Latest news with #Noema
West Australian
27-07-2025
- West Australian
Noema, a new Bali resort, marries art with a family focus
It's become truly hard to stand out in Bali's crowded tourist-focused south-western enclave of Canggu, but sometimes it's still possible to find a good surprise. Noema Pererenan Resort, part of Indonesia's own JHL Collection of hotels, is the first resort-style property in the popular namesake beach, set within a 10-minute walk (700m) from the black sand Pererenan Beach and a couple of minutes away from its strip filled with high-brow restaurants, art galleries, and cafes. The 157 rooms are all disabled accessible thanks to large corridors, elevators and ramps. The hotel has two large, attractive swimming pools, and about 11 rooms on the ground floor have secluded verandas with direct access to the second, more private pond. Upon arriving at the lobby, which has a welcoming, large open side strewn with couches, one steps out of the largely concrete-paved surroundings and into a youthful, airy environment. Noema utilises a soothing Mediterranean-type palette of colour, where beige and light sand brown make a relaxing backdrop for splashes of greenery, and walking inside the arch-like ceiling reminded me of stepping into a Middle Eastern caravanserai structure or a Moroccan mansion. A series of couches set below the floor level and hemmed by a pond filled with red fish sets the lobby's farthest perimeter, inviting guests to look right towards the open space where a large free-form pool nestles outside of the wall-to-ceiling windows of Noema's all-day restaurant, Mamaloma. We are served a fruit-infused welcome drink as staff register us in, and soon enough we are ushered in our room, one of Noema's Imagisuite on the third floor — a large, luminous room with a cosy living room space, table and mini-bar and coffee preparing station on the left, separated by a bamboo-covered screen housing a flipping LED television that gives way to the sumptuous bedroom area. The bathroom is impressive — larger than life, with beautiful retro terrazzo tiles and a vintage and artsy vibe, a bathtub to soak in, and, if needed, enough room to accommodate a whole family with children. There's also a balcony that overlooks the swimming pool and — a very nice touch given the speed of development in the area — a relaxing view over Pererenan's last and rare rice terrace fields. Other types of rooms have a private plunge pool and their own rooftop balcony. Their warm, artist home-like feel — each has art books and colourful rugs that set the mood — is the first sign of Noema's commitment to blend hospitality with creativity and art — the rest is all visible as one strolls around the resort's three long floors. One of Noema's characteristic creative features is outside on the second floor: a rock-climbing wall realised by Japanese artist Kanoko Takaya, a mix between adult playground and work of art. A few metres away and set in a vertical open space from the ground to the third floor is another art installation by Jogjakarta-based artist Iwan Yusuf. A giant man and a woman come together in mid-air, cleverly realised using a mix of upcycled materials, most of it sourced from the sea, such as fishing nets, ropes and pieces of driftwood. Just in front of it, on the other side of the corridor on each floor, there is access to Noema's feature dedicated to kids of all ages, the Hoola Playground, which is developed using rope tunnels and slides across three stories. The area is made with a mix of rattan, bamboo and playground-type games that help kids own an area they can explore while their parents enjoy other parts of the resort. The main piece is an octopus installation made of bamboo and rattan, whose tentacles dominate the structure and become the pillars upon and among which the kids can climb, jump and explore. Adults may find the spot attractive, too — the swings and structures are certainly nice for taking pictures. A dedicated studio space is used for workshops and for exhibiting artworks, where guests can take a stroll and get to know about some contemporary Indonesian and visiting artists. Noema takes the art involvement even further by offering international artists the chance to take up residencies of about a week. The guest artists' works are then exposed at the nearby Sun Contemporary Gallery tucked away along Pererenan's main street, a delightful space funded by a South African artist. When we visited, we saw the incredibly detailed miniature paintings of South African artist Lorraine Loots, who created a series inspired by her time on the island. Noema's annexed restaurant, Mamaloma, is set around the right corner from the lobby, with views of