When the earthworm hits, the consequences are massive

On my first day in New York I was wandering around Downtown when I happened to catch a glimpse of a flyer taped to a lamp post. Something about it made me stop, walk back a few paces and take a closer look. I didn’t take that close a look: seeing the words “Guggenheim”, “lab” and something to do with your local area was enough to make sure I Googled it when I got back home that evening.

Glad I did.

The BMW Guggenheim Lab is a mobile laboratory traveling to nine major cities worldwide over six years. Led by international, interdisciplinary teams of emerging talents in the areas of urbanism, architecture, art, design, science, technology, education, and sustainability, the Lab addresses issues of contemporary urban life through programs and public discourse. Its goal is the exploration of new ideas, experimentation, and ultimately the creation of forward-thinking solutions for city life.http://www.bmwguggenheimlab.org

My kind of people!

I’m signed up for various things on the programme of events and workshops with the first of them having been today: Mapping Movements and Power.

First Park | Houston at 2nd Ave

lab + urban

The lab is situated in a small city park. Well, the cafe and the loos are; the main structure itself slots into the gap where I assume a building once stood, so that the gaffiti’ed outer walls of the two remaining buildings stood either side form part of the walls of the lab.

It felt good to be in this void space so close to large, busy roads but reclaimed for discussion, debate and thinking.

And we did a lot of thinking this afternoon.

50 brains thinking about movement and power

After an introduction to the migrant earthworm – stowaways from Europe transported in the ballast of ships – four groups were each given a task. Not the usual starting point, but one to make us “start somewhere else to get somewhere else”.

  • What makes a species invasive?
  • How does your identity produce rights?
  • Describe 3 basic types of movement.
  • What should the setting of democracy look like? (ie the space it should happen in)

I was in the first group and it turns out that trying to define what an invasive species is is quite tricky! After chewing over the semantics and accompanying baggage of negative and/or conquering connotations, my understanding of a possible definition of an invasive species got distilled down to something like “agents of change (within a specific temporal and spatial frame) that transform one equilibrium to another”.

Teenage fish with legs. Just hanging out. Trying to survive with the body it has.

This definition and our other initial thoughts were then to be challenged as we applied them to fish with legs and rampant zebra mussels.

I’m not going to try and reproduce those lines of thought here, just note down a few things that seemed to resonate.

A teenage fish with legs leaves fish world, enters land world and radically changes both worlds as a result.

When tools developed for one situation (ie for being a better fish in water) are applied to a new environment (ie land), new possibilities open up. When tools are applied to a new system they can induce radical changes, rather than the changes-by-degrees they can affect in their originating system.

You don’t know you are catalysing the change of worlds when you do it.

We can’t see the future beyond the change.

Equilibrium is an illusion – there is no fixed state of “before” that we can go back to.

When the change comes about, not only can you not foresee your wants and needs in the new world, but your measures of value will be out-dated too.

Zones of transition are where the evolution happens. Should we be preserving the forest fringes in order to preserve the sites where innovation happens? Can we take that a step further and promote conditions for forest fringes to form?

When the earthworm hits, the consequences are massive.