Sunday, September 05. 2010
Via Swissnex San Francisco
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San Jose digital art festival showcases “Build Your Own World” projects including a magic book, an Internet light source for space colonies, and the sounds of ripening tomatoes.
4 Sep 2010 - 19 Sep 2010
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Practical Information:
Location:
Multiple locations in San Jose, CA
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Cost:
Day pass $24 - Multi-day Pass $45. More information below.
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The 2010 01SJ Biennial (ZERO1) presents artwork, performance, special events, and talks from September 16th through 19th under the theme, “Build Your Own World.”
swissnex San Francisco supports three projects included in this year’s interdisciplinary, multi-venue digital art Biennial. I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting, by fabric | ch, in the South Hall proposes an open source, artificial climate and public light source based on human metabolism that could be distributed through an imaginary “Deep Space Internet” to intergalactic colonies. Tomato Quintet, by Chris Chafe, Greg Niemeyer, Sasha Leitman, and Curtis Tamm, also shows in the South Hall. This piece both sonifies and visualizes the difference in air quality between a chamber housing ripening tomatoes and the ambient environment. At the San Jose Museum of Art, artist Camille Scherrer’s Le Monde des Montagnes (The World of Mountains) blends low and high tech in an interactive, ditigal fairy tale. Her augmented reality storybook lets viewers flip through the pages only to find magical animations appear on a nearby computer monitor.
With support from Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council. Stay tuned for related event announcements.
Purchase tickets
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Related events
Retro-Tech Gallery Talk
September 16, 2010 at 12:00 pm
With Kristen Evangelista, associate curator and curator of the exhibition and Camille Scherrer
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I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting (2010), by fabric | ch
fabric | ch is Christian Babski, Stéphane Carion, Christophe Guignard, and Patrick Keller. The Lausanne, Switzerland team formulates new architectural proposals and produces radical livable spaces. In 2001, architect Philippe Rahm and fabric | ch set up I-Weather.org, an open source, artificial climate based on human metabolism, circadian rhythms, and light therapy research. I-Weather.org envisioned synchronizing and distributing climate to any physical or digital space connected to I-Weather’s server.
In 2008, NASA announced the first successful communication with a distant spacecraft 20 million miles away via the Deep Space Internet, a model for a forthcoming interplanetary Internet. At the 01SJ Biennial, fabric | ch takes this idea to its conclusion by setting up I-Weather Deep Space Public Lighting, a metabolic public light source distributed through the imagined Deep Space Internet spaceships and intergalactic colonies.
Tomato Quintet (2007/2010), by Chris Chafe, Greg Niemeyer, Sasha Leitman, and Curtis Tamm
Tomato Quintet (2007/ 2010) is a “musification” and visualization of the air quality differences between a container of ripening tomatoes and the ambient environment. Tent walls made from sheets of Mylar are induced to vibrate through transducers attached to the top and bottom. Visitors to the tent will find a Plexiglass chamber filled with green tomatoes. During the course of the show, the green tomatoes will ripen to perfection while air quality sensors measure the gas output (CO, CO2, NO2, plus temperature and light). The Tomato Quintet 2.0 software will compare the patterns and differences of air qualities in the two spaces and render them audibly through speakers and headphones. On the final day of the Biennial, the project will convert the ripe tomatoes into salsa for guests to enjoy during lunch, accompanied by the sounds of the tomato ripening data accelerated by a factor of 240X.
Le Monde des Montagnes (The World of Mountains) by Camille Scherrer
In Le Monde des Montagnes (The World of Mountains) (2008), Swiss artist and designer Camille Scherrer blends low and high tech to push storybooks into an interactive realm. She has created a digital fairy tale, enlisting both her background in illustration and new media art. As the reader turns the pages of an ordinary book, a nearby computer monitor displays the very same pages augmented with mysterious animations of birds and snowflakes. Scherrer created this magical illusion with custom software and a reading lamp that contains a hidden camera.
Scherrer likes to play at the intersection of technology and art, looking for new fields of investigation. In Le Monde des Montagnes, she created her own universe inspired by the mountains where she grew up. She graduated in 2008 from the University of Art and Design, Lausanne (ECAL) in visual communication and works at EPFL+ECAL Lab, whose mission is to foster innovation at a crossroads between technology, design, and architecture. Her project was awarded Best European Design Diploma (Talent exhibition, Design huis, Eindhoven) and has been exhibited and published internationally.
Saturday, August 21. 2010
Via Domus, via Beatrice Galilee
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By Christophe Guignard
Arctic opening is an new installation for the Festival MIMI which is part of an outdoor exhibition presenting several works of art / experimental architecture. The aim of Arctic Opening is to let appear a "second day" made of a large artificial lighting, between Marseille's sunsets and sunrises, when the islands becomes dark and quiet. The light emitted by the installation will reproduce the luminous variations of a distant environment, where the sun shines 24 hours long during summer: the Arctic. This light, transported from North, will shine on a Mediterranean landscape, facing the Frioul port. Set up in a rocky zone swept by wind, close to an industrial ruin, Arctic Opening could also evoke a strange scientific expedition. Its sensing devices and climatic interfaces would analyze by anticipation a fictional and catastrophic future of an Arctic Ocean free of ice. BG
"Each day, when night falls on our urbanized landscapes in our cities, our streets or our ports, another day dawns, electric. It is literally a "second day" which begins: one of neon signs, street lights, sodium, mercury or fluorescent lighting, one of illuminated apartments and shops windows, one of night activities that we did not know two centuries ago.
