D4TC: 'Oystertecture'

“Oystertecture: infrastructure, profanation and the sacred figure of the human,”

Essentially Wakefield has researched and seen that oysters can be a buffer against an impending catastrophe, rising sea levels. Post hurricane Sandy, NYC became more fragile. Oysters are now seen as being a living, growing, infrastructure. Wakefield challenges people to think of a world in which we use nature instead of tech to monitor and buffer certain environmental changes. Now she claims that, ‘as a species of resilient infrastructure, oystertecture is intended to secure a mode of life to govern life in a particular way.’ She mentions the company SCAPE a lot in this reading. SCAPE is a studio based in New York that looks into ways to combine regenerative living infrastructure and new forms of public space. They have their own clan of oysters that are not to be collected and eaten, but used to buffer the rising sea levels. There is now a proposition to use the oysters to create reefs. The public image of oysters has changed, it has changed from being a delicious food item, to being biopolitical. Biopolitics was developed by a man named Michel Foucault, and it is a crossing between politics and biology. It explores how they influence each other and how they can work together. Oysters are reliable because once they pick their surface to stay on, they will remain there till death and beyond. Oysters are awesome and this oystertecture is the just the beginning of using earth’s natural products in place of tech.

Questions:

• How do you feel about the idea of using nature instead of tech to monitor certain environmental changes?

• How is SCAPE using these oysters?

• After this reading what is your idea of a back loop creator?

• Would you want to be a back loop creator? (a creator who designs and create things for the a new civilization) Why?

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