The historical reset point. A society organized around limitless acquisition and consumption has finally met it's limits. Running out of cheap physical and human resources, having turned to speculation in illusory financial "products" as a means to continue fictional production, laissez faire capitalism is running down.
Year Zero posits a fresh start, a new beginning. Life rising from the wreckage of the post-capitalist post-manufacturing and post-finance economies.
The man-made environment as recyclable resource. No longer can we continue the defacto export of our "refuse" as "product" to the third-world whereby we outsource the decommissioning of our production made obsolete by design.
Subsistence at its most fundamental level.
An ecology of the basics: sunlight, heat and cold, air, water, the earth.
The flora and fauna we survive on.
The most basic protection from the elements: the clothes we cover our skin with, the shelter we build around ourselves.
There is no "new." We only transform what exists, shaping it into something that different from what it was before, having a different use and purpose.
The "disposable" plastic shopping bag becomes a new" skin"
The abandoned shopping cart becomes a mobile green house.
The shipping container a home.
The physical body -
locomotion - movement;
environmental manipulation- grasping, picking up;
Resource ingestion- air, sunlight, food and water;
resource extraction- digestion, respiration;
building/growth using extracted resources.
The mental body-
sensing- seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting;
Communicating
The body suit - The scavenger skin- a peddle powered vehicle that extends the bodies reachExamples:Shopping cart green house. Protected and enclosed by a double skin of plastic bags supported on a frame of beach umbrellas. The double skin provides translucent insulation. Pores on the skins exterior channel rain water into the dome. The shopping cart holds water containers for drinking water, an aquarium for fish, a water tank for electrolysis to provide oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for fuel. PV cells channel electricity to a car battery. An air-conditioner condenser coil removes moisture from the air creating water.Metal grid racks fan out from the cart providing multiple levels for plant growing
Detroit/Newark 2012
The Cities of Detroit and Newark are depopulating. Detroit was once the center of the american auto industry, the crown jewel of american manufacturing. American manufacturing is gone and won't be coming back, at least in its previous incarnation. Newark kept pace with the world by working in the FIRE economy: Finance, Insurance and Real Estate. The economic meltdown took IDT an Insurance company that imploded when it crossed over into the casino economy of finance, leaving an empty office tower behind
