I am an MA Design and Environment student at Goldsmiths College, Universitiy of London.
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Buzz Holling: Portrait
A portrait of the award-winning ecologist and founder of the resilience theory, Buzz Holling (don't get confused by the somewhat cheesy beginning...)
Preview Image: ecotrust.ca, Video: stockholmresilience.org
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Bruce Sterling on Atemporality @Transmediale.10
Preview Image: Jonathan Gröger, Video: transmediale.de
Transmediale is an international festival for contemporary art and digital culture which includes exhibitions, competitions, conferences, film and video programmes and live performances. This year's subject of the festival, to which Bruce Sterling refers, was "Futurity Now!:
2010. It is a year which has been synonymous with past images of the future. Writers and commentators throughout the 20th century strove to depict 2010 as a shining example of a future framed by technological progress and social harmony. But as 2010 draws nearer it is clear that global society is neither the utopia nor the dystopia traditionally presented in these fictions, architectures and theories of the future. Rather, it is an increasingly complex web of economic, political and cultural systems dependent on the convergence of rapidly evolving technologies. With the ubiquity of digital practices and social media firmly entrenched as an intrinsic part of our cultural code, we have caught up with our own notions of the future. The future is experiencing an identity crisis. Futurity is a concept that examines what the 'future' as a conditional and creative enterprise can be. At its heart lays the intricate need to counter political and economic turmoil with visionary futures. With FUTURITY NOW! transmediale.10 explores what roles internet evolution, global network practice, open source methodologies, sustainable design and mobile technology play in forming new cultural, ideological and political templates. transmediale.10 invites artists, scientists, media activists, thinkers and visionaries to ask not what the future has in store for us, but what do we have in store for the future? (source: transmediale.de)
Update: here's a transcript of the speech: Atemporality for the Creative Artist
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Metropolis by Rob Carter
Metropolis (2008)
Total running time: 9 mins 30 secs
robcarter.net/
Metropolis is a quirky and very abridged narrative history of the city of Charlotte, North Carolina. It uses stop motion video animation to physically manipulate aerial still images of the city (both real and fictional), creating a landscape in constant motion. Starting around 1755 on a Native American trading path, the viewer is presented with the building of the first house in Charlotte. From there we see the town develop through the historic dismissal of the English, to the prosperity made by the discovery of gold and the subsequent roots of the building of the multitude of churches that the city is famous for. Now the landscape turns white with cotton, and the modern city is ‘born’, with a more detailed re-creation of the economic boom and surprising architectural transformation that has occurred in the past 20 years Charlotte is one of the fastest growing cities in the country, primarily due to the continuing influx of the banking community, resulting in an unusually fast architectural and population expansion that shows no sign of faltering despite the current economic climate. However, this new downtown Metropolis is therefore subject to the whim of the market and the interest of the giant corporations that choose to do business there. Made entirely from images printed on paper, the animation literally represents this sped up urban planners dream, but suggests the frailty of that dream, however concrete it may feel on the ground today. Ultimately the video continues the city development into an imagined hubristic future, of more and more skyscrapers and sports arenas and into a bleak environmental future. It is an extreme representation of the already serious water shortages that face many expanding American cities today; but this is less a warning, as much as a statement of our paper thin significance no matter how many monuments of steel, glass and concrete we build.
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Human Nature & Political Values
Explore how brain and behaviour research is increasingly being incorporated into political and policy debate. Cognitive Media enriched former Tony Blair adviser Matthew Taylor's lecture at the RSA on human nature & political values in a wonderful way.
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Afterlife by Auger-Loizeau
Auger-Loizeau's brilliant project Afterlife: There's life after death, in a battery. Speculative design at its best!
13.7 billion years before the Earth existed, the blue print and elemental makeup for this planet and all its contents were formed. The big bang is widely accepted as the event responsible for the creation of everything - The universe, its stars, it’s planets; it’s trees, animals, silicon, I-pods and humanity. Nothing, including the human body, exists that cannot be created from these basic building blocks. Under normal circumstances after death, the human body would be assimilated back into this natural system.
The Afterlife device intervenes during this process to harness the chemical potential and convert it into usable electrical energy via a microbial fuel cell - a device that uses an electrochemical reaction to generate electricity from organic matter. This electricity is contained within a familiar dry cell battery.
(Source: Auger-Loizeau)
Project website: auger-loizeau.com
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Edward Burtynsky: Oil
image: edwardburtynsky.com
I'm speechless after seeing the slideshow of Ed Burtynsky's new exhibition about oil organised by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC. These images are strangely beautiful yet shocking to me. Burtynsky has traveled across the globe and explored todays landscapes of oil, from extraction and refinement to transportation and motor culture to the end of oil. He draws a rarely-seen image of the use and effects of the most critical form of energy of our time on our lives. The exhibition which shows 90 photographs and which will be traveling through 2012 explores territories formed by extraction of oil as well as cities and suburban areas affected by its use. In my eyes, Ed's work provides the very immediacy of effects which is always hard to experience on topics such as peak oil and environmental pollution.
See Ed's TED Talk:
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Flooded McDonald's by Superflex
Seems like I have missed that wonderful artpiece by the superflex collective which had been screened during January and February 2009 at South London Gallery. More Info on the project website.
"Flooded McDonald's is a film work in which a convincing life-size replica of the interior of a McDonald's burger bar, without any customers or staff present, gradually floods with water. Furniture is lifted up by the water, trays of food and drinks start to float around, electrics short circuit and eventually the space becomes completely submerged." Superflex
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Garduino and Twitter
I always enjoy when projects emerge in which interaction, open source technology and social media is being used in resilient everyday design proposals and appliances. So, here's a great instructable about how to build a garden monitoring system using the open-source electronics prototyping platform Arduino and Twitter. Instructable user natantus had the brilliant idea to combine the "Tweet-a-Watt" power-metering project with the automated garden how-to "Garduino". In this step by step tutorial you'll learn how to build your own garden that you can monitor from work, university or with your smartphone via Twitter.
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Rock (and U.S. Oil Production) Is Dead
via good.is
Mere correlation? Dastardly causality? What would this look like if it used best-of data from a magazine that hadn’t ignored the majority of hip hop, electronic music, and the American underground for the last three decades?
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