Belgian art collective Time Circus built their first prototype of a giant Land Ship that will travel through Europe. Like a modern-day galley, the land ship will be propelled by the muscle power of the participating travelers. The journey is understood as a 21st century pilgrimage and will take an estimated 10 years.

The Journey

Along the journey, people can board the land ship and travel along for as long as they want to. Longer stops will be made in Marseille (France), Novisad (Serbia), Timisoara (Romania) and Elefsina (Greece).

In 2018, land ship terminals will be built in these cities. Like bus stops, these will show how long it takes before the vehicle arrives. The start of the journey is planned for 2020.

The Ship

When we talked to one of the makers earlier this month in Antwerp, he said it was not yet clear whether the final vehicle would be a single monstrous land ship of 50 metres long, or a caravan of ‘small’ ones the size of the first prototype, which is 13 metres long.

He said they were also contemplating the use of draft animals or sails — reminiscent of the ancient Chinese wheelbarrow. The vehicle or vehicles will be equipped with sleeping accommodation for at least 50 people.

Confronting Bureaucracy

Either way, the trip will be challenging, not only because of the physical effort involved, but also because of many other obstacles, from bridges over telephone lines to rules and regulations. Time Circus wants to “obtain freedom of movement by gently opposing regulations with inventiveness and the use of the grey areas of the law, confronting the bureaucracy in a playful and witty way.”

The slowness of the journey gives ample space for meetings and interaction along the road. The main message of the project is to demonstrate that “unexpected forces can develop through cooperation”. It also wants to “encourage the imaginative forces in the world, introducing alternatives that lie dormant”.

More info: Time Circus. There’s also a video (in Dutch).

“Personal Effects (after Hokusai) 2016″, 5footx7foot8”, charcoal & pencil on paper. Click to enlarge. By Laurie Lipton.

Read more at Wired: Wintergatan’s ‘Marble Machine’ makes music with 2,000 marbles.

Cargo cults appear when the outside world, with all its material wealth, suddenly descends on remote, indigenous tribes. The locals don’t know where the foreigners’ endless supplies come from and so suspect they were summoned by magic, sent from the spirit world.

To entice the Americans back after the war, islanders throughout the region started building giant airplanes from wood, carving headphones and radios from bamboo and awaited the messianic serviceman John Frum. They prayed for ships and planes to once again come out of nowhere, bearing all kinds of treasures: jeeps and washing machines, radios and motorcycles, canned meat and candy. Their rituals included the non militant army TAU (Tanna Army USA), marching with wooden rifles.

The more naive will laugh about these imitations. But did the US soldiers truly understand their technology, their big agenda? The cult of the cargo is our world exactly: We perform meaningless routines we call work, in hope for future cargo. With a technology that could navigate us to the moon, we write LMAO. The western world itself is a giant cult of imitating things that somehow work: dressing in suits, using buzzword-vocabulary, mimicing old forms of art. The longing for godlike goodies on the horizon, the usage of things we don´t understand: it’s a big parable of desire.

Surprisingly the local performers of the Cargo Cults succeeded: By remaking western technology with bamboo, by re-enacting western rituals they attracted actual planes full of tourists and anthropologists.”

Quoted from “In John they trust” (Smithsonian Magazine) and “The supercargo manifesto” (Supercargo Tumblr). Pictures: Supercargo Tumblr. Thanks to Edwin Gardner.

By Laurie Lipton.

Under good climatic conditions and using specific technology, the full moon can be a powerful source of light.

Using technology inspired by solar energy concentrators, the “Full Moon Theatre” lights its performances using only moonlight. Moonbeams are collected, concentrated, and focused on stage.

The original Full Moon Theatre was built in Southern France and their plan is to create twelve Full Moon Theatres worldwide.

The Full Moon Project is the brainchild of French opera director Humbert Camerlo. Camerlo got the idea in 1987 and initially tested it by assembling a group of shaving mirrors that focused the light of the moon onto a small sculpture in his garden in Southern France (picture below). Four years later, in 1991, the construction of a full-size theatre began, in collaboration with Irish engineer Peter Rice. Rice would be involved in the project until his death in 1992, after which his disciple, Nicolas Prouvé, took over the collaborative role.

Like most good inventions, the Full Moon Theatre was born out of necessity. Camerlo was setting up an interdisciplinary theatre lab, but had no money to pay for a professional lighting installation.

The original moonlight theatre, 1987. Picture: The Full Moon Theatre.

