The Project Presented was Open_Sailing
[the next idea] voestalpine Art and Technology Grant Open_Sailing_Crew http://www.opensailing.net
“Open Sailing” is the vision of an organic architecture that constitutes a laboratory for techno-social experiments. As nothing less than a process for surmounting all possible natural and human-generated catastrophes, this ambitious undertaking’s aims include fostering the human spirit of inventiveness and strengthening social solidarity. The ultimate mission of “Open Sailing” is to take on challenges like overpopulation, climate change and energy conflicts with do-it-yourself technologies: Instinctive_Architecture, Energy_Animal and Life_Cable are some of the new approaches that are being developed and tested. The immediate objective is facilitating R&D within the mobile, nomadic system of “Open Sailing”—a floating city consisting of solid, well-appointed buildings surrounded by oceanic fields. With navigation controlled by a Swarm_Search_Engine, the floating city is continually steered in the direction of what is at any particular instant the safest location. The physical configuration of the floating platform is constantly undergoing rearrangement to assure the most efficient management of information, energy and other resources. The Linzer version of this organic platform is designed to have a diameter of approximately 30 meters and to provide living space for five persons. “Open Sailing” calls into question the way we are currently populating and exploiting our planet, and asks if it could be possible to coexist in a harmonious interrelationship with one another and with our environment. The developers of “OpenSailing” think that the answer is YES, and are working in Great Britain, France and Morocco on initial prototypes. Making the seemingly impossible happen is the declared goal of voestalpine—the same approach that “Open Sailing” takes to achieving its mission. As part of their ongoing effort to actively promote innovation, voestalpine is fostering the implementation of new ideas by supporting the Art and Technology Grant, and is looking forward with great anticipation to the results that are about to emerge from [the next idea].