Although today we no longer think much about it, this "second day" is now part of everyday life for city dwellers. Artificial light has been a conquest: by fire first, then by the gas, and more recently by electricity. This "fabricated" light permitted first to extend artificially the day at night to illuminate the darkness, but also to transform our relationship to time, to landscape and to space. It especially allowed to exceed the given natural immemorial cycle of day and night induced by the rotation of the Earth itself, and thus to redefine architectural and urban spaces.
One also began to design new architectures that did not require natural lighting anymore. In a few decades, artificial lighting profoundly altered the lifestyle of city dwellers, but not only: birds began to sing at night near the lampposts, insects to swarm under the spotlights and stars to disappear of the urban night sky, opening the door to a strange world, that combines natural and artificial cycles. Losses and gains then.
This environment, sometimes magical, sometimes disturbing, develops undoubtedly for us a poetry of shifts. Now, the challenge is to deploy these shifts, which combine presents and futures, into a comprehensive reflection on our contemporary space and our consumption of energy.
Designed for the Innovative Music Festival (MIMI 2010) in Marseille, on the Frioul islands, Arctic Opening does not aim to deny this "second day", but to amplify its positive and sensitive issues. Thus, Arctic Opening seeks to develop the potential of imagination(s) of artificial illumination, while integrating new technologies and intelligent lighting cycles of low energy consumption.
In a global environment, endlessly interconnected, which develops new forms of mobility, temporalities, and social behaviours at the crossings of time zones, this artificial day provides an opportunity for another kind of "days", simultaneous and distant: an imaginary or mediated "connection" with countries where precisely and literally, at the same time, the sun is shining. Through satellite imagery and sensor data, it is now possible to imagine opening a "window" onto a sensitive and remote light whose intensity varies continuously, the sky is sunny, then cloudy, then possibly sunny again. A window "teleporting" abstractly a remote atmosphere without physical mobility, without means of transport other than transportation data from there to here.
With Arctic Opening, fabric | ch proposes to create such an "opening" at a large scale, to another day: an artificial and sensitive light, revealing some geographical patterns, luminous and meteorological, across the globe (to the summer of one hemisphere corresponds the winter of the other, to the daylight the darkness, to the perpetual light of a pole the night of the other, etc.). When night falls over Marseille this "second day" gets up with its source somewhere north of the Arctic Circle, on the edge of the habitable zones, where once the ice melted new navigation routes open and will open more and more in the future.
Fed by light coming from regions, where in this season, the horizontal light of the sun never sets, where sunrise and sunset mix, Arctic Opening reproduces the continuous modulation of the northern summer. Composed of hundreds of light emitting diodes (LEDs), this bright band long of eighteen meters illuminates a rocky landscape, swept by winds. At sunrise, it goes slowly to reveal a temporary installation of pipes, placed there to conduct this experiment in distant light. Erected near the vicinity of a military and industrial relic of the twentieth century, a tent hosting the instruments of control suggests a possible scientific expedition in an "hostile" zone.
The combination of light produced by this window and the Frioul islands' landscape produces a composite territory: Arctic Mediterranea, remote nocturnal day. This hybrid area in mixed light is purposely created as a prospective environment, which evokes the contemporary patterns of mobility and crossing time zones, the fluxes and the networks, the artificiality and the mediatization, or to indicate the strange topographic similarities between the arid Frioul islands and the Arctic regions where no tree grows.
As if this temporary place in front of Marseille, illuminated by a light transported from the Arctic could become the distant, catastrophic and fictitious future of these northern territories: warmed by climatic changes, visited by boats navigating on new routes opened by melting ice, the shores of the Far North could begin to resemble those of the Mediterranean Sea. This environment would then hybridize himself as well, as people become increasingly mobile over time: mix of here and elsewhere, future and present, material and immaterial.
Wednesday, July 14. 2010
Via Creative Review
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by Gavin Lucas
Barnbrook has compiled and designed a 192 page book which combines graphic imagery with hundreds of shocking global facts. Did you know, for example, that 2.6 billion people do not have basic sanitation, or that life expectancy in Swaziland is just 32 years, or that there are nearly 2 million inmates currently housed in US prisons?
The various facts collected in The Little Book of Shocking Global Facts (published by Fiell, £8.95) are arranged into chapters (see two images down for the contents page) and no two spreads share the same design or layout. Essentially the book aims to highlight what the authors see as the dangers of unchecked globalisation.
Here is a selection of spreads:
The Little Book of Shocking Global Facts is published by Fiell and priced at £8.95. It is also available in a German and French editions. More info at fiell.com/page/our-books/ethical/shocking-global
Thursday, July 08. 2010
Via GOOD
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by Mother Nature Network
I ran into author and Rolling Stone contributing editor Jeff Goodell at Arizona State in Phoenix, where he was a speaker at the Covering the Green Economy conference (I also spoke). Though he had just published a book, the rumpled-looking Goodell didn’t talk about it until prodded by his fellow journalists. The book is How to Cool the Planet (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26), and it’s about geoengineering—scientific approaches to reduce the Earth’s temperature that can achieve positive results without actually reducing the carbon dioxide (CO2) we seem unable to stop pumping into the atmosphere.