the swimming pool hemmed by greenery and rice fields. Breakfast is a la carte, with a menu of eggs and French toast-type mains, with an additional well-stocked buffet area where the highlights definitely were the Indonesian choices (I loved the tempe and fresh ground spicy sambal on offer), the salad area, fresh cheese, and pastries. The coffee served is barista type, brewed with beans from a Jakarta-based company called Roemah Koffie. My cappuccino was frothy the way I like it. The selection of four different coffees in the rooms, all from the same brand, surprised me with fruity flavour and the high quality of the brews. If one had to try lunch at Mamaloma, the menu leans towards Italian tastes. We tried a mushroom soup, which was good but a little salty, and as an Italian I am, I had to try the sourdough pizzas. Done in a Napoli style, they have a soft and light crust that didn't feel stuffy even after I wolfed down a whole pizza. My wife tried the duck confit ravioli — served in a thick layer of olive oil and butter, it's filled with tender shredded meat to enhance the taste and flavour. Well done. I was positively impressed by Noema. The rooms are perfect for families or couples who need a little bit of extra space or an excuse to snuggle inside a foamy bathtub. The swimming pool area is quiet and hemmed by greenery, which is a rarity in these southern Bali parts, and the breakfast is definitely curated and deserving of the area's reputation for excellent food. Families with kids will enjoy having the Hoola Playground as a space to let their little ones go wild, and if I could pick, I'd say that the rooms with private pool access are definitely the highlight. Pick Noema if you look for a cosy and artsy stay with plenty of good vibes and relaxed colours, secluded and yet set deep into the heart of one of Bali's tourist hot areas. + Marco Ferrarese was a guest of Noema. They have not influenced this story, or read it before publication.
RNZ News
25-05-2025
- Science
- RNZ News
Thomas Moynihan: Is increasing complexity humanity's path to survival or destruction?
Can humanity take a path toward a better future? Cambridge University's Dr Thomas Moynihan thinks we have the tools that make it possible. Photo: CHRISTIAN BARTHOLD Humanity's strength is in our shared knowledge and thinking - a kind of 'global brain', Cambridge University's Dr Thomas Moynihan says. But does increasing complexity ultimately create a path to our species' certain destruction, or can we build a more benevolent future? Dr Thomas Moynihan is a writer interested in the history of our thoughts about the future. He is a visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and the author of X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction. And in a recent article for Noema magazine, discussed the idea we're unintentionally building an artificial 'world brain'. It is thought that 99 percent of all species that have ever lived are now extinct. But Moynihan says compared to the length of time humans have existed, it has only been the past few hundred years we've begun to seriously contemplate our own possible extinction. "When we do think about the sheer complexity of the planetary predicament and the amount of vested interest in corruption globally, the crumbling of geopolitical stabilities, I think we've reached a point of such technological might but haven't got the systems in place to harness that in productive ways. So, not to be too despondent, but it is a quite terrifying situation," he says. "There are these branching paths ahead of us, and some of these lead - in the near term, within potentially decades, maybe even years - to wholesale destruction. The world seems more precarious than ever." Moynihan is not willing to speculate on how likely extinction is for humanity, but he says others have: Lord Martin Rees, the UK's Astronomer Royal has given us a 50:50 chance of making it to the end of the century, while Oxford University philosopher Toby Ord has predicted there is a one in six chance we won't make it that long. "But then there are other futures," Moynihan says. "There are other paths out of the present wherein that doesn't happen and we continue doing the things that we've been doing." What does AI mean for the future of the planet? Can it help us save ourselves? "AI seems new and it seems scary and newfangled, because we often think that we haven't been doing that with cognitive processes - and to a degree that is true, but at the same time intelligence has never been brain-bound," Moynihan says. "We learn who we are and what we're capable of and all the things that make us powerful as intelligent agents from the outside in - we learn from copying