also, you could use computer keys to make dice, which is perfect for "dice 'n' fodies night."

While I'm thinking about kitchens and kitchenery, check out these Bic-pen tops that transform your used pens into cutlery.

Possibly the World's Best Kitchen!?

I first heard of Mike Meiré’s Farm Project in an issue of DWELL and was later reminded of it when it was featured on Inabitat earlier this month.

I do a lot of cooking and therefor spend many hours thinking of ways to make my kitchen more efficient and easy to use. So, of course, the thing I love about this space is its exposure. Nothing is put away, in the typical sense, but out in the open. In it's installation form, it resides in the middle of a barn, with livestock on hand, wandering freely through the space (mainly sheep, ducks, and chickens). While this is somewhat grim, since they are about to be eaten or not, it's an interesting way to create a holistic view of food. There are also containers built into the counter for growing herbs, and an abundance or racks for storing fresh veggies.



Aesthetically, I am drawn to things which use a bricolage of object/images/etc. that to me, create a homey and comfortable environment. Meiré’s attempt isn't only cozy looking, it is beautiful and sleek. ULTIMATE KITCHEN!

"E.P.A. (Environmental Performance Actions)is a large-scale program dealing with current environmental concerns and the way artists respond to them. E.P.A is a group exhibition surveying recent performance work from around the world that addresses current environmental crises. E.P.A. will include performance documentation from more than 30 international artists. These works, created in the public sphere, draw attention to and engage the public in a dialogue about issues such as climate change, watersheds, urbanization and, ultimately, human survival."

please visit this link to learn more about Environmental Performance Activism.

this super cute organize was made from recycled bits and pieces!

Recycled items: all file cards

New items: varnish, alphabet rub-ons, cardstock dividers

Address file cards are made from:
magazine subscription cards
found papers
dumpsters



you can buy one, or get inspiration to make your own here.

Response to Butterflies Are Free

Besides for the cheesy comparison of a young artist to an "emerging butterfly", I can see how this article would be mind-blowing for some people, in the sense that it comes very forward in saying "Yes, the art market follows the same rules as any other modern consumer market; there are trends, stylistic niches, and certain things that are expected of you if you want to make it big."

One of the most compelling excerpts I read was:

Today the idea of progress has disappeared. The only aspiration presented to a young artist seems to be to fit into an existing social structure governed by the aesthetic mood of the moment; the artworld that he or she enters demands art that, year by year, might be eccentric, DIY, political, nihilistic, or shiny. These moods seem to spring both from larger political conditions as well as in reaction to artworld gambits of the past (no more oversized C-prints, please, just ragged installations). To "emerge," an artist must respond to the climate, and so be recognized for being whatever it is we want today.

Matt Hart commented on the difference between the CommArts students response to this information and that of the Fine Arts class. For some reason, I feel that no one was really surprised or even thought about arguing this point (correct me if I am wrong, but this seemed to be my general impression). This started to make me very curious as to why. I feel that mainly it is a difference in language. Instead of words such as "patron" or "curator", we instead use words like "client", "business", "for profit/non-profit", etc.

Anyways,

I was also interested in Siegel's comparison of the artworld 30-50 years ago to that of the present. She talks about how everyone hung out at the same bars, parties, etc. but how that now the difference in money is so large that mildly successful artists compared to the superstars is an ever increasing gap socially as well as financially. While this isn't totally shocking, I find that it brings issues to the table concerning the formation of strong artistic communities, and in situations such as these it is important to define your own personal terms of success. I feel reassured in knowing that here in Cincinnati, due mainly to its small size, that I can drink at the same bar with an artist more successful than myself, and party with people making good money off their art, and it's not an issue of economic class, or what have you. Cincinnati is in a lot of ways a healthy place for art, socially. I can hang out at a mansion one day and an efficiency the next, I know artists that are twice my age as well as AAC freshman. The chances of becoming directly involved with other artists within our city from a large range of successes is extremely high, and in a lot of ways I feel that people really feed off of each other here, more so than most cities. Getting a show is a piece of cake. Everyone knows all the gallery owners, and if you don't, someone you know does (The two-degrees of Cincinnati! Everyone if a friend of a friend.) Although people aren't getting "discovered" here, or working at crazy awesome firms, I'm excited to think of the possibilities that Cincinnati has to offer, based on everyone's close proximity, the affordableness of the city, and of the abundance of boredom that plagues everyone here. To me it sounds like the perfect formula for a potentially active wake within our little city, and that would be success enough for me. I just want to be in the middle of a giant think-tank of people creating and doing, regardless if any money ever exchanges hands.