Goodell’s book is not science-lite: There’s not a lot of pages devoted to crazed schemes and the dreamers who advance them. Instead, he focuses on some key scientists—including a bleeding-heart liberal who used to organize anti-nuke rallies and a former Dr. Death who created weapons systems with H Bomb designer Edward Teller—who might actually be on to something. The book’s message is that there’s no substitute for reducing CO2 emissions, but given the results of the underachieving Kyoto Treaty and the dramatic failure of COP 15, it doesn’t look like that’s happening anytime soon. And if we continue to ignore the Earth’s dire warnings, geoengineering may be a Hail Mary pass for a planet in trouble. I talked to Goodell after the conference:
MNN: How do you define geoengineering?
GOODELL: The British Royal Society defines it as large-scale, intentional intervention in the climate system to offset global warming. It’s figuring out ways to reduce the amount of sunlight that hits the planet in order to cool things off. It’s also about developing new technologies that could suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in artificial ways in order to reduce concentrations in the atmosphere.
Most people would think that was an impossible task. Did your research in how to cool the planet show that these kinds of things are really achievable on such a big scale?
One of the things that’s really surprising is that when it comes to cooling off the planet by blocking sunlight you don’t have to block very much, only 1 or 2 percent. That could offset a doubling of CO2 emissions, and doubling is the common yardstick you’ll find scientists use to talk about climate sensitivity.There are simple things that would mimic natural processes. For instance, we know that big volcanoes like Mount Pinatubo, which erupted in the Philippines in 1992, put a lot of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. The particles act like tiny mirrors. Mount Pinatubo actually lowered the temperature of the Earth by about a degree for several years.
One of the most promising and interesting ideas here is to mimic nature — build an artificial volcano that would put small amounts of such particles high into the stratosphere, higher even than a volcano would do, and reflect away a small amount of sunlight. That has not been done yet, but it is very doable, and it could have the effect of cooling off the planet. It does not eliminate the need for reducing carbon dioxide emissions, but if you wanted to find a way to cool off the planet quickly, this is one way to do it.
If I took these ideas to leading climate scientist James Hansen or to environmental writer and350.org founder Bill McKibben, would they scoff at them?
I was on a panel with Bill McKibben a few weeks ago in Vermont. Bill says the fact that we’re even talking about this seriously is a measure of how desperate things have become. One of the reasons I got into geoengineering was that I wrote a book about coal ["Big Coal"]. I realized that the world was not going to stop burning coal anytime soon, and the technology to remove CO2 from the coal stacks is not likely to work on a large scale. And so that means we’re going to be pumping a whole lot more CO2 into the atmosphere for a long time, and we’re going to blow through a whole lot of the targets scientists have set in order to avoid the risk of dangerous climate change.
And so what might we do, what are other ways of dealing with this problem? I think people like Bill McKibben and James Hansen would say this is very dangerous, manipulating the climate on this level. And we really should focus our intentions on reducing CO2 levels. And I totally agree with them. But despite what Hansen has been saying for 30 years and McKibben for almost as long, we’re not doing a very good job of it. Emissions are going up, up, up, and by any meaningful measure we’re not making progress.
So I think it’s important to at least think about geoengineering, to at least articulate what the risks and dangers are so we can better understand it.
What are some of the more far-out geoengineering concepts for reducing global warming effects?
There are basically two categories of techniques, one of which is reducing the amount of sunlight that hits the planet, which would work very quickly — it’s like popping a parasol on a beach. And in that category are things like pumping particles high into the stratosphere, and also brightening marine clouds. We know that can work because ships do it — particles from diesel exhaust stimulate cloud growth and reflect away sunlight. Other ideas are about changing the reflectivity of the Earth — even Energy Secretary Steven Chu has talked about painting roofs white, and roads white, which would have a small effect.
The other category encompasses ideas that would suck CO2 out of the air, ranging from dumping iron into the ocean to stimulating plankton blooms (which would pull carbon out of the surface waters and out of the air). There is also using a chemical process to build machines called artificial trees that will pull CO2 out of the atmosphere directly. Think of a kind of iron lung for the planet that would allow us to dial in the kind of climate we want. Those are some of the more practical things.
One of the far-out, science-fiction ideas is putting mirrors in space—I don’t take those ideas very seriously because they’re very expensive and would take hundreds of years to implement. Researchers also have had the crazy idea of dumping plastic balls or Styrofoam into the ocean in order to change the reflectivity of the Arctic Ocean. Some have even talked about launching a nuclear weapon at the moon to create a lot of moondust and reflect away sunlight. There are a lot of wacky ideas.
Isn’t there some idea involving the breakfast cereal Special K?
Yes, one researcher has talked about dumping thousands of millions of tons of Special K into the ocean with the idea that it would change the reflectivity of the oceans while also adding nutrients and creating plankton blooms—so it would be a lot of bang for the buck. These are the nutty ideas that a lot of garage thinkers are putting out there. I tried to not focus too much on that stuff, because it just makes you laugh and this is a really serious endeavor. To focus too much attention on those things undercuts the seriousness of the science.
