New course starting tomorrow at interfaculty Artscience (KABK, Den Haag) by Cocky Eek & Maja Kuzmanovic

“The ultimate goal of farming is not growing of crops, but cultivation (…) of human beings.” — Masanobu Fukuoka

In his essay Plan/Plant/Planet, Terrence McKenna proposed that plants could represent organizational principles for life in the 21st century (McKenna 1992). What would our response to climate change be if the majority of humanity embraced the slowness, introspection and resilience of a vegetal culture, working with whole life-cycle systems, renewable technologies and other characteristics of plant life? Plants are able to both sustain themselves and replenish their surroundings – from purifying the air and fertilizing the soil to recycling waste and producing energy.

The interconnectedness of the human and the vegetable has been a recurring theme in art, science and religion for millennia. Think of Hildegard of Bingen’s Viriditas, The Voynich Manuscript, Andy Goldsworthy’s poetic works, Clive Backster’s bio communication experiments, or the imaginative crescographs by Jagdish Chandra Bose and Randall Fontes.

Nowadays, at the crux of art and culture, gardening and technology we might be able to comprehend how plants can become organizational principles for our lives in the turbulent times of the 21st century. How do we instill the values of a vegetal culture into today’s fast-paced, predatory consumer societies? How can we intertwine pre-industrial, even archaic relationships between humans and plants with new technologies? What is the range of possible human-plant interactions, beyond the merely functional food and fuel? Can we invoke a vegetal future through alternate realities and storytelling? What can we learn from ethno-botany (the study of cultural uses of plants) to inspire contemporary techno-artistic experiments?

In this research project, we look at how can ethno-botanical stories (of the past, present and future) seep into reality of everyday life. One of the possible approaches is to design an alternate reality narrative (ARN) - an immersive story that evolves through the interaction with the layers and audiences. The stories could be encountered online - through games, apps and websites - and in the physical world – in objects, surfaces, gardens, farms, parks and green spaces in cities. Each encounter could serve a different  purpose; a game might get players to think about what it is to be a plant, whereas a garden might teach visitors how to grow their own food. These encounters are not isolated. Information can flow between the different parts of the narrative, with plant sensors feeding data into a game, game and website interactions being displayed in the real world, through augmented reality devices, physical materials and artifacts. By straddling the online and offline world, the realms of gamers and of gardeners, Borrowed Scenery aims to engage people in an immersive story that can reinvigorate the relationship between humans and plants, culture and nature. The story embraces the participatory capabilities of digital technologies, and is told in a multitude of turbulent ecosystems, while being grounded in hallowed cultural traditions.

We will work towards a functioning public experiment including both online and physical components, with a compelling narrative connecting them into a coherent and inspiring whole. The most promising experiments will have the possibility to be included in a larger ARN developed as a part of the European project PARN (physical and alternate reality narratives).

by Nam June Paik (from Eine Data Base, La Biennale di Venezia German Pavilion 1993)

Para você que lê música e entende alemão. Não é o meu caso, mas este livro me pareceu extremamente interessante, assim que o tive nas mãos. Por Josef Matthias Hauer. Um dia não muito longínquo eu vou entender tudo de teoria musical.

Bebida é água
Comida é pasto
Você tem sede de que?
Você tem fome de que?

A gente não quer só comida
A gente quer comida
Diversão e arte
A gente não quer só comida
A gente quer saída
Para qualquer parte

A gente não quer só comida
A gente quer bebida
Diversão, balé
A gente não quer só comida
A gente quer a vida
Como a vida quer

Bebida é água!
Comida é pasto!
Você tem sede de que?
Você tem fome de que?

A gente não quer só comer
A gente quer comer
E quer fazer amor
A gente não quer só comer
A gente quer prazer
Prá aliviar a dor

A gente não quer
Só dinheiro
A gente quer dinheiro
E felicidade
A gente não quer
Só dinheiro
A gente quer inteiro
E não pela metade

Bebida é água!
Comida é pasto!
Você tem sede de que?
Você tem fome de que?

