. Andy Clark, in a recent book, Natural Born Cyborgs, describes his feeling of hybridity thus: “Electronically speaking, my body is virgin. I don’t embody silicon chips, bionic eyes, cochlear implants or a pacemaker. I don’t even wear glasses but I am gradually turning into a cyborg. And so are you all. Very soon […], we will become cyborgs not superficially as a result of a combination of flesh and wires, but in the more profound sense of human-technological symbiosis: thinking and reasoning systems whose minds and selves are distributed across biological brains and non-biological circuitry.”

DRIVERS Why then focus on a such a pervasive condition?

Because new drivers of hybridization have emerged over the last few decades, bringing renewed attention to our hybrid condition which is becoming more and more evident—and more uncomfortable for some.

What brings about hybridization? Hybrid creations and creatures emerge from fragmentation and recombination. The smaller, the more flexible the unit, the greater are the possibilities of recombination. Hence the principal drivers of hybridity are the gene, the atom and the bit. Language itself is a product and a generator of hybridization. Like migration and cross-breeding, languages drive hybridization because they bring together common features from otherwise unrelated entities. Digitization increases and multiplies the existing property of the alphabet to act as a translator of human experience and a generator of technologies. As more and more objects are made available in digital form, invention arises more and more from sampling and mixing, leading to a generalized digital/material bricolage.

The key driver is digitization. We are smashed to bits by digitization. By reducing everything to sequences of zeroes and ones, 0/1 is now the small

est common denominator of everything. 0/1 is the privileged gate and filter through which our senses as well as our sense or meaning are passing, only to be restituted in their secondary modality, as Walter Ong so astutely observed in his Orality and Literacy landmark book. The digital process invites an infinity of recombination, all hybrids, with software cultivated with care, like a flower.

The digital is also the cognitive edge of electricity. It is that edge that commands the rest, driving machines in a purposeful way. While in its analogue mode, electricity gave us light, heat and energy; by going digital it is truly emulating our central nervous system to extend our senses and our selves and, through a new level of translation, to join our biological being, itself an electro-chemical entity.

At a more mundane level, digitization is also a precondition to the practice of sampling and remixing.

If music be the food of hybridity, mix on … Sampling translates and transports the modes and rhythms of one culture into another, lifting bits of both and mixing. Sampling is not just one of the techniques of the digital, it has become a way of life. And we have DJs of culture, David Letterman, Michel Drucker or Maurizio Costanzo, albeit operating at longer-term rhythms. Everybody is sampling; Costanzo samples

64

vignettes of contemporary folklore on TV, my students Google pearls of wisdom and factual data, and Buddhabar mixes oriental and occidental to the satisfaction of both sides. What can people do but sample in an environment where everything is always available?

CULTURES If you want to see cultural hybridization in action, watch a Bollywood movie. Globalization, one of the drivers of today’s hybridity, is not new, but electronic media are making its pressure felt more than ever upon our psyche.

Globalization brings a new scale to our mental representation of the world. Under the gaze of satellites, the world implodes and hybrid societies redesign the political face of the planet. With globalization comes implosion, all cultures and time zones piling up upon each other. Being at once global, continental and local, we are all global, but some of us are more global than others. When imploding, things either integrate or break.

Take Europe, for example. To make Europe, or even to simply let it happen, requires thinking Europe. A geographical mental space that makes room for many different cultures, let alone languages, must either appear spontaneously or be produced.

How does one stretch one’s imagination from the local to the global and back? We have been helped to do that every evening watching the weather reports on TV. Europe is branded in our psyche as a unified climactic environment. We even get the occasional live transmission from satellites to confirm the authenticity of the representations. Hence we may owe to satellite transmissions of our own common image a new scale of spatial representation that is based on the continent and not on national

borders (these have all but disappeared in Europe).

The question is: Is Europe a mosaic or a melting pot?

And the answer is, a mosaic, of course, juxtaposing cultures with strong identities supported by locally secure and confident languages. This confidence is evidenced in the discussions surrounding the inclusion of Turkey in the European community. These reflect both a resistance to hybridizing Europe further, but also the amazing potential of sharing a common literacy to establish at least the possibility of coming to terms with the inclusion. When Mustapha Kemal Atatuerk decreed in 1928 that Turks would use the Roman alphabet instead of the Arabic one, the legacy of the Ottoman empire, it was to reduce the power of the imams, but it was also to include Turkey in the European spectrum. Turkey is indeed a mostly Moslem culture, with apparently very different values than those subconsciously associated with what being European implies, but it is a Moslem culture run by the phonetic alphabet, one of the very tools of hybridization. So it might just work.

Continentalism is a trend that can be observed in economic—and political—alliances between countries sharing the same continental space, NAFTA, MERCOSUR, ASEAN, EUROPE. Continentalism, an emerging trend that will eventually metamorphose into globalism, clusters administratively, economically and politically neighboring countries in ever larger realms until they reach a large body of water or a high range of mountains, or, a major cultural difference. From micro-economies to macro-mergers, the very structure of traditional sectors is yielding to new pressures, new alliances. Most changes are lateral as we witness the repeated drama of vertical disintegration. In the media-driven politics of the globalized economy, and keeping in mind the dubious strategies of recycling old concepts to fit new situations, what is the meaning of “democracy”?

Globalization brings a new scale to our mental representation of the world.

Under the gaze of satellites, the world implodes and hybrid societies redesign the political face of the planet.

65

IDENTITY Do we have hybrid sensibilities? Both the robot and the cyborg are hybrids. Humans lend their mind to the first and their body to the other in the still uneasy coupling of metal and flesh. All technologies, however, begin visibly as an externalized extension, only to be unconsciously absorbed and internalized in the psyche of the user. The very technologies that support us have a tendency to sink into invisibility.