I think you were a bit surprised that the fossil fuel lobby actually loves your book.
When the galleys of the book came out, the first call I got was from one of the big fossil fuel lobbying firms, inviting me to Washington and offering to sponsor talks. They love the idea, because if it’s positioned for them in the right way, which for me is the wrong way. They hear the message, “We don’t have to worry about cutting back on oil and coal and other fossil fuels if we can just put some sulfur particles up in the sky and continue on our merry way.” It’s a diet pill for our climate problems. But in reality, that’s kind of a nightmare scenario because reducing the sunlight that hits the planet is not a cure-all for the problems of high CO2 levels. Among other things, we’d still have to deal with the most important consequence of those high levels, which is the ongoing acidification of the oceans.
Jim Motavalli is a New York Times contributor who blogs about green transportation for MNN.
Personal comment:
When it comes to the point of intentionnaly architecture the planet as a whole (unintentionnaly we do for centuries). So to say, CO2 and other type of emissions are already the geoengineering of the planet.
Tuesday, May 25. 2010
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by Nicola
IMAGE: Screen grab showing global agricultural land-use in 1700, from World Cropland, Bill Rankin, 2009.
At Bill Rankin’s fantastic Radical Cartography site you can see an animation that shows the intensification and spread of agricultural land-use around the world over the past three hundred years.
IMAGES: Screen grabs showing global agricultural land-use in 1750 and 1800, from World Cropland, Bill Rankin, 2009.
I could spend hours with these maps: for example, it’s amazing to see that agricultural activity in India in 1700 is as intensive, if not more so, than in the traditional bread-baskets of the Caucasus or the densely populated areas of Northern Europe. The persistent un-farmed patch of France’s Massif Central is also interesting: even the Alps appear to have more agricultural activity.
IMAGES: Screen grabs showing global agricultural land-use in 1850 and 1900, from World Cropland, Bill Rankin, 2009.
Rankin notes that the major trend of the past three hundred years is simply the intensification of farming practices on land that was already agricultural, “punctuated by several episodes of rapid expansion into previously untapped areas: the Great Plains in the late nineteenth century, Argentina in the early twentieth century, and in last few decades, Brazil and central India.” He also points out rare but occasional declines in agricultural density: in the “central Amazon, northern Patagonia, or the Appalachian Piedmont after World War II.”
IMAGES: Screen grabs showing global agricultural land-use in 1950 and 1992, from World Cropland, Bill Rankin, 2009.
You might be wondering how Rankin knows what percentage of land was used for growing crops in 1700, before much of the world had even been charted, let alone systematically analysed in terms of land-use.
The dataset on which Rankin’s animation is based was developed by Navin Ramankutty and Jonathan Foley, whose methodology relied on an assessment of global agricultural land in 1992, at “5 min spatial resolution” (about 10 km at the equator), by “calibrating a remotely sensed land cover classification data set against cropland inventory data.” They then compiled an “extensive database of historical cropland inventory data, at the national and subnational level, from a variety of sources,” and processed that information through their 1992 land cover/inventory algorithm, in order to arrive at a historical reconstruction.
As Ramankutty and Foley freely acknowledge, the resulting map is a guess, albeit an extremely educated one that also matches what we know of “the history of human settlement and patterns of economic development.”
As always, much of the interest in maps like these lies in thinking about what is or isn’t measured—and why. Personally, I’m intrigued by the intensification metric, and the visual implication, as Bill Rankin puts it, that “many agricultural areas are at close to 100% exploitation.” This doesn’t seem quite right: Ramankutty and Foley are measuring agricultural land use (and only at a resolution of about 10 km at the equator), not productive potential. After all, surely an area of land could be solely devoted to agriculture and yet produce wildly differing yields depending on the crops sown and the farming techniques used?
IMAGE: Map showing the suitability of land for agriculture. The map (larger view here) is derived from more data sets developed by Ramankutty and Foley, available at the Atlas of the Biosphere.
Elsewhere, Ramankutty and Foley have also collaborated to map agricultural potential, based on “the temperature and soil conditions of each grid cell.” Somewhat implausibly, since agriculture both shapes and is shaped by human civilisation, the suitability rating ignores human inputs—urban sprawl, artificial irrigation, topsoil creation—altogether.
Stepping even further away from plausibility (and human intervention), Ramankutty and Foley subsequently produced a fascinating map of potential vegetation, showing “the vegetation that would exist at a given location had human forms of land use never existed.”
IMAGE: Map of potential vegetation. The map (larger view here) is derived from more data sets developed by Ramankutty and Foley, available at the Atlas of the Biosphere.
It is an alternate surface of the earth, carefully surveyed and classified by a human civilization that could not have existed in order for it to be a reality.
On a similar note, Colorado State University researcher David Theobald has designed a new system for evaluating and mapping the “naturalness” of a landscape. In his review, Rob Goldstein describes Theobald’s methodology thus:
Specifically, Theobald used existing land use data to apply scores at a scale of 30 metres. Urban/built-up areas, roads and cropland were assigned a score of “0.” Natural areas (i.e. forests, grassland, wetlands, etc.) were assigned a score of “1.” Roads and rural development negatively impacted the scores of adjacent areas.