A gente não quer só comida
A gente quer comida
Diversão e arte
A gente não quer só comida
A gente quer saída
Para qualquer parte

A gente não quer só comida
A gente quer bebida
Diversão, balé
A gente não quer só comida
A gente quer a vida
Como a vida quer

A gente não quer só comer
A gente quer comer
E quer fazer amor
A gente não quer só comer
A gente quer prazer
Pra aliviar a dor

A gente não quer
Só dinheiro
A gente quer dinheiro
E felicidade
A gente não quer
Só dinheiro
A gente quer inteiro
e não pela metade

Diversão e arte
Para qualquer parte
Diversão, balé
Como a vida quer
Desejo, necessidade, vontade
Necessidade, desejo,
Necessidade, vontade,
Necessidade

It was an innocent experiment. Tesla had attached a small vibrator to an iron column in his New York City laboratory and started it vibrating. At certain frequencies specific pieces of equipment in the room would jiggle. Change the frequency and the jiggle would move to another part of the room. Unfortunately, he hadn't accounted for the fact that the column ran downward into the foundation beneath the building. His vibrations were being transmitted all over Manhattan. For Tesla, the first hint of trouble came when the walls and floor began to heave (ref 1). He stopped the experiment  just as the police crashed through the door. It seems he'd started a small earthquake in his neighborhood smashing windows, swayed buildings, and sending panicked neighbors rushing into the streets. The police had frequently responded to complaints about Tesla's unusual activities.
Although Tesla was not the first to discover resonance he was obsessed with it and created some of the most incredible demonstrations of it ever seen. He studied both mechanical and electrical versions. In the process he created an artificial earthquake, numerous artificial lightning storms, knocked an entire power plant off line in Colorado, and nearly caused the steel frame of a sky scraper under construction in Manhattan to collapse. Tesla realized that the principles of resonance could be used to transmit and receive radio messages well before Marconi. In fact, many knowledgeable sources now credit Tesla as the inventor of radio rather than Marconi. This includes the Supreme Court which in 1943 ruled that Tesla's radio patents had preceded all others including Marconi's . Tesla was a one-of-a-kind neurotic genius who had a profound influence on our technology and culture. He was obsessed with germs and the number three yet his inventions almost single handedly enabled the creation of our modern AC power distribution system. He was a contemporary of Edison and for a time worked for the famous inventor. Unlike Edison (who Tesla considered something of a bumpkin), Tesla used theory and calculations as well as experimentation to conduct his research and was the more modern of the two in his approach. He was also far more interested in pursuing his inventions for their own sake than in becoming rich and famous. Unfortunately, Tesla's obsession with pursuing grand ideas and projects proved to be his undoing. He became convinced that energy could be transmitted through the air without wires and spent a small fortune on a demonstration project. He built a giant Tesla coil in Colorado Springs which used electrical resonance to build up incredibly high voltages and caused fantastic lightning shows. Unfortunately, his dream of transmitting wireless power was never commercialized and, partly because of it, Tesla ended dying a poor man .
The mad scientist stereotype came from Tesla. Tesla's Manhattan Lab was a mysterious place with buzzing electric arcs, eerie lighting, and bizarre contraptions. The lab undoubtedly inspired mad scientist scenes in 1930's horror pictures such as Frankenstein, with Boris Karloff, in which high voltage arcs are used to give the monster life. Although Tesla never attempted to create life he did create the first radio controlled robotic vehicles and claimed that one day robots would free humanity of drudgery work. He also claimed to have invented a powerful death beam. For entertainment, Tesla once convinced his good friend Mark Twain to test out a vibrating platform in his Manhattan lab. Twain took him up on the offer and found it to his liking. When Tesla commanded Twain to come down off the platform Twain refused because he was having a good time. A few minutes later Twain ran from the device. It seems that Tesla had deliberately neglected to tell Twain that the vibration tended to cause diarrhea. Had Tesla been less eccentric and more interested in personal fortune he would have avoided the grandiose projects which were his undoing. If he had simply avoided making outrageous statements, he would have had more scientific credibility and easily overshadowed Edison. Today, Tesla would be far more famous and the subject of resonance would probably receive far more attention in science textbooks. Resonance was certainly one of  Tesla's greatest passions and, like Tesla, seems almost too mysterious to be real.