i just got an amazing report from the library today called Who Rules Cincinnati?:A Study of Cincinnati's Economic Power Structure and its Impact of Communities and People, which was just recently put out by CincinnatiStudies

Press Release:
“Who Rules Cincinnati?” argues that seven corporations have dominated the City of Cincinnati’s economy, society and politics leading to “distorted development” and “grotesque contrasts between rich and poor” with “a particularly damaging impact on the African American population.”

The study, a compendium of information on Cincinnati-based corporations, their revenues, profits and the salaries of their officers, and their political contributions, also describes the role of corporate coalitions such as Cincinnati Business Committee (CBC), Downtown Cincinnati Incorporated (DCI), and Cincinnati Center City Development Corporation (3CDC).

The study also found that two families, the Lindners and the Peppers, the first associated with American Financial Group and the second with Procter and Gamble, play an inordinate role in the financing of local political campaigns and candidates.

This is the first such study of wealth and power in Cincinnati since Polk Laffoon IV wrote “Who Runs Cincinnati?” published in the former Cincinnati Post in the 1980s.

The principal findings of the study are are:

* Seven corporations, by virtue of their enormous wealth and power, dominate the economic and social life of Cincinnati – 1) Procter & Gamble; 2) Kroger, 3) Macy’s/Federated Department Stores/; 4) Fifth Third Bancorp, 5) Western and Southern Financial, 6) American Financial Corp, and, 7) E.W. Scripps. They can be said to rule Cincinnati and among them, Procter & Gamble plays the predominant role.

* In Cincinnati the seven dominant corporations and some other companies guide all the important civic, cultural, and social organizations of the city. They influence or control the boards of directors of foundations, universities, museums, and social welfare organizations. They sit on boards while community members and working people are virtually excluded from participation. Middle class and working class people have almost no role in these organizations or at best have token representation.

* Cincinnati corporations and wealthy families play an inordinate role in financing and shaping local politics. Corporate Political Action Committees or PACs, such as the P&G PAC, and corporate families loom large in local, regional and state politics.The Lindner family (American Financial Group) and the Pepper family (Procter & Gamble) make large financial contributions to political candidates and ballot issues. These firms and families contribute significant funding to local Republican, Democratic, and Charter candidates in order to shape the city’s government and the educational and judicial systems.

* To achieve their goals, Cincinnati corporations have created a series of private organizations—CBC, DCI, 3CDC—which have usurped democratic control from the city council, from city agencies and from the public. Creation of the “strong mayor,” abolition of the planning department, and handing over public planning functions to private organizations have all worked to the detriment of public discussion, debate and democratic control.

* Control of the city’s economic and political life for profits and the accumulation of corporate wealth and property has made Cincinnati the third poorest mid-sized city in the United States. Social and economic indicators in areas of unemployment, health care, segregation and education reflect devastation from corporate priorities. Cincinnati’s middle class and working class neighborhoods have declined while corporations focused on downtown development. The inevitable growth of crime out of poverty further degrades the lives of all working people in Cincinnati while also imposing the heavy costs of the police and judicial apparatus.

* Corporate control of Cincinnati’s economic and political life has preserved and sometimes deepened patterns of racial segregation, discrimination and outright racism. The focus on downtown development and emphasis on expensive entertainment and luxury consumption, redefining the city in terms of the interests of white suburban visitors, and creation of a climate of fear of African Americans have all worked to the detriment of the city’s black population.