Using this technique, Theobald arrived at “a natural landscape score of .6621 for the conterminous United States in 2001.” In other words, the lower forty-eight states are sixty-six percent “natural,” and only one-third human-designed, or “unnatural.”
The project seems flawed on several levels (it is somewhat incredible that Owens Valley, with its hijacked river and poisonous lake-bed, could receive the “highest naturalness” scores under any rubric), but the paradox of its premise is fascinating—that a pure form of nature can be carefully located and recognised as such by humans whose activity otherwise renders impossible its very existence.
Theobald suggests that his system is a useful tool for conservationists seeking to prioritise their efforts. To me, however, it is more interesting as a geographic expression of impossible nostalgia—the land-use database equivalent of medieval monks calculating how many angels could dance on a pin.
Personal comment:
This is to be put in parallel with Jared Diamond's book: Guns Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies that explain the evolution of human socities from a geographic/food point of view, that would in a way generate, according to Diamond, social and cultural diversities. An eye opening book on the interaction between environment and human societies.
Just one comment as well about the title: I don't think any percent of land and atmosphere is natural anymore. We've totally changed the quality of air (not saying climate) through human activities at least since the industrial period (but in fact much earlier, agricultural, etc.) and we could also consider the change of perception in landscape through communication electromagnetic waves. A large part of the landscape has now become a sort of "invisible urban territory" though electromagnetic networking.
Tuesday, May 18. 2010
Rethinking Location Anytime Anywhere Everything :: until June 19, 2010 :: Sprüth Magers, Oranienburger Straße 18, D-10178 Berlin.
With works by Rosa Barba - Cyprien Gaillard - Andreas Hofer - Koo Jeong-A - David Maljkovic - Trevor Paglen - Christodoulos Panayiotou - Sterling Ruby - Paul Sietsema - Taryn Simon - Armando Andrade Tudela - Andro Wekua. Curated by Johannes Fricke Waldthausen.
Evolving from the work of twelve conceptual artists, filmmakers and photographers presenting alternate interpretations of fictional geographies, imaginary sites and ‘mash-up’ destinations, the exhibition Rethinking Location reconsiders the notion of location. In an era characterized by a rapidly changing perception of time and space due to ever increasing mobility, migration and globalisation, our understanding of what a location is has significantly transformed. Taking these changes for granted, the exhibition investigates how artists consider location and geography as source material for their work.
The work of Rosa Barba and Taryn Simon often derives from an interest in unusual places or improbable situations: Barba’s film The Empirical Effect (2010) explores a geographical ‘Red Zone’: weaving a fiction around the Vesuvio Vulcano, her film was shot during an actual evacuation test and, on another level, points towards the complex relationships between society and politics in Italy. Collaborating with the scientific research laboratory Observatorio Vesuviano in Naples, Barba creates a fictional documentary including surveillance cameras, seismographs and early archival material of Naples by the Lumière Brothers. Empathizing with the role of a contemporary ethnographer, the work of New York based photographer Taryn Simon oscillates between an aesthetisized realism and collective memory. The works shown in Rethinking Location symbolically refer to sites of geopolitical weight, such as the Interior of Fidel Castro’s Palace of the Revolution in Havanna and night shots of a checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah on the West Bank.
In his work Cyprien Gaillard alters the hierarchy of geographical sites and their representative value by detaching them from their original connotations: it deconstructs and conflates actual landscapes perpetuated by a spirit of anachronism and ruin of both past and present. His Fields of Rest series (2010) evolves around decomposed architecture of Second World War bunkers at the coastlines of the French Normandy. Paul Sietsema’s 16 mm films, drawings and sculptures bridge color, space and movement through subjects spanning a broad geographic and temporal range. Over the last years, Sietsema has gathered archival photographs of artifacts of ‘lost cultures’, often from rare anthropological and ethnographic books. The artifacts he examines and transcribes into his own work often derive from western colonialism, industrialisation and geographic explorations including Oceania, South Asia, and Africa. In his film analyse d´une épouse (2008) he traces a ship-wreck, capturing its ruins on celluloid like timeless sculptures of a lost cultural memory.
Recalling thoughts by Bourriaud of the artist as Semionaut, treating geography as source material for new work, the drifting and the displacement between different cities allows artists to enter multi-dimensional, seminal dialogues within different contexts. Within both a local and global artistic practice charted by increasing displacement, expeditions, sites, destinations, distances and routes are elements that become incrementally significant.
Interested in topographies of detachment and displacement, Peru-born Aramando Andrade Tudela explores the notion of ‘tropical abstraction’. Referring to the potential of 1960s utopian modernist architecture from South America, his 16 mm film Espace Niemayer (2007) takes place in the headquarters of the French communist party in Paris. Shot mostly in close-up mode, Tudela transformed the site built 1967 – 1972 by Brasilian architect Oscar Niemayer into a non-place: a fictional site without geographical foundation.
Koo Jeong-A creates mythologies and imaginary sites within the logic of existing places. Her work often gives prominence to the hidden, the ephemere, and the invisible. For the exhibition Koo Jeong-A produced a new series of works, consisting of geological and social layers where maps, drawings and signs extend to a notional geography. Furthermore, she created a site specific, secret surprise location yet to be discovered.