Performances lit by moonlight are, of course, limited to certain nights when there is both a full moon and a clear sky. When these opportunities occur, however, we have at our disposal a lighting source that is potentially better than artificial light. Moonlight has a similar quality as sunlight.

“We can see at night during the full moon phase reflecting sunlight but we do not have a strong visual accuracy. Under good climatic conditions, the light power of the Moon is 1 on 100 000 to the sun light power. In the same time moon light has practically the same colour temperature to the sunlight. The challenge was to find optical systems to multiply the power of the Moon in order to light a performance and to reveal costumes colours.”

Reflectors

The development of the reflectors has been an on-going process. Three types were made: “Keplers” and “Archimedes” designed by Rice’s teams in London and Paris, and “Copernics” designed by Camerlo. The reflectors track the moonbeams, amplify them and reflect them onto the stage. Some of the reflectors also track the actors on stage.

   Moonlight collectors. Image: The Full Moon Theatre.

Beyond the symbolic or metaphoric use of the moon to light a performance, the Full Moon Theatre laboratory has prompted ideas for experimental work in architecture or even in town planning. The project wants to promote the development of technology for the use of natural light in the visible fringe of the solar spectrum. Underground areas such as subway stations, for instance, could easily be lit by sunlight during the day. The Full Moon Theatre also promotes actions dedicated to reduce light pollution in the world, as moonlight cannot be used when light pollution is high.

Moonlit stage. Picture: The Full Moon Theatre.

For most of its lifespan, the theatre has been a research project. This will soon change. The first public performance in the theatre, in the summer of 2010, had spectators also carrying mirrors to aid the lighting. The ultimate aim of the project, which brings together artists, engineers and scientists, is to set up a planetary network of “Full Moon Theatres”. The plan is to equip twelve open air theatres with full moon technology by 2014 or 2015, using new types of reflectors. We’ll keep you updated.

The Full Moon Theatre.

Thanks to Emmanuel Grimaud.

Edited by Deva Lee.

Related articles: 

• An engineering exploration of Stonehenge
• The bright future of solar thermal powered factories
• Moonlight towers: light pollution in the eighteenth century

Korean artist Jihyun Ryou, a graduate of the Dutch Design Academy Eindhoven, translates traditional knowledge on food storage into contemporary design. She found the inspiration for her wall-mounted storage units while listening to the advice of her grandmother, a former apple grower, and other elderly. Her mission: storing food outside the refrigerator.

On her blog, “Shaping traditional oral knowledge“, Jihyun Ryou explains the motivations underlying her work, which actually go beyond food storage:

“This project is about traditional oral knowledge which has been accumulated from experience and transmitted by mouth to mouth. Particularly focusing on the food preservation, it looks at a feasible way of bringing that knowledge into everyday life. Through the research into the current situation of food preservation, I’ve learned that we hand over the responsibility of taking care of food to the technology, the refrigerator. We don’t observe the food any more and we don’t understand how to treat it. Therefore my design looks at re-introducing and re-evaluating traditional oral knowledge of food, which is closer to nature. Furthermore, it aims to bring back the connection between different levels of living beings, we as human beings and food ingredients as other living beings. Through the objects of everyday life, design can introduce traditional oral knowledge into people’s lives through their experience of using it. Objects make invisible knowledge evident.”

Talking about fruits and vegetables as living beings sounds rather woolly, but it is actually true. Vegetables and fruits continue to live even after they are picked. They keep breathing, taking oxygen from the air and giving off carbon dioxide, water vapour and heat. By regulating temperature and humidity, it is possible to slow down this respiration, resulting in a longer storage time.

Storing food outside the refrigerator

While many fruits and vegetables benefit from the low storage temperature in a refrigerator (around 40 degrees F or 4.5 degrees C), this is not true for all of them. So-called fruit vegetables such as peppers, courgettes, aubergines and tomatoes require higher temperatures and decay more rapidly in the refrigerator. They need high relative humidity, though. The shelf pictured above gives these vegetables a suitable space. Through the ritual of watering them everyday, they will stay fresh. The water not only raises humidity but also cools the produce, assuring a temperature that is higher than that in the refrigerator but lower than that in the room.

The same principle is applied to the fruit bowl shown above, in which a perforated dish sits over a bowl of water. The concept is inspired by the old farmer’s wisdom to preserve fruits fresh before selling.

