I am pleased to announce the launch of the new issue of Organs Everywhere, Ghostly, which peers into phantasms, shaky boundaries, experimental design interfaces and speculative futures with fantastic contributions by (in order of appearance) Alessandro De Francesco, Brunella Antomarini, Lev Manovich, Jordan Geiger, Raphael Sperry, Ling Tan, Miriam Simun, Rachel Armstrong, Catie Newell, Bob Sheil, Thomas Pearce, Gregory Barton, Simone Ferracina, Tim Maughan, Nicolas Nova, Julian Bleecker, Fabien Girardin, Nick Foster, Anne-Gaëlle Amiot, Zenovia Toloudi and Stuart Munro. Thank you to the authors for their generosity and patience…and look out for another announcement shortly regarding exciting news for the (printed) future (and past) of Œ!

The journal is also digitally augmented: follow the ‘organseverywhere’ channel on the Aurasma app (iPhone & Android) to view a film by Alessandro de Francesco (trigger image on pages 16 and 17), and follow the ‘modernlovers’ channel to find many of Stuart Munro’s evocative photographs extended into films and audiovisual compositions. Finally, find here below the original musical composition “Photodotes III” by composer Reuben Son, which you can listen to while reading Zenovia Toloudi’s “Hacking Light.”

Enjoy and/or download the new issue here!

Material agility. Collaborations of living and non-living actants. Building materials exhibiting life-like behaviors. Architecture, protocells and Petri dishes. Stratophysical approximations. Soil taxonomies developed to account for anthropocenic change. The dream of a non-anthropocentric, nomadic domesticity. Homes built out of bones and muscles. Cities that are co-evolved with Nature.

These are only some of the things you will read about in this fantastic new issue of Organs Everywhere, “Material Shifts.” Along for the ride will take you the terrific and generous contributions of some amazing thinkers, researchers and innovators: Mitchell Joachim, Etienne Turpin, Seth Denizen, and finally Rachel Amstrong, whose vision truly made this issue possible. I thank them all for their outstanding contributions, and wish you an excellent read! Enjoy!

Jonathan LaRocca and Ned Dodington of Animal Architecture have just launched Urban Animal, the new installment of the Animal Architecture Awards, which this year closes in on new potential collaborations—what they call cospecies coshaping—between human and non-human animals in the density of our shared urban environments.

I like this setting very much because it removes animal life from the kind of ideal, self-regulating pre-anthropocenic “nature” we are still tempted to ascribe to it, and places it right in our backyard, in the midst of complex and entangled urban ecologies and material processes.
Of course, we know that the most catastrophic effects of our actions can travel the mesh of planetary interconnections in ways often hard to predict or understand (and reach far from the point of origin) but what kinds of links and alliances can be found in the most concentrated nodes of the mesh, in the places where the environmental impact of human agency is more tangible and apparent—our cities? What productive and mutually beneficial relationships are in place or could be designed between nonhuman animal life and urban subjects, buildings, infrastructures, social systems?

As the Animal Architecture editors suggest squirrels, pigeons, mice, crows and others (not to mention our own biomic entourage) are “highly urbanized non-human animals and our potential design partners”. They continue: “Expanded hetero-cultures, urban agriculture, and a flexible, more resilient urbanism are all potential benefits of cross species collaboration. What other benefits exist?”

The possibilities seem endless, with proposals/interventions ranging from the built to the unbuilt, from the site-specific to the typical, from the practical to the speculative, from large to small, from theoretical to critical, from utopian to dystopian, from domesticated to feral…

I will be a jury member along with such names as Fritz Haeg, Kate Orff of SCAPE, Christopher Hight, Susan S. Szenasy (editor in chief of Metropolis Magazine) and the Animal Architecture editors.

Register by 13 May 2012 to submit your work. Further information, including the complete call for submissions, can be found on the Animal Architecture website.

I am excited to announce the launch of the third issue of Organs Everywhere (Œ), available for online browsing or download here. This issue, entitled “Cyborgs and Monsters” combines contributions by an outstanding pool of thinkers, writers and designers: Ben Woodard investigates the space between haunted and green houses, and calls for the opening up of ‘homeness’ to broader outside ecologies. Liam Young and Tobias Klein with Denis Vlieghe explore the effects of external flows on the internal geographies of the body. Simone Ferracina performs digital plastic surgeries on the body as perceived in virtual/physical blended space. Sara Hendren proposes an ethics of augmentation rooted in the cyborgian experience of disability. Sukjong Hong transforms and overwrites the monstrous ‘others’ generated by Cold War narratives. Tim Maly narrates the science fictional story of a woman who gets pressured into consuming the drug-filled remains of an enemy academic.