Andreas Hofer’s work overlaps science fiction, scientific research and popular culture. Often evolving around early film noir, comics and crime literature, his multi-media installation Robert and Matt Maitland (2010) responds to the notion of the artist as an explorer. His work in the exhibition archly superimposes the protagonist from J.G. Ballard’s 1974 science fiction novel Concrete Island and the setting of a geographic exploration from a 1950s comic classic. By blending two originally detached storylines, Hofer proposes a new imaginary landscape.
Today intersections between actual sites, mass media and communication technology transform places into virtual mash-up locations: archipelagos of alternating signs oscillating between the actual and the virtual. Moreover, the internet has significantly increased the presence of maps and navigation systems in our thinking. For example, it has become easier to generate maps, to share and alter them, and to create them collaboratively (e.g. GPS and geo-tagging systems like Google Maps and Google Earth).
The art of Trevor Paglen blurs the border of art, science, and politics. Holding a Ph.D. in geography and operating at USC Berkeley’s geography department, Paglen uses data analysis, advanced research skills and state-of-the-art photo observation techniques to map the terrain of American military secrets. He appropriates scientific imagery and dicourses of astronomy to provide the framing for what he calls an ‘experimental geography’. In his series The Other Night Sky Paglen turns our attention to some 189 secret intelligence satellites operated by the U.S. military to keep most of the world under surveillance.
The juxtaposed positions within Rethinking Location express a vast area of interconnected ideas and systems in a world where places are increasingly re-articulated and interrelated. Fostering an interdisciplinary approach, the exhibition aims to serve as inspiration to reconsider what the notion of location implies today. After the recent emphasis on networks and communities, could the focus now shift to location as a new key dimension?
Monday, May 10. 2010
Via e-flux
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Eduardo Abaroa
Proposal: We Just Need a Larger World, 2009 (detail)
Courtesy the Artist & kurimanzutto gallery, Mexico City
Uneven Geographies:
Art and Globalization
8 May – 4 July 2010
Nottingham Contemporary
Weekday Cross
Nottingham NG1 2GB
UK
info@nottinghamcontemporary.org
http://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org
Éduardo Abaroa (Mexico City), Yto Barrada (Tangiers), Ursula Biemann (Zurich), Bureau d'Études (Paris), Öyvind Fahlström, (Rio de Janeiro, Stockholm & New York), Goldin + Senneby (Stockholm), Mark Lombardi (New York), Steve McQueen (Amsterdam & London), Cildo Meireles (Rio de Janeiro), George Osodi (Lagos & London), Bruno Serralongue (Paris), Mladen Stilinović (Zagreb), Yang Zhenzhong (Shanghai)
Curated by TJ Demos and Alex Farquharson (Director, Nottingham Contemporary)
Uneven Geographies focuses on projects by artists concerned variously with visualising the transnational mobility of capital, goods and people in today's global networks. Its point of departure is the assumption that the opaque and labyrinthine workings of worldwide economies tend to frustrate attempts to represent the historic conditions and expanding geographies that define current forms of globalization. Artists have consequently turned to the invention of innovative ways of imaging and narrating, analysing and reconceptualizing the processes and relations of globalization - whereby geopoetics mediates geopolitics.
Without returning to an imaginary lost language of objectivity, these artists' practices mobilize experimental forms of transnationalism—whether in regards to labour, migration, or resource allocation—via active and creative re-stagings by which the underlying relations of profit and exploitation become legible and are imaginatively reconfigured. These strategies creatively re-animate the novelistic and poetic, the cartographic and the documentary, the performative and the ludic, which connect to global processes situated in relation to varied geographies, including Mexico, the Congo, Morocco, Central Asia, the Bahamas and Mumbai. In the case of Fahlstrom—here the exhibition's historical forebear—and Lombardi, networks are tracked, rhizomatically, around the globe in diverse flows of capital and relations of power. With the photographic and video-based projects of Barrada and Biemann, passages of migration are imaged with ambivalence, evoking both the disenfranchisement of statelessness and its empowering potential. Whereas McQueen invests the imagery of Sub-Saharan manual labour with perceptual affect and literary allusion, contesting documentary legibility yet connecting current operations to the history of colonialism, Goldin + Senneby reveal how the conditions of post-representation serve as well to cloak unregulated economic power today.
These far-reaching engagements with the creative imaging of the cultural geographies of globalisation will be extended further through its public programme, in partnership with University of Nottingham and Nottingham Trent University. The programme include Lars Bang Larsen on Öyvind Fahlström, a short residency by Ursula Biemann, Renzo Martens and Alfredo Cramerotti on Episode III – "Enjoy Poverty", John Tomlinson on the acceleration of capitalism, and a keynote lecture by Saskia Sassen. The exhibition opens with a one-day conference, The Geopolitical Turn: Art and the Contest of Globalization featuring Cramerotti (author, Aesthetic Journalism), Angus Cameron (co-author, The Imagined Economies of Globalization and emissary of Goldin + Senneby), Mark Fisher (author, Capitalist Realism), geographer Alex Vasudevan, Sara Motta (Co-Director of The Centre for the Study of Global and Social Justice at The University of Nottingham), participating artists Biemann, Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler, Bureau d'Études and George Osodi and the exhibition's curators. All events are free but booking is essential. See our website for full dates: http://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org
Wednesday, April 14. 2010
Via ArchDaily
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by David Basulto
AMO is a design and research studio inside OMA, a think tank operating on the boundaries of architecture: media, politics, sociology, sustainability, technology, fashion, curating, publishing and graphic design. Some of their works include the barcode flag for the EU and a study for Wired magazine.