The blog could be the soul of the cyborg, of somebody made up of a node and a network. As we blog our daily encounters, we publish ourselves simultaneously with our networks of like-minded people.

Differing from our shadow, our “digital persona” does not merely follow us, it precedes us, as when people “google” each other before they meet.

The concept of the “Digital Persona” was developed and described thus by Roger Clarke: “The digital persona is a model of the individual established through the collection, storage and analysis of data about that person. It is intended for use as a proxy for the individual.” The digital persona is a kind of electric shadow of the self. But it’s archived. As we pour ourselves out into networks in streams of data springing from our credit cards, our cellular phones and out of the myriad barcodes scanned for us and the myriads cameras recording us, we develop an electronic profile that upon reflection, we might not want to recognize, but that unquestionably, instantly and everywhere recognizes us. Some urgent questions, among others: Is this persona safe? Are we safe with/from it?

Is it threatening to replace or dominate the organic, psychological persona each one caries with his or her body? Can we, should we keep it private?

(Is transparency destiny?)

And, of course, as Clarke carefully describes, we have several digital personae, some of them active, most of them passive, which simply continue to accumulate, combine and hybridize references to ourselves from different sources, a lot of them wrong, and over which we have little or no control.

To that singular perception of the digital persona, we could also add the distinction between private or shared. A blog, for example, projects the markings of a personal identity selecting and controlling the information it provides. It is thus an active digital persona. However, a blog is not a stand-alone linguistic expression of a personality committing itself to paper for private use or at least very restricted readership. A blog is a publication of self, along with the ever-changing and flexible network of interactors. In turn, these interactors are provoked

Blogs represent a perfect hybrid of self and other.

You somewhat are what you post and your value is estimated and represented by your network. and inspired by ever-changing, flexible, but reliable sets of indices, the catalogue of ideas, hypotheses, comments made by the blogger and commented by his or her readers. To be accurate, one could say his “wriders” because nobody actually “reads” a blog. To engage in a blog is to invite oneself to a condition of potential intervention on whatever is read. People somehow read and write at the same time when they engage in a blog, even if they do not care to do anything else than “poke”. Blogs, then, present a perfect hybrid of self and other. You somewhat “are” what you post and your value is both estimated and represented at once by your network and the networks created by, or, at least, with your list of interests. The structure of blogging software, by necessity, respects the limits and the features of both self and other and presents them as a combination, not an addition of separate elements. Thus the blog both resolves the contradiction between self and other as well as reaffirms the basic connectivity of the self (“we are our networks”). Inasmuch as the cyborg could said to be a hybrid of body and technology, the blog is a hybrid of mind and technology. It needs to be displayed on a screen, itself a hybrid of psychology and technology, which we now need and use more than paper to negotiate and communicate meaning. The blog is thus a psychotechnology introducing a new variety of human communication and social way of being. It is one of the first signs of the psychological maturation of the web. Blogs could be said to engage humans in the internalization or introjection of the condition of electrical projections of our central nervous system. In that regard, blogs present the traces of a perfect hybridization between and among active digital personae. The blog is the soul of the cyborg.

67

ECOLOGY We used to think of ecology as an essentially “natural” thing. And the first observation was that the intervention of mankind is what disturbs and destroys that natural quality, as well as, more often than not, ecology itself. Having cloned sheep and other creatures, having reshaped vegetables and other plants, having written down the human genome, we have reversed the order of precedence of nature over culture. We cannot think of ecology in the same manner ever again. Henceforth it has to include all the human factors that come into play to modify the basis of existence.

New techno-cultural ecologies (such as that of the mobile industry, for example), arise from the renewed cycles of external innovation and internal assimilation. The 1.5 billion owners of a portable phone may not yet be aware of the fact that they can now put the world in their pocket. They may not be aware either that thus equipped, they are “always on” in a vast “ecology of mind” in Batesonian terms, or an active “noosphere” in Teilhardian ones. Daily life has certainly changed often enough over the last twenty years, but never did such change come as fast as now. It is important to examine what is happening now to time and space as a result of what the industry calls mobility. It is the culture of the Present: all times are now on the web and in a wireless condition. It is almost as if the world itself had turned “always on.”

Hybridity, then, has become a visible sign of fashion in cars, power plants, clothes and music. A good

question is: Does the rising consciousness of the hybrid condition spell a permanent feature of a globalized culture, or merely a transition phase between the era of hardware and the era of software?

One of the US army special strategic leadership units calls itself VUCA, an acronym which stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. We live in a paradox, in a suspension of disbelief that will last until the dust settles and the contradictions between self and other, between nationalisms and globalism, between democracy and state control are resolved. And the contradictions between the power of media and that of the state. And the contradictions between science and the economy generating hybrids for all purposes with a clear bias towards profitability over service to humanity. And the contradictions …

Derrick de Kerckhove is Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture & Technology and Professor in the Department of French at the University of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. in French Language and Literature from the University of Toronto in 1975 and a Doctorat du 3e cycle in Sociology of Art from the University of Tours (France) in 1979. He was an associate of the Centre for Culture and Technology from 1972 to 1980 and worked with Marshall McLuhan for over ten years as translator, assistant and co-author. His research into the effects of innovative technology on human communication, of new media on traditional culture have gained worldwide recognition.

It is the culture of the Present.

It is almost as if the world itself had turned “always on.”

CONSTRUCTION OF URBAN SHELTERS. GLOBAL WATER SHORTAGE. NEW INSPIRATIONS IN FASHION.

TIME CAPSULE 3 PERSPECTIVES ON THE FUTURE

Apartments in Beijing Photo by: urbanshelter

“We will create urban shelter for the entire world population�

1

71

Urbanization,

one of humankind’s most successful and ambitious programs, is the triumph of the unnatural over the natural, the grid over the organic.