The study’s recommendations call upon Cincinnati’s citizens to organize in social and political movement to change the city’s direction. “ Cincinnati’s priorities need to change from development that favors narrow corporate objectives to development that strengthens neighborhoods, creates industrial, technical and service jobs with high wages, and that favors a green, sustainable economy,” writes the author.



The call number is: 330.9771 qL123
I will be returning it April 16, so after that it will be free for the borrowing.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke dies at age 90

Most famously known for his work with Stanley Kubric on the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the amazing science fiction author, scientist, revolutionary theorist, and more personally, one of my biggest influences, died on March 19 2008. Author of 35 fiction novels, 13 published collections of short stories, and about 31 non-fictional works, plus countless contributions to the field of science, Sir Clarke has made a lasting legacy in the face of American culture. Not only was Sir Clarke an accomplished science fiction writer, but also a respected scientist and naturalist, having interests in interplanetary studies as well as marine biology. Likewise, he was deeply interested in paranormal studies, all of which contributed greatly to his literary style.

Art Imitating Life

Sir Clarke's greatest contributions to the field of science were his theory of geostationary satellites, as well as his revolutionary interest in the use of nanotubes, suggesting that linked together, these hollow particles could be formed into a giant elevator to the moon, or beyond.
Sir Clarke has received many honors during his time. Among them was his knighting in the year 2000, the naming of the Apollo 13 craft and also the Mars Orbiter (both named Odyssey), the nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize, a dinosaur and astroid both named in his honor (Serendipaceratops arthurcclarkei, 4923 Clarke) Vice president of the H.G. Wells Society, Chairman of the British Interplanetary Society, Honorary Board Chair in the Institute for the Cooperation in Space, as well as a seat on the Board of Governors for the National Space Society.

Art Imitating Art

Among the many novels of Sir Arthur C. Clarke, my favorite is most definitely Childhood's End. The novel is about "humanity's transformation and integration to an interstellar hive mind, the Occult, man's inability to live in a utopian society, cruelty to animals, and the idea of being 'The Last Man on Earth'". To summarize, alien spaceships have appeared above all of Earth's major cities. These aliens become known as the Overlords. Under the Overlords, a sense of world peace is quickly achieved, yet at the price of the loss of personal creativity. However, the only people which talk directly with the aliens are a set of "delegates", if you will, who never actually see them, only talk through a two-way mirror. The Overlords claim that in fifty-years time they will reveal themselves to the people of Earth, hoping that by this time humans would not be prejudice to their appearance. So in fifty years, the Overlords appear in person. More or less, they have characteristics similar to the traditional image of a demon (large wings, horns, and biforcated tails.) Although relations with the Overlords are positive, and the two races unite to together build a utopian world, some of the limitations on the personal freedoms of the human race cause a sect of humanity to establish the New Athens Island Colony. After 100 years of the colony, children there start developing telekinetic and telaphathic abilities. Eventually it is discovered that this is the true purpose of the Overlords colonization of Earth. The children are now in service to the Overmind, an "amoirphis being of pure energy". It was their mission to foster humanity's transition to a higher plane of existence and a merger with the Overmind. Hence, the Overlords' resemblance to the devil, along with its racial memory limited by their liner concept of time, is a visualized fear based upon instinct and the foreknowledge that they herald the end of the human species. The children are put onto an island of their own, and after this no more children are born on earth. The story starts to hint at an ever increasing merge with the Overmind and New Athens is destroyed by a nuclear bomb. The last man on earth is a physicist who stows away on an Overlord supply ship. In Earth time, round trip, he is gone a total of 80 years, but in his perspective, it is only a matter of seconds. When he returns, the only remaining humans are now the Evolved Children. Finally, the Evolved Children use their collective energies, altering Earth's rotation and causing other planetary adjustments. In this instant they reach a higher level of existence, needing neither a body nor a place.



This novel has been the influence for some of my favorite musical artistic works, including a song off of Pink Floyd's Obscured by Clouds album (as well as Iron Maiden and David Bowie) , and a music video by Encyclopedia Pictura for Seventeen Evergreen, as well as a bulk of the Startrek Series, Babylon 5, and Stargate.