(Though this article is pretty much focused in USA's policies, we are all connected anyway, directly or indirectly; and before it goes offline, I'm posting it here).

Originally published in 12/nov/2011 in The New York Times.
By Jeffrey D. Sachs




OCCUPY WALL STREET and its allied movements around the country are more than a walk in the park. They are most likely the start of a new era in America. Historians have noted that American politics moves in long swings. We are at the end of the 30-year Reagan era, a period that has culminated in soaring income for the top 1 percent and crushing unemployment or income stagnation for much of the rest. The overarching challenge of the coming years is to restore prosperity and power for the 99 percent.

Thirty years ago, a newly elected Ronald Reagan made a fateful judgment: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Taxes for the rich were slashed, as were outlays on public services and investments as a share of national income. Only the military and a few big transfer programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaidand veterans’ benefits were exempted from the squeeze.


Protesters severely disrupted operations at the Port of Oakland, Calif., earlier this month

Reagan’s was a fateful misdiagnosis. He completely overlooked the real issue — the rise of global competition in the information age — and fought a bogeyman, the government. Decades on, America pays the price of that misdiagnosis, with a nation singularly unprepared to face the global economic, energy and environmental challenges of our time.

Washington still channels Reaganomics. The federal budget for nonsecurity discretionary outlays — categories like highways and rail, education, job training, research and development, the judiciary, NASA, environmental protection, energy, the I.R.S. and more — was cut from more than 5 percent of gross domestic product at the end of the 1970s to around half of that today. With the budget caps enacted in the August agreement, domestic discretionary spending would decline to less than 2 percent of G.D.P. by the end of the decade, according to the White House. Government would die by fiscal asphyxiation.

Both parties have joined in crippling the government in response to the demands of their wealthy campaign contributors, who above all else insist on keeping low tax rates on capital gains, top incomes, estates and corporate profits. Corporate taxes as a share of national income are at the lowest levels in recent history. Rich households take home the greatest share of income since the Great Depression. Twice before in American history, powerful corporate interests dominated Washington and brought America to a state of unacceptable inequality, instability and corruption. Both times a social and political movement arose to restore democracy and shared prosperity.

The first age of inequality was the Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century, an era quite like today, when both political parties served the interests of the corporate robber barons. The progressive movement arose after the financial crisis of 1893. In the following decades Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson came to power, and the movement pushed through a remarkable era of reform: trust busting, federal income taxation, fair labor standards, the direct election of senators and women’s suffrage.

The second gilded age was the Roaring Twenties. The pro-business administrations of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover once again opened up the floodgates of corruption and financial excess, this time culminating in the Great Depression. And once again the pendulum swung. F.D.R.’s New Deal marked the start of several decades of reduced income inequality, strong trade unions, steep top tax rates and strict financial regulation. After 1981, Reagan began to dismantle each of these core features of the New Deal.

Following our recent financial calamity, a third progressive era is likely to be in the making. This one should aim for three things. The first is a revival of crucial public services, especially education, training, public investment and environmental protection. The second is the end of a climate of impunity that encouraged nearly every Wall Street firm to commit financial fraud. The third is to re-establish the supremacy of people votes over dollar votes in Washington.

None of this will be easy. Vested interests are deeply entrenched, even as Wall Street titans are jailed and their firms pay megafines for fraud. The progressive era took 20 years to correct abuses of the Gilded Age. The New Deal struggled for a decade to overcome the Great Depression, and the expansion of economic justice lasted through the 1960s. The new wave of reform is but a few months old.

The young people in Zuccotti Park and more than 1,000 cities have started America on a path to renewal. The movement, still in its first days,  will have to expand in several strategic ways. Activists are needed among shareholders, consumers and students to hold corporations and politicians to account. Shareholders, for example, should pressure companies to get out of politics. Consumers should take their money and purchasing power away from companies that confuse business and political power. The whole range of other actions — shareholder and consumer activism, policy formulation, and running of candidates — will not happen in the park.  

The new movement also needs to build a public policy platform. The American people have it absolutely right on the three main points of a new agenda. To put it simply: tax the rich, end the wars and restore honest and effective government for all.