We remain committed to a global program of extrusion upward and repitition outward in an effort to provide shelter that is safe, healthy, and uplifting. Underway on a scale never before witnessed, one side effect of urbanization is the liberation of vast depopulated territories for the efficient production of “nature”.

The document addresses fears that the Large Hadron Collider is so energetic, it could have unforeseen consequences. Critics are worried that mini-black holes made at the soon-to-open facility on the French Swiss border might threaten the Earth’s very existence.

But the report, issued the European Organization for Nuclear Research, says there is “no conceivable danger”. The organization - known better by its French acronym, Cern - will operate the collider underground in a 27km-long tunnel near Geneva. This Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a powerful and complicated machine, which will smash together protons at fast speeds in a bid to unlock the secrets of the Universe.

Six “detectors” - individual experiments - will count, trace and analyse the particles that emerge from the collisions.

Most physicists believe the risk of a cataclysm lies in the realms of science fiction. But there have been fears about the possibility of a mini-black hole - produced in the collider swelling so that it gobbles up the Earth.

Critics have previously raised concerns that the production of weird hypothetical particles called strangelets in the LHC could trigger the mass conversion of nuclei in ordinary atoms into more strange matter - transforming the Earth into a hot, dead lump.

The lay language summary of the report, which has been written by Cern’s top theorists, states: “Over the past billions of years, nature has already generated on Earth as many collisions as about a million LHC experiments - and the planet still exists.” The report added: “There is no basis for any concerns about the consequences of new particles or forms of matter that could possibly be produced by the LHC.” If a black hole is produced, it might look like this in LHC data. The new document is an update of the analysis carried out in 2003 into the safety of the collider by an independent team of scientists.

The authors of the latest report, including theoretical physicist John Ellis, confirmed that black holes could be made by the collider. But they said: “If mi-

croscopic black holes were to be singly produced by colliding the quarks and gluons inside protons, they would also be able to decay into the same types of particles that produced them.”

The report added: “The expected lifetime [of a miniblack hole] would be very short.” On the strangelet issue, the report says that these particles are even less likely to be produced at the LHC than in the lowerenergy Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York, which has been operating since 2000.

A previous battle over particle accelerator safety was fought over the US machine.

The scientific consensus appears to be on the side of Cern’s theorists. But in 2003, Dr Adrian Kent, a theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge, wrote a paper in which he argued that scientists had not adequately calculated the risks of a “killer strangelet” catastrophe scenario.

He also expressed concern that a fundamental question (how improbable does a cataclysm have to be to warrant proceeding with an experiment?) had never been seriously inspected.

The first delay was precipitated by an accident in March 2007 during stress testing of one of the LHC’s “quadrupole” magnets.

A statement carried on the Cern website from the US laboratory that provided the magnet stated that the equipment had experienced a “failure” when supporting structures “broke”.

It later emerged that the magnet had exploded in the tunnel, close to one of the LHC’s most important detectors.

FACT: Our planet is not at risk from the world’s most powerful particle physics experiment, a report has concluded.

Human Body = 80% water Photo by: Flickr

“The amount of water in the world is limited”

2

73

Water,

covering about two-thirds of the Earth’s surface admittedly, is mostly too salty for use. Population is rising, but water supplies are not.

Only 2.5% of the world’s water is not salty, and twothirds of that is locked up in the icecaps and glaciers.

Of what is left, about 20% is in remote areas, and much of the rest arrives at the wrong time and place, as monsoons and floods. Humans have available less than 0.08% of all the Earth’s water. Yet over the next two decades our use is estimated to increase by about 40%.

In 1999 the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) reported that 200 scientists in 50 countries had identified water shortage as one of the two most worrying problems for the new millennium (the other was global warming). We use about 70% of the water we have in agriculture. But the World Water Council believes that by 2020 we shall need 17% more water than is available if we are to feed the world.

So if we go on as we are, millions more will go to bed hungry and thirsty each night than do so already.

Today, one person in five across the world has no access to safe drinking water, and one in two lacks safe sanitation. Today, and every day, more than 30,000 children die before reaching their fifth birthdays, killed either by hunger or by easily-preventablediseases. And adequate safe water is key to good health and a proper diet. In China, for example, it takes 1,000 tonnes of water to produce one tonne of wheat.

In China it takes 1,000 tonnes of water to produce one tonne of wheat. Another is the inefficiency of the way we use much of our water. Irrigation allows wastage on a prodigal scale, with the water trickling away or simply evaporating before it can do any good. And pollution is making more of the water that is available to us unfit for use. The Aral Sea in central Asia is one of the starkest examples of what pollution can do, to the land as well as the water.

Increasingly, governments are seeking to solve their water problems by turning away from reliance on rainfall and surface water, and using subterranean supplies of groundwater instead. But that is like mak

FACT:

1 person in 2 across the world lacks safe sanitation and 1 person in 5 across the world has no access to FACT: safe drinking water

ing constant withdrawals from a bank account without ever paying anything into it. And using up irreplaceable groundwater does not simply mean the depletion of a once-and-for-all resource. Rivers, wetlands and lakes that depend on it can dry out. Saline seawater can flow in to replace the fresh water that has been pumped out. Pumping groundwater is like making constant withdrawals from a bank account without ever paying anything into it And the emptied underground aquifers can be compressed, causing surface subsidence - a problem familiar in Bangkok, Mexico City and Venice.There are some ways to begin to tackle the problem. Irrigation systems which drip water directly onto plants are one, precision sprinklers another.

There will be scope to plant less water-intensive crops, and perhaps desalination may play a part - though it is energy-hungry and leaves quantities of brine for disposal. Climate change will probably bring more rain to some regions and less to others, and its overall impact remains uncertain. But if we are to get through the water crisis, we should heed the UNEP report’s reminder that we have only one interdependent planet to share.