And while OMA covers sustainable strategies on a building or master plan scale, AMO is approaching it on en European scale as one of the five consultants conducting technical, economic and policy analyses for Roadmap 2050, an initiative by the European Climate Foundation which looks to chart a policy roadmap for the next 5-10 years based on the European leaders’ commitment to an 80-95% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050. You can download a brief of Roadmap 2050 in PDF.
Roadmap 2050 © AMO
The goal is to achieve a 2% energy efficiency saving per year in order to meet this goal, with power and vehicle transportation being the most important areas.
Through the complete integration and synchronization of the EU’s energy infrastructure, Europe can take maximum advantage of its geographical diversity. The report’s findings show that by 2050, the simultaneous presence of various renewable energy sources within the EU can create a complementary system of energy provision ensuring energy security for future generations.
AMO’s work focuses on the production of a graphic narrative which conceptualizes and visualizes the geographic, political, and cultural implications of the integrated, decarbonized European power sector.
On their study you can find an interesting approach to a diverse european energy grid, including energy trade and the use of new non-traditional sources.
Eneropa © AMO
The image of “Eneropa” appears as a new continent based on its energy production: Biomassburg, Geothermalia, Solaria, the Tidal States… are part of this new territory. Other branding concepts are introduced on the study, creating a tangible image of this ambitious plan, which reminds the powerful (yet simple) idea behind the barcode flag.
You can download the full study in PDF format at the Roadmap 2050 website.
More after the break:
Energy source © AMO
Power grid 2050 © AMO
Solar / wind energy © AMO
Decarbonized grid power distribution © AMO
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Additionnal images and comments on the same topic by InfraNet Lab
[Eneropa - The New European Map? Image via OMA/AMO]
An interesting new report by AMO for Roadmap 2050 recently emerged online. Roadmap 2050 is a policy roadmap to address the 80-95% reduction in CO2 emissions targeted by Europe for 2050. The AMO study creates a new image of Europe as Eneropa, a continent now defined by energy territories – Biomassburg, Geothermalia, Solaria, Isles of Wind, Tidal States, etc…. These new territories are connected by a new green grid, represented by AMO in a language akin to subway transit maps – isolating nodes of production and movement corridors for energy. While doing so, this new networked grid creates a legible structure of energy infrastructure which is displayed in various branding schemes. The report also discusses the possibility of an energy exchange with North Africa, utilizing the solar potential of North Africa in exchange for wind energy from Eneropa"""''s Isles of Wind.
[The Target: 85-90% reduction in CO2 emissions. Image via AMO/OMA]
[Predicted Energy Supply in 2050]
What would happen to the old energy infrastructure of Europe? The report suggests that this could be preserved as as Unesco Sites of the pre-Eneropa world. Perhaps as a memory/ reminder of the world reliant on carbon, these would be the monuments of a world enthralled with energy. And how much would this cost? AMO"""''s study estimates that the increased energy cost per household to live in a decarbonized Europe would only be 140 euros. The report also touches on some new energy initiatives and technological breakthroughs. You can access the Report PDF here.
[Rendering of Solaria via OMA/AMO]
[Rendering of Hydropia. Image via OMA/AMO]
[Energy Grid of Eneropa. Image via OMA/AMO]
Personal comment:
Intersting to see that "sustainable solutions" are taking advantage of geographic diversities. Answers seems to come at the scale of at least large regions or continents, taking differencies into account. Can we speak here about global sustainability, global differencies, maybe "networked miscegenation" or "networked mobility".
These are themes that interest us for a while now and we see here a confirmation and a way to continue to go with those concepts in our work.
Friday, January 29. 2010
by Stephen Messenger, Porto Alegre, Brazil on 01.28.10
Photos: Stephen Messenger
After several days of meetings outlining the various threats posed by the current geopolitical and economic status quo, day four of the World Social Forum was largely dedicated to discussing the necessary solutions. Capitalism and the consumer culture it promotes were again the targets of criticism--and reiterated to be at the center of the looming crises of the 21st century. Climate change, growing disparities between rich and poor, and a laundry-list of social injustices were said to all be 'symptoms' of an unsustainable economic model which needs to be addressed to effect any real change--and a need for radical change in human behavior.
Current Trends Show Limits
In a meeting this morning to address the challenges of a "Sustainable Era," political economist Dowbor Ladislaus discussed the future projected by current trends in resource consumptions. One of his major concerns was with skyrocketing birthrates, articulating a need for population control to quell increasingly unsustainable cultural preferences. "Everyone wants to consume more meat, which means more methane and heat. We have to rethink it," he said.
Meanwhile, various speakers met to discuss how a new approach to governance could help ease the trends outlined by Ladislaus, with a new economic model based on sustainability. Getting more people involved and concerned for the environment is the key to moving towards a "post-capitalist horizon," said Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Souza.
Every challenge to the current political hegemony will depend on a broad consensus. It is necessary to focus on democracy; A more advanced democracy, participatory democracy, a democracy Community.