Finally, the new progressive era will need a fresh and gutsy generation of candidates to seek election victories not through wealthy campaign financiers but through free social media. A new generation of politicians will prove that they can win on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and blog sites, rather than with corporate-financed TV ads. By lowering the cost of political campaigning, the free social media can liberate Washington from the current state of endemic corruption. And the candidates that turn down large campaign checks, political action committees, Super PACs and bundlers will be well positioned to call out their opponents who are on the corporate take.

Those who think that the cold weather will end the protests should think again. A new generation of leaders is just getting started. The new progressive age has begun.

(Copied from here, just in case it goes offline one day)

What is dim sum (點心)? Dim sum, at least the form that has diffused most successfully worldwide, is most prominent in the Guangdong region of China.  The phrase itself, literally means “a bit of the heart” and refers to the assortment of steamed tapas-reminiscent hor-d’oeuvres served for brunch.  These typically bite-sized items can be practically anything.  Though there are classics, time and the desire for restaurants to stand out have produced a wide range of dim sum from dainty steamed dumplings of chives and shrimp or meat or custard filled bun miniatures to hearty bowls of beef innards or deep fried squid tentacles.  A recurrent theme in dim sum; however, is meat, and going for dim sum is quite vegetarian-unfriendly.  The act of going for dim sum, if you were Cantonese, is called yum cha (飲茶) – literally “drink tea” – as tea is the traditional companion to the dim sum dishes.

When you first sit down, the first thing ordered should be tea.  There typically isn’t a menu for the tea, as the implication is that you already know what type of teas are available and which you want.  Here is a handy list.  After the tea arrives at your table, there is really no real protocol to what you “order” next.  Traditionally, the food will come to you, and you merely have to point and pick what you want; however, many places now employ a tick-it-off ordering system, where you check off what you want on a paper menu.

As the bamboo steamer “baskets” descend upon your table from middle-aged women pushing food-filled aluminum carts (or otherwise), you’re bound to encounter some pretty bizarre looking things.  And these lead to questions…What is this?  What is that? These queries are difficult for your Chinese friends to answer regardless of their proficiency in your language.  There is so much to be lost in translation that it’s really not worth the effort, especially if you’re going to forget it the next time you try it.  So to make things easier for you and for them, below are bare-bones descriptions of a few common things you’ll encounter “at dim sum.”

HA GAO* (蝦餃)

Main ingredient(s): shrimp

The classic translucent shrimp dumpling.

-

SUI MAI* (燒賣)

Main ingredient(s): shrimp, pork, shitake mushrooms (冬菇)

A classic dumpling where the pork, mushrooms and shrimp are blended to form the filling.

-

CHEUNG FUN* (腸粉)

Main ingredient(s): rice paper, shrimp, barbecue pork, beef or shitake mushrooms (冬菇)

Rice paper rolls with assorted filling; dressed with soy sauce.

-

CHA SUI BAO* (叉燒包)

Main ingredient(s): barbecue pork

A bun filled with barbecue pork, a favourite amongst amateur dim sum adventurers and veterans alike.

-

LO BAK GOH* (蘿蔔糕)

Main ingredient(s): turnip, dried shrimp

A turnip cake.  NOT vegetarian – it is speckled with meat.

-

FUNG JOW* (鳳爪)

Main ingredient(s): chicken feet

You basically just tease the skin off the bones with your teeth.

-

TSUN JIU GAI* (珍珠雞)

Main ingredient(s): glutinous rice

Glutinous rice with assorted flavouring ingredients, typically wrapped in a bamboo leaf.

-

TSA LEUNG* (炸兩)

Main ingredient(s): rice paper, Chinese doughnut (油炸鬼)

Similar to cheung fun, except the filling is a Chinese doughnut.

-

DAN TAT* (蛋撻)

Main ingredient(s): egg, sugar, pastry

A dessert item.