It said: “The environment remains largely outside the mainstream of everyday human consciousness, and is still considered an add-on to the fabric of life.”

Hussein Chalayan Spring 09 Photo by: Style.com

“In fashion, it’s important to always think of something that isn’t already done”

3

75

Hussein Chalayan,

born in Cyprus in 1970, is an internationally regarded fashion designer who is renowned for his innovative use of materials, meticulous pattern cutting and progressive attitude to new technology. In 1993 he caused a sensation with his graduate collection at London’s Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design. what kind of music do you listen to at the moment?

I listen to all sorts of music: minimalist, folk, classical turkish, classical european, rock and punk. It’s never one thing. Anything that has a passion, that captures my emotions. what books do you have on your bedside table?

I’ve just finished a book by Jean Baudrillard and now I’m starting a book by Alain de Botton. I like cultural theory. do you read fashion design/ architecture magazines? not really, I flick through now and again.I don’t look at anything religiously. I like to be inspired by other sources, by seeing other visual things, by things that don’t necessarily relate to my world so much. where do you get news from?

I watch the news on tv, sometimes I read newspapers or radio. I move around so much, it really depends on where I am. do you notice how women are dressing?

I like a woman to dress for an occasion, she could be completely dressed like a boy during the day and at night she could become a fashion bitch. I like juxtaposition. The most stylish women for me, dress for an occasion rather than looking lady like all the time. what kind of clothes do you avoid wearing?

I don’t like clothes that are too designed for men. I like men to look quite classic. I mean, ideally my wardrobe would be saville row just in nicer colours. I guess I like men to be not so fashion-y. where do you work on your designs and projects? most often in my studio, but also at home, or on the plane. again I move around a lot for my work right now which I’m not liking but I have to.

do you discuss your work with other designers? yes, but not really in depth. There’s a few people I feel comfortable with but it’s quite rare to find that person.

I think everyone is a bit cagey about what they do. I like talking to architects because we speak a similar language. I have random people I speak to. I have a friend who is a writer, a friend in the restaurant business and another friend who’s a curator.

FACT:

he was awarded the MBE in the 2006 Queen’s Birthday

!

Honours List for his services to the fashion industry.

please describe an evolution in your work. my work has become more and more cross disciplinary. The evolution is using other disciplines to express my ideas. I’ve had the confidence that I’ve been able to, kind of express a world through other mediums. for example I’ve been making films in the last 3 to 4 years so that’s added a new dimension to my work. what project has given you the most satisfaction?

I don’t think I have a project that’s given me the most satisfaction. I’ve worked on various projects and each one is a different experience. our show in 2000 with the living room that converted was a very powerful experience. my project for venice biennale last year was a strong experience. The one before that called place to passage, which we toured with, was a film. my collections are always challenging and I get a lot out of them. all the projects have a different impact on me.

I make a real effort to push myself as far as possible with each one.

NEW YORK CIT Y “BOBBING FOR THE BIG APPLE” B OAT TO U R

CALL

212 -12 3 - 4 5 6 7

77

78

79

80 180

Y = MX + EVOLUTION OF MAN

1

GROOMING Trim neck hair biweekly with clippers or a disposable razor. Wandering unibrows must be plucked until the follicles wear out (shaving actually encourages growth).

THE EVOLUTION OF MAN

5

5 tips to transform from Neanderthal to Neo man.

2

ELEVATOR ETIQUETTE If the carriage is crowded, rather than reaching for the controls, politely inquire the lovely person near the buttons: “Could you mash five please?”

3

UMBRELLAS There are two types of umbrellas: those routinely left in taxis and finer parapluies meant to be cherished.

The gentleman totes a black umbrella.

Ordinary push-buttton styles are fine for commuting and routine errands.

4 SIMPLE CELL RULES Set your phone to vibrate or hum in public settings.

Silent in situations where tranquility is required.

FOOTWEAR Invest in quality. Shoes last countless years with periodic maintenance and repair. Mild care is sensible and cheaper than buying a new pair. Shoehorns ease slip-in and prevent premature erosion of a shoe’s backstay and lining.

Dollar shine conditions leather, redarkens outsoles, and is a simple pleasure that feels like a decadent luxury. Shoe shines are for gentlemen what weekly manicures are to ladies.

Do not text-attack. If an individual has not responded to your sms, this is not the cue to send a slur of follow-ups.

Use abbreviations with caution. “2mch abbvt’ing iz annying.”

Important matters should never be sent through text message.

Mass-texting is 98% of the time a bad idea.

GOOD TO KNOW: ELEVATOR ETTIQUETTE Don’t hold up traffic; promptly step in and out.

Reserve the elevator for rides over three floors Small talk can be just as deadly Don’t bore your fellow passengers with fourteen-floor jokes or gawdy personal stories. Stick to the basics: the weather, current events & sports.

bailey banks & biddle

800 651 42222 www.marcienne.com

-ARCIENNE the art of celestial glass

82 180

Y = MX + ECO PROBLEM

WORLDLY OVER CONSUMPTION When is taking too much?

C

onsider the amount of materials we use or waste in support of our lifestyles. Citizens of industrialized countries need huge volumes of bricks, cement, iron, oil, chemicals, paper and many other materials. They also generate vast quantities of pollutants and other waste, plus they cause similarly large quantities of materials to be excavated or moved around in their pursuit of valuable minerals. To produce one kilogramme of gold, for instance, somebody moves 350 tonnes of earth and hence the gold ring on your finger effectively weighs three tonnes. In the United States the physical displacement of materials is about 80 tons per person per year, or over 1000 times a typical American’s weight In Japan with its more efficient economy, the amount is only one quarter as muchbut five times more than it

need be if the country were to deploy all efficiency technologies available. U.S. “outflows” (pollutants, eroded soil, waste water, etc.) amount to 25 tons per American per year, well over twice as much as in Japan.