Thanks to the contributors for their amazing and generous work. And to everyone else, enjoy!

If you live in Texas or happen to stop by over the holidays, you might want to check out the Animal Architecture Exhibition, which will be on display at Caroline Collective through November 28th, and will then travel to the Architecture Center Houston (ArCH) in mid January. And if you are interested in finding out more about the Theriomorphous Cyborg project, you can read my interview with the Animal Architecture team here. Enjoy!

I am excited to announce that I will be giving a short presentation on recent speculative projects at Thrilling Wonder Stories 3, an incredible event organized by Geoff Manaugh, Liam Young and Popular Science magazine. Two events will take place simultaneously at the Architectural Association in London and at Studio-X NYC. The line-up for both locations (which you can find here, along with all the details) is absolutely amazing. Do stop by if you have a chance, and see you there!

I’m happy to announce that you can now follow my design/research work outside of Organs Everywhere at simoneferracina.com . Take a look around, let me know what you think and enjoy! On a different note, keep your eyes peeled for the next issue of Œ: it will feature some exceptional contributors!

I am very pleased to announce that my project “Theriomorphous Cyborg” has been selected as the winning entry to the 2011 Animal Architecture Awards! The project, inspired by zoologist Jacob von Uexküll’s animal Umwelt, speculates about an Augmented Reality game capable of opening up new perceptual realities and fields of experience and reach previously invisible animal/human worlds. Find out more about the “Theriomorphous Cyborg”  here and take a look at the other selected projects here.

As work toward the third issue of Œ begins in the scorching New York Summer, I am pleased to announce that Œ No.1 “Augmented Selves” (here) and Œ No.2 “Alternate Ecologies” (here) are now available on the site as downloadable PDFs, as will be all future Organs Everywhere issues. This format should provide readers with a freer, more personal experience, as well as the ability to browse issues from all devices. Enjoy!

Just a quick post to let you know that my project “Super-Natural Garden” will be featured this coming August in Kerb 19, the journal published by RMIT University School of Architecture and Design. Judging by the other selected contributors, this year’s issue promises to be excellent. Thanks to Justin Pickard and Alexander Trevi for posting the call for submissions —which made me aware of it—and to Timothy Morton whose books, “The Ecological Thought” in particular, were a determining inspiration for the project. Also, thanks to the editors for selecting it! Can’t wait to see it.

You can check out Kerb’s contributors page here.

Today I had an article published on Lo Squaderno – Explorations in Space and Society. The article, entitled “Cyber-Imageability,” aims at re-framing key concepts from Kevin Lynch’s landmark book The Image of the City in light of contemporary and future modalities of urban navigation. My contention is that way-finding in the Augmented City—an environment made up of as many bits as atoms—will rely more on technological mediation and subjectivity than on objective physical cues, with the following outcomes: 1) In a city (Keiichi Matsuda appropriately calls it domesti-city) appropriated with ever-expanding electronomadic tools, environmental images—our mental pictures of the physical world—will increasingly become externalized and digitized. 2) If “legibility” ceases to be a condition for successfully inhabited physical space and efficient relating of building parts, architecture may endorse the radical possibilities afforded by illegibility. More on this soon. For now, enjoy Lo Squaderno No.19 “Urban Knowledges.” You can download it in its entirety here.

Hey everyone! Issue No.2 Alternate Ecologies is out!

Special thanks to Neil Spiller—guest author of this issue—for his generous contribution.
Thanks to Brian and Lauren for reading the first drafts and for providing much-needed feedback. Thanks to Keight for the last-minute website amendments.

And Happy New Year from Organs Everywhere!

Hey Everyone! Issue No.1 Augmented Selves is out!

Thanks to Brian, Lauren and Lisa for reading the first drafts and/or kindly agreeing to appear on the images. Thanks to Keight (lureandcast.com) for the beautiful website design.

And welcome to Organs Everywhere!