-

JUK* (粥)

Main ingredient(s): rice, water, assorted flavouring ingredients: pork, preserved egg, chicken, shitake mushrooms (冬菇), peanuts, green onions, ginger

Watery rice (congee) flavoured with pretty much anything.  What type of flavour will be made explicit in its name: [ingredient from which it lends its flavour] JUK.  Eg. chicken JUK

This list is by no means exhaustive, but I hope this proves useful in disambiguating some of the more common dim sum out there.

*the phonetic ‘translations’ given here are subject to variation

Researching on pedal power generators I've found out that we indeed have to re-discover the wheel. During the industrial revolution many devices were designed as hybrid engines which included human power instead of steam or coal. Here is a great link in Low Tech Magazine on pedal power devices. Another one on human power cranes.



Hasta mediados del siglo XX se usaban grúas movidas a fuerza humana. Recuperar estas útiles tecnologías en países necesitados mejoraría mucho sus economías. Esta foto es de una grúa hecha toda de madera, movida caminando dentro de esas dos grandes ruedas; se usaba aún en Holanda a principios del siglo XX para subir barcos del río.

Mechanical demonstrations always catch my attention.



.

Watch this guy!

There's been a while since I'm fascinated by sweatshops in general, their amazing spaces and the conditions of their employees. It was only recently that I've found out about the art factory ones. Of course, not only sneakers and sportive clothes but classic paintings can as well be reproduced in large scale in China, Philippines and Indonesia. It's been a worldwide issue since 2006 at least. Many websites started exhibiting images and facts about the obscure warehouses where all kinds of art products are copied often 30 times per day by a single worker.

One of the most astonishing articles I recently read was Spiegel's Van Gogh from the Sweatshop (aug 2006). Another even more shocking is one by The Times on Australian's sweatshops of aboriginal art (fev 2007) about how poor aboriginal men were technically working for used cars, drugs or alcohol. A whole network of former police officers, galleries and industrial businessmen are involved. What we saw in Gomorrah (the book and the film on Neapolitan mafia) isn't exclusively an expression of corrupt Italian men, but a trend which is becoming a common behavior. The mafia's practice is now a global model.




In 2010 after Banksy released his first film (Exit through the gift shop, which is in itself a discussion on the contemporary art market) the same artist collaborated in a Simpsons episode called MoneyBart. I couldn't watch it yet, but the story seems to criticize and expose the outsourcing of Simpsons animations in South Korea. Ironically within time the subject turns out to be a hype. In Rotterdam for example there's a gallery called Singer Sweatshop, opened in 2007(?).

The occurrence of the eastern art factories arise many questions on global trade, modern work and industry, the rise of Asian economies and last but not least art making in contemporary times.

The whole phenomenon can be used as an alarm for what's happening now in the Netherlands, where I'm living and studying art; and where we have seen artists lose their hope of working and surviving out of their creativity, since art and culture are being severely cut off from the state's expenses. They are being forced to look for other solutions and find new means for applying their energy and time to keep making art.

The image of aboriginal people making their vernacular crafts in exchange of waste makes me think of Brazil, where I come from, and of all emerging economies which still charge very little due to their own currencies and contribute to a wide disproportion of values, of work and incomes between rich and developing countries; a problem which feeds our insane global trade, where popular brands offer apparently cheap products coming from all possible backyards of the planet.

We are all paying a high price for the vicious circle of waste and exploitation!

While looking at Reuben Margolin's work, Youtube brought me this:

Don't forget his name: Reuben Margolin, an American counterpart of Theo Jansen.

A nice reading from the latest weeks.

(…)
To return to bacteria, you can see why even they cannot be considered 'primitive'. Indeed it is a mistake to call any species of creature alive today primitive, because it has been around for a great deal longer than we have, sometimes in extraordinary conditions. For example, there are bacteria that can survive freezing, boiling, enormous doses of radiation, total lack of oxygen, high salt concentrations - all of which would finish us off in no time. Living bacteria have been found frozen in Antarctic ice after 32.000 years, while one species survived temperatures of 175ºC in the crash of Columbia space shuttle. Clearly bacteria are not about to become extinct.

pg 25





Living with Germs, in Health and disease
John Playfair
Oxford University Press
2004

Alguns vídeos que vi esses dias e que estão servindo de referência do que fazer, o que não fazer e como refinar minha idéia.