All the rich nations, with one quarter of the world’s population, consume three-quarters of the world’s natural resources and generate three-quarters of its pollution and other wastes.

The effective size of an average American family in terms of per-capita consumption of critical resources and pollution is the equivalent of 30 citizens of the developing world and 80 citizens of Nepal. And it’s not always a case of sheer quantity.

Some waste is harmful in small amounts, as is the case with many of the 70,000 synthetic chemicals that industry dumps into the environment after only minimal testing against only a few recognized diseases.

Again, the good news lies with how we could do better.

Hey, reader, that envelope that brought you this magazine: have you put it in your recycling box--or is it full already?

Remember that your country recycles hardly more than half as much paper as does Japan.

Germany requires businesses to take back packing supplied with their products.

Y = MX + ECO TIP 83 180

ECO TIP #1

Golden Pothos, English Ivy, & Peace Lilies aroe all easy to grow toxin fighters they can help remove indoor air pollutants like Benzene & Formaldehyde.

OVER CONSUMPTION is a concept related to overpopulation, referring to situations where per capita consumption is so high that even in spite of a moderate population density, sustainability is not achieved. The concept was coined to augment the discussion of overpopulation, which reflects issues of carrying

OTHER SAFE TIPS Custom order solid wood cabinets made with sustainably harvested wood.

Formaldehyde is banned from use in furniture products made in Europe. Investigate buying European Furniture.

Install metal cabinets.

F

ormaldehyde is an intermediate in the oxidation of methane as well as other carbon compounds, e.g. forest fires, in automobile exhaust, and in tobacco smoke. When produced in the atmosphere by the action of sunlight and oxygen on atmospheric methane and other hydrocarbons, it becomes part of smog. When reacted with phenol, urea, or melamine formaldehyde produces, respectively, hard thermoset phenol formaldehyde resin, urea formaldehyde resin, and melamine resin, which are commonly used in permanent adhesives such as those used in plywood or carpeting. It is used as the wet-strength resin added to sanitary paper products such as facial tissue, table napkins, and roll towels. They are also foamed to make insulation, or cast into molded products. Production of formaldehyde resins accounts for more than half of formaldehyde consumption.

Formaldehyde is also a precursor to polyfunctional alcohols which is used to make paints and explosives.

The textile industry uses formaldehyde-based resins as finishers to make fabrics crease-resistant.It is also used as an ingredient by some shampoo manufacturers.

Formaldehyde is classified as a probable human carcinogen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The International Agency for Research on Cancer has determined that there is “sufficient evidence� that occupational exposure to formaldehyde causes nasopharyngeal cancer in humans.

84 180

Y = MX + AGENDA TITLE HERE

AGENDA

A directory of future events in the greater galactic area

T

his agenda may go further than you may wish to venture. It contains a listing of events, some of witch are prospective, to give you a time line of what to expect in the near or distant future. So save the date for the first commercial space flight and lets see if we can hit it. Agendas are used to get ready for what is ahead so start planning ahead and lets try to make things happen. Get out and make these events happen.

MOVIES Antarctica November Israeli director Yair Hochner’s 28 diffuse gay drama centered on a 2008 shy librarian runs both hot and cool — the hilariously fevered fresco of sexually activity in the opening scenes strikes a sharp contrast to the more awkward relationships depicted later on. Through it is a compelling portrait of gay relationships in country not always known for its tolerance, the results are uneven and the overstuffed film often lacks focus.

Australia November How can one do justice to 26 Baz Luhrmann’s overripe epic 2008 Australia? It’s several types of primitive melodrama—cattle-drive Western, war picture, anti- racist message movie — whirred together, burnished with state-ofthe-art CGI, and blessed with dialogue that defies parody. In one scene, the transplanted Englishwoman (Nicole Kidman) gazes moist-eyed on the rough-and-ready cattleman (Hugh Jackman) as he caresses an edgy stallion, and you know her line will be a clever variation on “You really have a gift with horses.”

Milk November While not up there in the annals 26 of transformation with Robert 2008 De Niro’s poundage or Daniel Day-Lewis’s palsy, Sean Penn’s smile lines in Milk are a wonder. They’re not crinkles, they’re furrows; they seem to stretch all the way down to his soul. As the gay activist Harvey Milk, who was shot to death in 1978 along with the San Francisco mayor, George Moscone, the volatile Penn is unprecedentedly giddy. There’s anger in his Milk, but it never festers—it’s instantly channeled into political

action. In the tedious remake of All the King’s Men, Penn went in for Method-y pauses in the scenes of Willie Stark finding his soapbox voice: He seemed too inward an actor to play a natural rabble-rouser. But as Milk, he shakes off Method self-attention the way Milk shook off the shame of being gay. As the personal becomes political, he opens all the windows and gets visibly high on the breeze.

Rome & Jewel November Set in present-day Los Angeles, 28 this contemporary musical version 2008 of Romeo and Juliet focuses on the relationship between a young black man and a young white woman, and features original hip-hop songs performed by the film’s cast.

Transporter 3 November Having been pressured into 26 transporting the kidnapped 2008 daughter of the head of Ukraine’s environmental-protection agency across Europe, Frank Martin finds himself falling for her.

THEATER All My Sons October

27

2008

In Simon McBurney’s production of All My Sons, Arthur Miller’s 1947 drama about a war profiteer

85 Y = MX + AGENDA TITLE HERE 180 accused of manufacturing faulty airplane parts that killed American pilots, one character asks another, “You don’t want to be the voice of God, do you?” No, that job belongs to Miller. All My Sons is a preachy, pompous piece of work, and Miller’s status as a national treasure, one who spent a lot of time poking a pointy stick into dark corners, doesn’t change that.

