These interactive “Web Curios”—bringing nature meditation, a map of all controlling technologies, and raw Gen A angst—are very much worth playing with
This is as much an “interactive” as a “audio-visual” curation this week - taken from the slightly OTT but immensely rich Web Curios newsletter, which throws itself into the digital plenitude around us, and surfaces with some curiosities and gems (and sometimes absurdities).
Above is a clip from our interaction with Google Labs’ In Rhythm with Nature. Blurb below:
In Rhythm with Nature offers a virtual multisensory experience, with flora and fauna, colors and soundscapes sourced directly from the natural world.
Designed by the artist Anna Glover in collaboration with Google Arts and Culture Lab, In Rhythm with Nature is an artistic interpretation of Carl Linnaeus's flower clock.
Linnaeus was a renowned botanist and taxonomist who developed a modern system to identify, name, and classify living things. His unique garden design took advantage of the natural circadian rhythms of different plants, using the observed opening and closing of their blooms to mark the time of day.
Like our plant friends, humans also respond to changes in the environment through a circadian rhythm.
This 24-hour internal clock seated in the brain helps to regulate our sleep-wake cycle. From morning to afternoon, we move into an increasingly alert state before downshifting in the evening to prepare for nighttime sleep. In Rhythm with Nature honors our circadian rhythms by synchronizing its sights and sounds to your local time.
We offer this experience as digital refreshment for the mind, allowing you to take a break and enjoy a healthful dose of Mother Nature anywhere, anytime.
Can we also ask how much carbon has been burned to provide us with this digital-natural experience?
Next, the wild mapping enterprise that is Calculating Empires. From their About page:
How can we understand the operations of technology and power in our era? Our technological systems are increasingly complex, interconnected, automated and opaque. Social institutions, from schools to prisons, are becoming data industries, incorporating pervasive forms of capture and analysis.
Even places that were once off-limits to capital, from our emotional expressions to outer space, are now subject to computational control and extraction. Meanwhile, the industrial transformations in AI are concentrating power into even fewer hands, while accelerating polarization and alienation.
If we are to address the urgent challenges of the contemporary time - including technocratic fascism, climate catastrophe, colonial wars, and wealth inequality - we need to contend with the interwoven nature of their histories. In order to have a future, we must first confront our past.
Calculating Empires is a large-scale research visualization exploring how technical and social structures co-evolved over five centuries. The aim is to view the contemporary period in a longer trajectory of ideas, devices, infrastructures, and systems of power.
It traces technological patterns of colonialism, militarization, automation, and enclosure since 1500 to show how these forces still subjugate and how they might be unwound.
By tracking these imperial pathways, Calculating Empires offers a means of seeing our technological present in a deeper historical context. And by investigating how past empires have calculated, we can see how they created the conditions of empire today.
[We recommend listening to the “audio tour” on the menu at the top right, before fully exploring.]
We are big fans of alienated millennials and alphas taking themselves to digital platforms and spilling out their angst about their pointless working lives (see our #corecore posts on the TikTok phenomenon).
The above game, Chao Bing, is a quite brilliant fusion of 80s CD-ROM-like games experiences, which capture the performativity-blues being instilled in a hothoused child, toiling under extracurricular activity. And how that is the basis of their current ennui and lack of motivation. As you can see below:
