Lexicon

Abject
Accretion
Actant
Aeration
Aerobic
Algae-boosted
Animal
Anthropomorphism
Anti-Continuous Construction
Apocalypse
Aquaculture
Aquanaut
Ark
Artificial Intelligence
Autopoiesis
Assemblages
Asymmetry
Atrophy
Attraction
Autarchy
Automata
Automation
Autosymbiosis
Bambassador
Bathyscaphe
Bioconurbation
Biomedia
Bionics
Biosphere
Biotechnique
By-product
Capacity
Actant
Coisolation
Composting
Conservative Surgery
Consumer Envelope
Consumption
Continuous Construction
Conurbation
Correalism
Cultural_Memory
Cybernetics
Cybertecture
Cyborg
Dispositif
Diving Saucer
Dross
Earthship
Ecocatastrophe
Effluvium
Egosphere
End-use
Entanglement
Eutopia
Feedback
Foam
Folk
Gadget
Garbage House
Green Cyborg
Heuristic
Hoard
Holism
Homogenization of Desire
Hostile
Human Affect
Hybridized Folk
Hydroponic
Hyper-Materialism
Information Economy
Inner Space
Interama
Intra-Uterine
Maque
Megalopolis
Min-use
Mobility
Monorail
Multi-Hinge
Non-Design
Oceanaut
Oppositional Consciousness
Organic
Ouroboros
Panarchy
Parasite
Perceived Continuation
Permanence
Place
Prototype
Post-Animal
Reclamation
RI: Data Farms
RI: Garbage and Animals
RI:Shipbreaking
RI: Toxic Sublime
Sampling
Scale
Sensing Structure
Simulacrum
Simulation
Soft Energy
Spaceship Earth
Submersible
Superwindow
Symbiosis
Synthetic Environment
Technocratic
Technological Heredity
Technological Sublime
Telechirics
The Sublime
Thermal Panel
Actant
Thing-Power
Thinking Machines
Tool
Toxic Withdrawal
Turbulence
UV-Transparent Film
Vibrant Matter
Waste
Work

Ark

To tangibly alter a situation which involves a large connected system, John and Nancy Todd along with William McLarney developed The New Alchemy Institute research center to investigate support systems at a manageable scale. The idea was to start with the doable and change the system from the roots. This meant the human subject is being brought into the picture as a single entity versus changing the society in one large group. “The assumption was that larger units of organization can be no stronger than the elements of which they are comprised, […].”1 This focus put their philosophy into the hands of the individual quite literally when it comes to changing the hardware driven society to the personal culturing of one’s food. The “hardware-driven society” which comes up is an important issue to note as, this is a time of crisis, where the future fossil fuels per capita is estimated to become substantially limited, which would halt any large production facilities and put emphasis of resource collection on the shoulders of the smallest unit to produce their own. This jump to reducing the world to a system no bigger than the average house lot in a city is an attempt by the institute to self-contain and autotomize localized living. They call these projects an “ark” where life is sustained by limiting the inputs from undesirable outside resources.

1. John Todd, “The New Alchemists,” in Stewart Brand, J. Baldwin (Eds), Soft Technology, (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), pp.149-158.