Van Mensvoort

Artist and philosopher. The discovery of Next Nature has been the most profound experience in my life so far. It is my aim to better understand our co-evolutionary relationship with technology and help set out a track towards a future that is rewarding for both humankind and the planet at large.

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Rather than growing whole steaks in bio-reactors, Knitted Meat assumes that it is more feasible to create thin threads of protein. Supermarkets sell balls of meat fiber seasoned with various spices and vegetable flavors. New kitchen appliances enable consumers to weave meat according to preset preferences. Texture, taste and tenderness can be controlled to create a personal, multisensory eating experience. Groups of diners can even knit their own sections of a protein scarf, enabling multiple people to share a unique moment.

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Here’s a video for the tiny niche of Dutch-speaking-long-attention-span-visitors of this website. Some months ago the Rotterdam Think Café organized a Next Nature night featuring your dearest long-standing nextnature connoisseur. Rather than a lecture, the event was an improvised conversation on next nature in response to images selected by the organizers. Slow video alert!

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Today, shoes have been naturalized to the extend that we hardly can imagine life without them. Yet, shoes didn’t exist in old nature, hence there must have been a day when footwear was a radical new technology people had to get attuned to. At that time, some ten-thousand of years ago, one had to decide whether to embrace or decline the emerging footwear technology, similar to mobile technology in our time.

Over the years, footwear moved from being an unfamiliar to an accepted phenomenon, from a second nature to a first nature. Like the mobile phones we carry only more recently, we can still decide to take off our shoes and experience life without them today. Indeed almost no one ever does that for a longer period, but at least we can.

The unidentified wearer of the Converse Sneaker Tattoo apparently decided he didn’t want to experience any shoe-less moments in life anymore? Or he just wanted to get his feet on a blog? In any case, he got what he wanted. Peculiar image of the week. Via BoingBong.

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Here’s one for the retro-trendwatchers. This 24-minute self-directed film was made in 1996 by artist-writer Douglas Coupland as a portrait of postmodern culture. Soon after it was abandoned and forgotten, yet if you watch it now it is striking how the film anticipates contemporary phenomena like social media and self-branding. You may want to spend 24-minutes on this Close Personal Friend.

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The Kitchen Meat Incubator does for home cooking what the electronic synthesizer did for the home musician. It provides its users with a set of pre-programmed samples that can be remixed and combined to their liking. Besides the preparation of traditional styles like steak, sausage or meatballs, consumers can bring their own imagination to the meat preparation process. The handy sliders on the device control size, shape and texture. More expensive models of the Kitchen Meat Incubator also come with a wireless link that allows you to download meat recipes from the internet or share them with friends.

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Another step in the fusion of the made & the born: Biological physicist Gabor Forgacs envisions to “print” new organs for use in clinical trials. Similar to an inkjet printer, Forgacs and his team use bio-ink particles to print living cells that sequentially organize themselves into a more complex tissue structures. Since the organ is printed from your own cells, chances of rejection should be minimal.

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Magic Meatballs are designed to playfully familiarize children with lab-grown meat. Young people are more prone to overconsumption of proteins and fats, and are more sensitive to the hormones and antibiotics used in conventional meat production. Luckily, lab-grown Magic Meatballs can be tailored precisely to a child’s individual needs.

The basic meat consists solely of animal protein, and the combination of fats, omega-3s and vitamins is completely customizable. Colors and flavors can also be added to the neutral base to make the meat change color or crackle in your mouth. Magic Meatballs actively involve kids with the meat they eat, so that future generations will more readily accept protein grown in labs.

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As the planet’s population speeds towards 9 billion, it’s becomes impossible to continue consuming meat like we do today. Will we all be eating rice and beans? Grasshoppers perhaps? Scientists hope to keep us eating vertebrate protein with in vitro meat. Grown in bioreactors from animal cells, in vitro meat could be a sustainable and humane alternative to raising a whole animal from birth to slaughter. The first lab-grown hamburger is expected within the next few months.

But why should lab-grown meat look like the meat we consume today? Growing protein in bioreactors could lead to entirely new forms of meat with radically different aesthetics, materials and eating rituals. While these new products might seem unfamiliar and artificial, much of the meat we already consume is divorced from the animal’s natural form: Ground beef, smoked sausages, and chicken nuggets.

A selection of these future in-vitro meat scenarios is currently shown at the highly recommended Food Culture: Eating by Design exhibition at the Design Huis in Eindhoven (NL). As you might not happen to be in the neighborhood, we will also publish them online over the next few weeks. The projects were coached by Menno Stoffelsen, Koert van Mensvoort, Cor van der Weele, Daisy van der Schaft and Ronald van Tienhoven. Illustration by K. Cheng.

Do you want to know more about the future of meat? We are writing a speculative cookbook of in-vitro meat dishes, join us on www.bistro-invitro.com.

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Unsure whether this tank escaped from an 8-bit videogame or the general that ordered the pixelated camouflage pattern didn’t quite quite understand what digital warfare is all about. Anyhow, it is our peculiar image of the week.

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Design by planning vs design by doing. Desire paths are unplanned paths grown by the erosion of its use. They emerge as shortcuts where constructed pathways take a circuitous route. Perhaps one day, all our roads will be desire paths.

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Imagine what you could do if you had one million Twitter followers. You would be so rich! Now seriously: Are followers becoming an alternative currency? Perhaps, although we are still awaiting the day that you can walk into a bakery and routinely buy a loaf of bread with your Twitter following. Scratch to win. Or if you don’t believe in lotteries, you can simply buy one million twitter followers for only $8295.

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As advances in nanotechnology bring us increasingly energy efficient products, plant life such as algae could become attractive sources for tapping energy. The Latro lamp by designer Mike Thompson is a speculative product responding to this potential future market. It utilizes living algae as its power source.

The idea was inspired by a scientific breakthrough by scientists from Yansei and Stanford University that allows a small electrical current to be drawn from algae during photosynthesis. Placing the lamp outside in the daylight, the algae use sunlight to synthesize foods from CO2 and water.

According to the ingredients list the drink does indeed contains both strawberry and dragonfruit substrates. The bats are missing, however, they’re merely added to the marketing mix to metaphorically enforce the association with night live.

Bacardi furthermore recommends to enjoy the drink with ginger ale for a quadruple biomimicmarketing mix of Dragons, Berries, Bats, Ginger and Headaches. Image consumption in the overdrive. Cheers folks!

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After being denied permission to reproduce the famed Little Mermaid statue from Copenhagen, the authorities of the modern town Vancouver (Canada) decided to go for something more realistic. The “Girl in a Wetsuit” was created by Elek Imredy.

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‘Everything is an event on the skin,’ wrote 19th-century scientist and philosopher Hermann von Helmholtz. This quote inspired body-architect & powershow speakerLucy McRae to create Morphē, a vibrant short film exploring the human body as a point of rendezvous for the made & the born.