August: Osage County So as you might have heard by 27 now, Tracy Letts’s play is not just 2008 good, but freakishly, atavistically good. The disappearance of Beverly Weston (Dennis Letts, the playwright’s father), the hard-drinking poet-patriarch of this Oklahoma clan, sets in motion a three-hour-plus, thirteen-character epic of a kind that simply does not exist in American theater anymore. Though Letts, an actorplaywright who lives in Chicago, has shown no prior inclination toward writing massive family epics, he’s recaptured the nobility of American drama’s mid-century heyday while still creating something entirely original. Well, almost entirely.

October

Avenue Q September Avenue Q is a puppet musical that 17 takes off from, saucily spoofs, and 2008 cheekily de-kidifies Sesame Street. Several Sesame characters’ caricatures populate the godforsaken Avenue Q where the play and some of the characters are laid. Princeton laments in song the uselessness of his just-acquired B.A. in English: Every apartment from Avenue A to P costing too much, he rents on Q, from the super, a young black woman with attitude who turns out to be Gary Coleman. Other live denizens—the fat, unemployed would-be comic, Brian, and his exaggeratedly Japanese therapist fiancée, Christmas Eve — sympathize with Princeton.

Billy Elliot: The Musical December The movie Billy Elliot, directed

by Stephen Daldry from a 6 2008 screenplay by Lee Hall, felt like the mutt offspring of a movie musical, a music video, and a sober BBC social melodrama—a hybridization that functioned as fine entertainment, if not the trenchant

commentary its makers were attempting.

Billy Elliot: The Musical, also directed by Daldry and with a libretto by Hall, is similarly crossbred: It wants badly to be a barefoot, bare-knuckled dance-play—and at its best, it is—but it genuflects obsessively to the most flat-footed Broadway conventions, tripping itself up at every turn. Without the vigor of its young stars and the pure propulsion of Peter Darling’s choreography, this newest Elton John–powered machine might have tour jêté’d listlessly into a ditch. But the show stays on its feet, sometimes just barely, and will no doubt bring many audiences to theirs.

Boeing-Boeing November For half an hour or so, Boeing10 Boeing lumbers along, slow-footed 2008 and messy—mortal failures for a French sex farce. Bradley Whitford works too hard as the Paris playboy who juggles three flight-attendant fiancées, and Christine Baranski, miscast as Bernard’s gruff maid, shows little of a farceuse’s polish.

The arrival of Bernard’s school chum only makes matters worse: After ten years running London’s Globe Theatre, the great Mark Rylance finally returns to New York in an open-ended run, and it’s this?

Chicago It was a gamble to transfer the Encores! production of Chicago to the larger and costlier venue of Broadway.

But since Chicago is about women who kill their men and the mercenary lawyer who gets them off, gambling seems like the merest peccadillo.

Especially when, as here, it pays off. Back in 1975, this Fred Ebb-John Kander-Bob Fosse musical opened in the shadow of A Chorus Line, and, though easily as good, reaped the deficit of the reviewers’ having exhausted their supply of encomiums. Also, amorality, at least officially, was not yet in.

ART American Folk Art Museum In 1961, as folk art was beginning to gel as the overarching term for everything from primitive paintings to Shaker furniture, a small group of pioneering collectors founded a gallery devoted to this emerging field. That

Y = MX + AGENDA TITLE HERE 87 180 institution—now called the American Folk Art Museum—has gone on to play a central role in fostering interest in self-taught artists and artisans nationwide. Today, as owners of one of the country’s largest collections of such hard-to-classify works, the organization acts as an indispensable interpreter and promoter of folk/outsider art.

Asia Society John D. Rockefeller III amassed a treasure trove of Asian art, which he eventually donated to the non-profit, international society he founded in 1956. Hailing from more than thirty Asian-Pacific countries, the headquarters’ holdings cover Hindu and Buddhist statuary, temple carvings, Chinese ceramics, and Japanese paintings—dating from around 2000 B.C. to the 19th-century.

The total assemblage of works may only number about 300, but Rockefeller was a true connoisseur and these masterpieces make up one of the finest collections in the country.

The Frick Collection

institutions on earth. Each year, five million people walk up the famous granite steps in search of the thrill of aesthetic vertigo. Many make a beeline for the Egyptian Art and European Painting collections, both among the finest in the world. But almost every one of the Museum’s 17 curatorial departments is superlative, and must-see works abound in every corner of the building. Also competing for visitors’ attentions are about 30 exhibitions a year.

NIGHTLIFE Boris The Japanese purveyors of droning December psychedelic metal just completed an opening stint on Nine Inch 3 2008 Nails’ U.S. tour. Brooklyn’s Growing opens.

Kenny Werner Quintet December Pianist and former Archie Shepp tourmate accompanied 2 2008

by David Sanchez, Randy Brecker, and others.

T.I. December Hot off the chart-topping success of “Whatever You Like,” and “Live 3 2008 Your Life,” the King of the South tours in support of his album Paper Trail.

Asssscat 3000

Robber baron Henry Clay Frick amassed an incredible fortune—and a goodly number of enemies—by ruthlessly exploiting steelworkers in 19th century Pittsburgh.

Unfazed by his repuation as Public Enemy Number One, the industrial magnate lived flamboyantly. His tony, neo-Classical mansion was built in 1913 by architects Carrere and Hastings (who were also responsible for the New York Public Library’s midtown headquarters) and has publicly showcased his sizable collection of ill-gotten gains since becoming a museum in the 1930s.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art With over two million objects—from 77, 000-year-old flints to contemporary digital art—housed under its roof, the Met is one of the largest and most eclectic cultural

December Amy Poehler, Matt Walsh, Ian 10 Roberts, and their Upright Citizens 2008 Brigade cohorts put on a superpopular weekly improv show. Lines are regularly around the block, but fans of their irreverent brand of humor consider it one of the best comedy nights in the city.