our parents and our community. "Humans have always been completely enmeshed with their technologies and have been transformed by them, and therefore created more transformative technologies in turn. And so this is, in a sense, an extension of that long-run process that's been going on forever." Photo: 123rf The future is going to be much stranger, he says. "If things go well and these more cataclysmic scenarios don't happen, but we do develop more powerful more potent AI systems - the kind of positive vision that I see is not utopias of abundance and all human problems are solved. Again, history is going to get more complicated as that happens, and therefore that final kind of destination, that utopia is never going to quite happen, in my eyes. "We'll begin cooperating with these systems and they'll transform us and our interests will transform in turn, and it'll be this open ended ongoing process. "To really zoom out, the project of human enquiry, is all based upon us trying to know more about the world so we can navigate it better, so that we can mitigate the risks better. This began with the invention of crop circulation or the dam, or even city walls." Ironically, as we gain knowledge and our society and technology become more complex, different new risks are created, he says. "That project of inquiry that began with the invention of crop circulation also led to the invention of hydrogen bombs." Of the thinkers who have considered the invention of a global human brain, there are as many who have said it is beneficial and what we need to survive as have said it is catastrophic and terrible, he says. Each step on the pathway - from the leap from single-celled organisms to multicellular creatures, from solitary hunters to large-scale cooperative groups - each step comes with the sacrifice of separate autonomy to a collective that is a more potent and complex whole. "So, this is just to assume that all this world brain stuff is feasible anyway - which it may not be; But if you think about it, that we are creating a far more complex planetary system and are far more coordinated globally, even if that hasn't led to peace ... if that's going to intensify, then of course something like a loss of autonomy will necessarily have to happen on the human individual." Humanity was destined to make predictions about our future, but the scope of our ability to foresee what could be ahead took time to develop, he says. "You go back to anywhere in the ancient world and no-one had quite yet noticed that the entire human future could be be drastically different to the past, and in unpredictable ways, in some sense simply because there just wasn't enough historic record yet. "So there wasn't the chronicle to look back and go 'oh the past was a foreign country', such that the future might become one too. "But also because the rate of change was so slow that within one lifetime you didn't really see so many things changing - that kind of rate of unprecedented change is only going to continue." Today's forms of art, cultural expression and media would have been almost incomprehensible to the ancients, Moynihan says. Photo: AFP "Now we step into the future with almost more of the opposite, I think. We now appreciate just how complicated everything is, and just how the smallest tiny inflection or perturbation can change the entire future in completely cascading ways. "It took Edward Lorenz in the 1960s to discover this by accident by messing around with weather simulations on his computer, to arrive at this fundamental insight from chaos theory - is that even in deterministic systems, very small changes to initial systems can leave to completely divergent futures. "And ... that metaphor of the branching paths - we now know that that applies profoundly at planetary level. If that can cultivate again that kind of sense of collective responsibility, then that would be a brilliant thing." Moynihan himself is hopeful the future can be more in line with proposals that have been made of a hopeful vision and cooperative steps forward. "And I do think that in the current era - you look at the people in charge and the ways that they act, and of course that seems like a completely idealistic thing. But then again, only 200 years ago the idea that universal suffrage was real, and that women would have the vote and that civil rights would be a thing that happened, and LGBT rights - those things would have all seemed impossible. "So I think we have to keep thinking that what seems impossible to us now can change overnight." Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
RNZ News
25-05-2025
- Science
- RNZ News
Is increasing complexity humanity's path to survival or destruction?