Boaventura de Souza addresses an audience at the Forum.
Amit Sengupta of India's People's Health Movement took the urgency of creating more involvement a step further:
It is not enough to defeat capitalism and build a new hegemony. We must also protect humanity from extinction. Perhaps the human species can not survive capitalism. If we want to save the world, people who form the vast majority of the world, should be emancipated and allowed to achieve their minimum aspirations.
Governments Need to Change
Later on in the afternoon, former Brazilian Environmental Minister and current Senator Marina Silva continued the themes of reforming the way humanity is governed when she spoke before an audience of roughly 500 in Porto Alegre.
The current model of civilization is in crisis. We can no longer patch it. The economic model also shows the phenomenon of exhaustion. And the environmental crisis is exemplified by the current climate change.
Silva was accompanied by Oded Grajew, who founded the first World Social Forum ten years ago and Boaventura de Souza from an earlier conference. She praised the persistence and determination of those "utopian dreamers" who battle against neolibralism.
Former Brazilian Environmental Minister, Marina Silva.
Quality of Life Could Be Sustainable
According to Silva, the vast majority of people in the world are not interested in the economic prosperity that drives the wealthy few, but are rather seeking a sustainable quality of life. Sadly though, she said, that minority is capable of reaping cultural and environmental devastation in its pursuit.
She referenced the impact of past imperialism--noting that there were 5 million natives in Brazil in 1500, but five centuries later, there are only 700 thousand.
We must change the policy, change the planet and always with an ethical commitment, forging an alliance between the generations. Everything we do now will surely pass on to future generations. We reached the age of limits. We must begin the march towards transformation.
Check out coverage of Day 5 at the World Social Forum tomorrow.
More on the World Social Forum 2010
World Social Forum - Day 1: "Another World is Possible"
World Social Forum - Day 2: "Rich Nations, Clean Your Mess!"
World Social Forum - Day 3: "Earth Can't Sustain Capitalism"
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Via TreeHugger
Tuesday, January 19. 2010
The world-wide mobility explosion is an enormous challenge for designers. How can we convince people that current forms of continuous mobility are no longer ecologically sustainable? Should mobility simply be made unaffordably expensive? Or can we design viable alternatives
As a prelude to the ElectroSmog festival De Balie in Amsterdam will present a showcase of design proposals, practical projects and design-ideas that should persuade us to start moving less.
With on-line and on-site contributions by among others:
John Thackara, director of Doors of Perception, the international conference and knowledge network which sets new agendas for design, will highlight design projects that try to tackle the question of mobility reduction.
www.doorsofperception.com
Stefan Agamanolis, director of Distance Lab, Dublin, will present the specific focus of his organisation on networking rural and remote area’s. The relevant question for the ElectroSmog festival is whether we can live in a sustainable way in the green and still connect to the rest of the world, culturally and economically?
www.distancelab.org
David van Gent is a managing consultant for IBM on Learning Strategy & Technology, Virtual Worlds, Serious Gaming & Web 2.0. He will talk about and demo the Virtual Offices project of IBM, using open SIM technology (similar to second life):
( See for instance this CNN item )
The Medialab Prado, Madrid will present their recent project “In the Air” (tbc); “a visualisation project which aims to make visible the microscopic and invisible agents of Madrid´s air (gases, particles, pollen, diseases, etc), to see how they perform, react and interact with the rest of the city.
(..) The project proposes a platform for individual and collective awareness and decision making, where the interpretation of results can be used for real time navigation through the city, opportunistic selection of locations according to their air conditions and a base for political action.”
www.intheair.es
Eric Kluitenberg, head of the media department of De Balie and initiator of the ElectroSnog festival, will present the concept behind the festival. Besides exploring the critique of mobility theoretically, ElectroSmog will also address the issue practically. All international presentations in the festival will be realised by means of tele-connections between the different international locations.
www.electrosmogfestival.net
This program will be streamed live on the internet – for details please refer to:
www.debalie.nl/live
datum | Thursday 21 January, 20.30 hrs.
language | Engels
entrance free entree
www.debalie.nl/media
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Via The Mobile City
Personal comment:
Shall we start to move less? This question will be asked (and answered?) during this coming event in Amsterdam. Some names to follow here (like John Thackara).
For my part I would rather say "move more sustainably", "move with purpose(s)" and somethimes "move in a mediated way", mix all those approaches, because I believe mobilty will increase in the future rather than the countrary.
Besides, mobility has brought a lot to the transformation of societes. In good and bad ways of course. Experimenting more with the ones that have some potential (like mixing of cultures while keeping differences or on the other side interbreeding, hybridations, some side of tourism --a tiny part--, creation of abstract and interferential environments and experiences --planes, trains, -- global spatial experiences --airports, branded hotels--, ...) would also be an interesting path to experiment while keeping a critical look to it.
One can hardly deny the fact that mobility has created new spaces (and paved the way for globalization, unsustainable at this stage) that have some potential (hybdrids, interferential, ex-dimensional, etc.). These environments add themsleves to the already existing "local spaces", that won't and shouldn't disappear. Mobility is in fact an old dream (even an old utopia from the 60ies) that is coming to reality in its own way. It's time probably to architecture this mobility and this global scale with sustainable and contemporary concepts that look further than just mere economics, profits or functionality!
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