Post date: Sep 30, 2013 2:40:57 PM
What is Artificial?
Artificial 1. produced by man. 2. made in imitation of, or as a substitute. 3. lacking naturalness or spontaneity; contrived, an artificial smile. 5. biol. based on arbitrary, superficial characteristics rather than natural, organic relationships.
The development of modern Western civilization has through its ideology sought to distance us from nature. The collection of human knowledge is distorted as it is collected through human minds and experiences, which selectively filter phenomena to place within the human context. The human built lens of reality perception, constitutes a massive spaceship of the mind that is made up of millions of little individualized spaceships, by which we in the emergence of the age of high technology seek to transcend the limits of what is presently accepted as physicality. The problem with this unfolding of events is that nature becomes merely the fuel tank to sustain the spaceship of humanity.
A translation of nature is an integral part of the evolving state of humanity. The human spirit is orientated towards self-realization, however the process of this self-revelatory experience is still very much unknown and therefore open to debate. Deep ecologists say that the path to self-realization and self-actualization is embedded within our habitat, both built and natural. So ecological design and sustainable design is about putting the theory of deep ecology into practice.
Our buildings, our culture and our science form an intense web of evolving artificial life (1), creations that is resulting from budding level of understanding of the world around us. To say that something is artificial is not say that it is necessarily bad. The concept appropriate technology involves the development of human scale technologies that are based on natural processees. Ecological design is about the development of human systems that replicate the basic building blocks, patterns and relationships found in nature.
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