Q-Tip and Rich Medina December A Tribe Called Quest’s legendary frontman shares a DJ night with 9 2008 scene vet Rich Medina.

RESTAURANTS Five Leaves Heath Ledger didn’t live to see his planned Greenpoint café, but with funding from his estate, Five Leaves has opened its doors to the public. The casual vibe might remind some of Cafe Gitane, the Nolita hangout where owner Jud Mongell and his wife worked for years. But the triangular space bears a much closer resemblance to Moto, the Williamsburg

restaurant whose designers also collaborated on Five Leaves’ nautically themed décor. The bar is shaped like a ship’s prow; maritime scenes are etched into marble tabletops; and a gold-leafed porthole marks the WC. Cat von Klitzing, formerly of Prune, shares KP duty with Mario Hernandez, late of El Beit and Abraço Espresso. It was Hernandez’s masterful scrambled-egg-and-fried-sage breakfast sandwich that got him the gig, and it’s featured on the menu alongside salads like fried egg with dandelion greens.

Bussaco Bussaco represents New Brooklyn Cuisine (NBC) — and this place is so Brooklyn that the communal table is made from white oak salvaged from Prospect Park. Beat that! Chef Matthew Schaefer is embracing the term, though he also uses plain ol’ “New York cuisine” to describe dishes influenced by his time at Judson Grill under Bill Telepan (they get a touch of refinement thanks to Schaefer’s recent stint at Le Bernardin). The chicken and waffles, for instance, are far from what you’ll find at Little House on Clinton: The brined, buttermilk-fried poussin is inspired by his southern wife’s recipe (it’s his favorite thing to eat). Another personal touch.

Curry-Ya If you’re a fan of ramen, soba noodles, takoyaki, or obscure sakes, chances are you’ve savored them at one of the many restaurants and bars of Bon Yagi, co-owner of pioneering establishments like Rai Rai Ken, Soba-Ya, Otafuku, and Sakagura. Now he tackles another culinary icon: Japanese curry. There are no tables at Curry-Ya, just fourteen wooden stools lined up along a marble counter, each with a built-in cubby to store belongings. Nine curries may be customized by size, spice level, and additional topping (corn, Cheddar, or natto) and feature ingredients like grilled hamburger and deepfried potato croquette. Takeout and delivery forthcoming; cash only.

180 Y = MX + FASHION DIRECTORY 18088 Y = MX + FASHION DIRECTORY

FUTURE FASHION FILE

The future’s most innovative gadgets come in a strapless size 4.

And we’re not talking about just any size 4. These fetching gowns will come complete with remote controls, global positioning systems and radio frequency identification tags, making catwalk shows look more like scenes from Mission Impossible than showcases of exclusive designer wear. Why? With the rapid merging of fashion and technology, future brands of haute couture will probably owe more to Cisco Systems than Coco Chanel.

Here’s a list of stores that already carry this wearable technology.

HUSSEIN CHALAYAN is a London based designer who is internationally regarded for his innovative use of materials, forward thinking and meticulous pattern cutting.

where to purchase: 8, avenue du Wilson, 75116 Paris, France

Y = MX + FASHION DIRECTORY 180 more featured future designers: BALENCIAGA’s Nicolas Ghesquiere has been playing with visions of futuristic form combined with his love for the 1980’s era. But it doesn’t end there, as he also incorporates a bold blend of futurism with French Classicism. where to purchase: 542 West 22 Street, New York, NY +212 348 2312 YOHJI YAMOMOTO has always been ahead of his time. Yamamoto’s main objective is comfort, thus providing a new approach to the body and creating a new silhouette. where to purchase: 103 Grand Street, New York, NY +212 436 2312 VIVIAN WESTWOOD modernized historical 20th and 21th century cutting principles. Her latest collection was about “gold and treasure, adventure, future and exploration”. where to purchase: 47 King Street, Manchester, UK +44 161 835 2121 LAVIN Elbaz’s collection was a feat of technical genius. He’d started off by making fabric out of strips of grosgrain ribbon, winding hundreds of meters of the stuff around the body to make shapely dresses, blouses, and skirts. where to purchase: 1125 Park Ave, New York, NY +212 342 2312 KARL LAGERFELD Modernism? Make that futurism, which was signaled by the first model, who beamed down in a Close Encounters shaft of light.

Lagerfeld’s sci-fi was actually more the retro-Blade Runner variety, as in an asymmetrically draped suit with forties tailoring or a pencil skirt that emerged from a peplum’s pleated tiers. where to purchase: 1125 Park Ave, New York, NY +212 342 2312

MARNI In a season when “simplicity”—or, more accurately, a redefinition of the dead term “minimalism”—is preoccupying fashion debate, Consuelo Castiglioni filled in the blanks with color.

She has a painterly eye for an offbeat choice of shades: dove gray against sugar pink, emerald with beige, sharp yellow and dusty mauve, muted pastels butting up against the odd shockingbright hue. She even went as far as using metal as one of the materials. where to purchase: 542 West 22 Street, New York, NY +212 348 2312 MARIOS SCHWAB London is thinking long—sinuously, serpentinely long in the case of Marios Schwab’s incredibly impactful Fall silhouette. Schwab is the first to completely nail the new look in a bravely exaggerated form: smooth, tubular, hobbling stretch dresses to the ankle, with strange textures breaking through their surfaces and clothing made out of just spray on fabric. where to purchase: 103 Grand Street, New York, NY +212 436 2312 LOUISE GOLDIN It’s only her second season showing, but Louise Goldin stepped onto the runway with a reputation for pushing sweater dressing into a new zone of fashion relevance. After her small but widely acclaimed Spring show of bright, short shapes, she needed to over-deliver to impress, and she knew it. “Since the minute I finished the last collection, I was researching Inuit culture and sci-fi, experimenting with computer programs so I could mix traditional pattern with the pixelation you’d see on a monitor screen.” where to purchase: 47 King Street, Manchester, UK +44 161 835 2121

Now if we can get a pair of sneakers that give us a good workout without us having to move, we would be set.