Can humanity take a path toward a better future? Cambridge University's Dr Thomas Moynihan thinks we have the tools that make it possible. Photo: CHRISTIAN BARTHOLD Humanity's strength is in our shared knowledge and thinking - a kind of 'global brain', Cambridge University's Dr Thomas Moynihan says. But does increasing complexity ultimately create a path to our species' certain destruction, or can we build a more benevolent future? Dr Thomas Moynihan is a writer interested in the history of our thoughts about the future. He is a visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and the author of X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction. And in a recent article for Noema magazine, discussed the idea we're unintentionally building an artificial 'world brain'. It is thought that 99 percent of all species that have ever lived are now extinct. But Moynihan says compared to the length of time humans have existed, it has only been the past few hundred years we've begun to seriously contemplate our own possible extinction. "When we do think about the sheer complexity of the planetary predicament and the amount of vested interest in corruption globally, the crumbling of geopolitical stabilities, I think we've reached a point of such technological might but haven't got the systems in place to harness that in productive ways. So, not to be too despondent, but it is a quite terrifying situation. "There are these branching paths ahead of us, and some of these lead - in the near term, within potentially decades, maybe even years - to wholesale destruction. The world seems more precarious than ever. "But then there are other futures, there are other paths out of the present wherein that doesn't happen and we continue doing the things that we've been doing." What does AI mean for the future of the planet? Can it help us save ourselves? "AI seems new and it seems scary and newfangled, because we often think that we haven't been doing that with cognitive processes - and to a degree that is true, but at the same time intelligence has never been brain-bound," Moynihan says. "We learn who we are and what we're capable of and all the things that make us powerful as intelligent agents from the outside in - we learn from copying our parents and our community. "Humans have always been completely enmeshed with their technologies and have been transformed by them, and therefore created more transformative technologies in turn. And so this is, in a sense, an extension of that long-run process that's been going on forever." Photo: 123rf The future is going to be much stranger, he says. "If things go well and these more cataclysmic scenarios don't happen, but we do develop more powerful more potent AI systems - the kind of positive vision that I see is not utopias of abundance and all human problems are solved. Again, history is going to get more complicated as that happens, and therefore that final kind of destination, that utopia is never going to quite happen, in my eyes. "We'll begin cooperating with these systems and they'll transform us and our interests will transform in turn, and it'll be this open ended ongoing process. "To really zoom out, the project of human enquiry, is all based upon us trying to know more about the world so we can navigate it better, so that we can mitigate the risks better. This began with the invention of crop circulation or the dam, or even city walls." Ironically, as we gain knowledge and our society and technology become more complex, different new risks are created, he says. "That project of inquiry that began with the invention of crop circulation also led to the invention of hydrogen bombs." Of the thinkers who have considered the invention of a global human brain, there are as many who have said it is beneficial and what we need to survive as have said it is catastrophic and terrible, he says. Each step on the pathway - from the leap from single-celled organisms to multicellular creatures, from solitary hunters to large-scale cooperative groups - each step comes with the sacrifice of separate autonomy to a collective that is a more potent and complex whole. "So, this is just to assume that all this world brain stuff is feasible anyway - which it may not be; But if you think about it, that we are creating a far more complex planetary system and are far more coordinated globally, even if that hasn't led to peace ... if that's going to intensify, then of course something like a loss of autonomy will necessarily have to happen on the human individual." Humanity was destined to make predictions about our future, but the scope of our ability to foresee what could be ahead took time to develop, he says. "You go back to anywhere in the ancient world and no-one had quite yet noticed that the entire human future could be be drastically different to the past, and in unpredictable ways, in some sense simply because there just wasn't enough historic record yet. "So there wasn't the chronicle to look back and go 'oh the past was a foreign country', such that the future might become one too. "But also because the rate of change was so slow that within one lifetime you didn't really see so many things changing - that kind of rate of unprecedented change is only going to continue." Today's forms of art, cultural expression and media would have been almost incomprehensible to the ancients, Moynihan says. Photo: AFP "Now we step into the future with almost more of the opposite, I think. We now appreciate just how complicated everything is, and just how the smallest tiny inflection or perturbation can change the entire future in completely cascading ways. "It took Edward Lorenz in the 1960s to discover this by accident by messing around with weather simulations on his computer, to arrive at this fundamental insight from chaos theory - is that even in deterministic systems, very small changes to initial systems can leave to completely divergent futures. "And ... that metaphor of the branching paths - we now know that that applies profoundly at planetary level. If that can cultivate again that kind of sense of collective responsibility, then that would be a brilliant thing." Moynihan himself is hopeful the future can be more in line with proposals that have been made of a hopeful vision and cooperative steps forward. "And I do think that in the current era - you look at the people in charge and the ways that they act, and of course that seems like a completely idealistic thing. But then again, only 200 years ago the idea that universal suffrage was real, and that women would have the vote and that civil rights would be a thing that happened, and LGBT rights - those things would have all seemed impossible. "So I think we have to keep thinking that what seems impossible to us now can change overnight." Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