Damp sand

Keeping vegetables in slightly damp sand has been a storage method for many centuries. While low temperatures are favourable for vegetables like carrots, high humidity is equally important. Keeping them in wet sand can be a good compromise. In the design above, this concept is improved by burying the vegetables upright, mimicking their growth conditions – and making them last longer, says Jihyun Ryou. Just don’t forget to water them from time to time.

Rice absorbs humidity

Other foods, like spices, garlic, onions and sweet potatoes, require low humidity but higher temperatures, which also makes them unstuibale for storage in a refrigerator. Because it absorbs moisture easily, rice can be of great help here. In the design above, the cork lid of each spice container contains a small space holding rice, which helps to keep the spices dry without forming into lumps.

Ethylene gas

Some fruits and vegetables (notably apples but also tomatoes, avocados, bananas, muskmelons, pears, plums, and peaches) emit ethylene gas. This has the effect of speeding up the ripening process of fruits and vegetables kept together with them, which is why it is wise to store ethylene producing fruits and vegetables separately. However, when combined with potatoes, Jihyun Ryou says, they have a positive effect, because the ethylene gas prevents the potatoes from sprouting. The design pictured above consists of a wooden box that keeps potatoes in the dark (a more common way to keep them from sprouting), while the holes on top allow them to benefit from the ethylene gas emitted by the apples.

The same design could also be used to accelerate the ripening of tomatoes, a process that is used – on a much larger scale – by food distributors.

Does it work?

The more food you can keep out of the fridge, the smaller it needs to be and the less energy it will consume. The designs described above show a refreshing way to do that, although it should be remembered that these are artworks, not consumer products. Using similar methods when storing food in a basement or a specially designed root cellar – the traditional way – will give better results (more on that in a forthcoming article). Furthermore, some of the storage strategies followed by Ryou are not generally accepted. Most of the sources that I have consulted (books, not grandmothers) say that ethylene gas will promote the sprouting of potatoes, not prevent it.

Anyway, her work will certainly encourage others to search for alternative storage solutions based on traditional knowledge – and that’s what it is all about. Experience and experimentation will tell what works and what not.

More at Jihyun Ryou’s blog: “Shaping traditional oral knowledge” and in this video. She also offers a beautiful booklet. An overview of temperature and humidity requirements for most vegetables and fruits can be found here (.pdf).

We will publish more on low-tech food storage soon. Stay informed via email, feed, twitter or facebook.

Thanks for the tip, mom!

Related articles:

• The poor man’s refrigerator
• How to keep beverages cool outside the refrigerator
• Pottery refrigerators
• California coolers
• Bog butter: storing food in soil

The film can be viewed in its entirity in English, French or German. Short review here. Thanks to Eva Maori.

Kitchen Timer by Ludvik Cjep. Don’t miss his other work.

Related: “Automata: engineering for a post-oil world?“.

Cars as they should be: toys. Metropolis II by Chris Burden.

These days, artists have no difficulty in finding free materials to work with. The same stuff can be used over and over again, for different purposes. One artwork can be transformed into another. Why can’t our industrial production system work the same way? Because it is automated and needs standardized parts. Mass production and re-use of scavenged materials don’t match, unless the materials undergo the (mostly energy-intensive) intermediate step of recycling.

Above: Hubcap creatures by Ptolemy Elrington (also see his lamps – why do we need new materials to make lamps? There is enough trash in the world to make lamps for another 10,000 years).

Covers of retro manuals for web services by Stéphane Massa-Bidal. Via Laughing Squid.

By David Trautrimas via WebUrbanist.

Anatomies by Fernando Vicente. Via Tecob & Bioephemera. Inspired by the works of Fritz Kahn and others (see illustrations below).

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Above: Der Mensch als Industriepalast (Man as Industrial Palace), Fritz Kahn, 1926. More of his work here and here.

“Fritz Kahn’s books and illustrations explored the inner machinery of
the human body, using metaphors of modern industrial life. Kahn turned
the brain into a complex factory with light projectors, conveyor belts,
secretaries and cinema screens; he showed the journeys of blood cells
as locomotives encircling the globe; and he compared bones to modern
building materials such as reinforced concrete.” (source).

 
Above: Corps Machine, illustrator unknown, found at Agence Eureka.

 
Above: The Head Office, by Harrold Wheeler, 1941

Above: The miracle of life, by Harold Wheeler, 1941

Above: Detail of a Chinese health poster (source).

Mechanical sculptures, steel art, welded furniture, bikes (see also the cycle mower) and more disturbing objects by Chris Hausbeck.