180 Y = MX + FASHION DIRECTORY 18090 Y = MX + FASHION DIRECTORY

GREEN’S GREEN’S THE THE NEW NEW BLACK BLACK Slowing down is the natural Slowing down ismoving the natural way to success: beyond way to success: moving beyond fast fashion to sustainable styles. fast fashion to sustainable styles.

STELLA MCCARTNEY as a strict vegetarian, STELLA MCCARTNEY a strict McCartney does notasuse fur orvegetarian, leather in her McCartney not use fur or leather in her designs anddoes supports animal rights.

Some of designs and supports animal rights.

Some of McCartney’s designs have text that elaborates McCartney’s designs have for textexample, that elaborates on her “no animal” policy; one of on “no animal” policy; example, of herher jackets for Adidas says,for “suitable forone sporty her jackets foronAdidas says, “suitable for sporty vegetarians” the sleeve. vegetarians” on the sleeve.

429 West 14th Street 429 Street NewWest York, 14th NY 10014 New York, NY 10014 + 1 212 255 1556 + 1 212 255 1556

other featured eco-designers: other featured eco-designers: ALEXANDER MCQUEEN, an environmenALEXANDER MCQUEEN, an environmentalist? That was the unexpected mestalist?

Thatemanated was the unexpected mes-of sage that from the mouth sage that that emanated from the a runway was backed by amouth videoof aprojection runway that backed by a and video of awas revolving Earth, projection a revolving Earth, and an flanked by of a zoo of stuffed animals: flanked bygiraffe, a zoo of stuffed elephant, polar bear,animals: lion, andan elephant, giraffe, polar bear,species. lion, and assorted other endangered assorted endangered species.

McQueenother explained, through program McQueen through program notes, thatexplained, he had been pondering notes, he had pondering Charlesthat Darwin, thebeen survival of the Charles Darwin, the survivalresults of theof fittest, and the deleterious fittest, and the deleterious results of industrialization on the natural world. industrialization on the natural world. where to purchase: where to purchase: 5 Old Bond Street, London, UK 5 Old207 Bond +44 355Street, 0088 London, UK +44 207 355 0088 HELMUT LANG. “A coming together of HELMUT LANG. coming together nature and the “A city,” is how Nicole of nature the city,” is work how Nicole Colovosand described the she and Colovos described the did work and her husband, Michael, at she Helmut her Michael, did atitHelmut Langhusband, this season.

Basically, was a Lang this season.

Basically, it was continuation of their exploration of a continuation of their exploration organic shapes for Fall, only this of time it organic forwords—”juxtaposed Fall, only this time it was—inshapes Colovos’ was—in Colovos’ elements.” words—”juxtaposed with architectural with architectural elements.” where to purchase: where to purchase: 819 Washington St, New York, NY 819 +212Washington 242 3240 St, New York, NY +212 242 3240 LINDA LOUDERMILK spearheaded the LINDA LOUDERMILK spearheaded the creation of a new, luxury eco lifestyle, creation of aconcepts new, luxury eco lifestyle, blowing old of environmental blowing environmental living outold of concepts the water.ofThrough her living out of the water.and Through revolutionary designs radicalher spirit, revolutionary designs and sustainability radical spirit, Loudermilk has redefined Loudermilk has redefined sustainability as something alluringly, sexy and fun. as something alluringly, sexy and fun. where to purchase: where to 6th purchase: 443 East St, New York, NY 443 St, New York, NY +212East 9796th 0389 +212 979 0389 REBECCA TURBOW by contrasting REBECCA TURBOW by contrasting organic, soft and sturdy fabrics with organic, soft and sturdy fabrics with clean, geometric patterns and detailed clean, geometric patterns and detailed craftsmanship, Turbow marries comcraftsmanship, Turbow comfort with high design to marries create pieces fort high to create that with please notdesign only the viewerpieces but the that please onlyare theone viewer the wearer.

Hernot pieces of a but king, wearer.

Her pieces are one of king, manufactured locally inside hera room. manufactured locally inside her room. where to purchase: where to 12th purchase: 437 East St, New York, NY 437 +617East 41712th 4424St, New York, NY +617 417 4424

92 180

Y = MX + TITLE HERE

LOOKING BACK A brief history of time using new technology

G

alaxies, galaxies everywhere - as far as NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope can see. This view of nearly 10,000 galaxies is the deepest visible-light image of the cosmos. Called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, this galaxy-studded view represents a “deep” core sample of the universe, cutting across billions of light-years.

The snapshot includes galaxies of various ages,

sizes, shapes, and colors. The smallest, reddest galaxies, about 100, may be among the most distant known, existing when the universe was just 800 million years old. The nearest galaxies - the larger, brighter, well-defined spirals and ellipticals - thrived about 1 billion years ago, when the cosmos was 13 billion years old.

In vibrant contrast to the rich harvest of classic spiral and elliptical galaxies, there

is a zoo of oddball galaxies littering the field. Some look like toothpicks; others like links on a bracelet. A few appear to be interacting.

These oddball galaxies chronicle a period when the universe was younger and more chaotic. Order and structure were just beginning to emerge.

AOaVO =PO[O " BVS aO[S =PO[O dOZcSa eS OZ`SORg PSZWSdS W\

live

he

by t

rules

of c

o-

crea tio

n

a scent for all COMME des GARCONS *