What's the best way to reclaim city space for cheap? Put money in a parking meeter. Conceived by San Fransisco group REBAR , this thoughtful event has turned into a global, annual occurrence. It's PARK(ing) Day!

About Rebar:

REBAR is a collaborative group of creators, designers and activists based in San Francisco. Rebar’s work ranges broadly in scale, scope and context, and therefore belies discrete categorization. It is, at minimum, situated in the domains of environmental installation, urbanism and absurdity.

Rebar was formed in 2004 to design and construct the Cabinet National Library - a functioning library built out of a file cabinet in the middle of the New Mexico desert. The Cabinet National Library, as the name might imply, is the national library for Cabinet magazine, a non-profit arts & culture quarterly based in Brooklyn. Rebar was founded by Matthew Passmore, John Bela, Jed Olson and Judson Holt, all of whom built the library.

Rebar’s work is fundamentally motivated by the desire to animate the arbitrariness of what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls the doxa: the uncontested acceptance of the daily life-world and the adherence to a set of social relations we take to be self evident. Rebar’s projects are intended to engage social, ecological and cultural processes as they unfold materially in space and time.

One way to approach Rebar's work is to compare it to the methods of sampling and remixing used by DJ's. Much like a DJ samples recorded sounds, Rebar's work appropriates elements of the physical/cultural world and remixes them into novel contexts. By “remixing the landscape” in this way, Rebar exposes new meanings and alters assumptions about our shared environment.

In addition to harvesting the creative energy of its four founders, Rebar considers itself to be an open forum for outlandish ideas. Rebar invites critique and promotes collaboration. To create a typical Rebar project, an ad hoc group of conspirators will coalesce around a concept to manifest a concrete reality. Membership and affiliation with Rebar is fluid, and evolves as projects are developed and deployed.

While Rebar’s work can be used or interpreted as playful, ridiculous, or absurd, it is also highly functional. Rebar remixes the ordinary, repurposes the ubiquitous, and rebuilds with invisible structural material . . . much like rebar itself.

Chicago Cultural Center – Gallery Guide Essay
By Margaret Wertheim and Christine Wertheim

“We could crochet a coral reef,” Christine had mused, pointedly using the conditional tense while the woolly forms piled higher on our sideboard. We innocently put an announcement on the Institute For Figuring website seeking crafters to join us in this potential hyperbolic undertaking. From around the globe pictures started to arrive by email, then packages in the post. Helen Bernasconi, a former mathematics teacher and computer scientist, now sheep farmer in Bonnie Doon, Australia, sent in a fan-like form budding with hyperbolic curlicues made from wool she had sheared from her sheep, then spun and dyed herself. A Hungarian graphics designer in Liverpool, England, Ildiko Szabo, posted a shoebox of pastel-colored anemones. Heather McCarren, a PhD candidate in geoscience, mailed in a collection of tiny mercerized cotton florets. The tectonic plates of our continent shifted when Vonda McIntyre, the author of a novel about Louis XIV’s encounter with a sea monster, emailed photographs of her beaded jellyfish and flatworms.

Hooked now, we began trawling on Flickr and discovered Helle Jorgensen, a former research geneticist, who had given up academic science for a life of handicraft and beachcombing; Helle was crocheting sea creatures from plastic bags. A net search revealed that we were not the only ones hand-making coral. In the Australian town of Bendigo, Marianne Midelburg had already crocheted her own reef from yarns scavenged in thrift stores and junkyards; in Vienna, Petra Maitz was presiding over the “Lady Musgrave Reef”; in the 1960’s, Helen Lancaster had preceded us all with her appliquéd “Coral Forest.”

Each of these new outcrops realizes potentialities we had not even guessed at. In Rialto, CA, Shari Porter crochets hyperbolic forms guided by the Holy Spirit; latter day versions of the Shakers’ “gift drawings.” In Boston, Rebecca Peapples makes miniature marvels of beaded Byzantine splendor, while in Cedar Hill, Texas, Evelyn Hardin crafts a steady stream of woolly mutants seemingly coughed up from the stomach of some bilious leviathan.

Every person who takes up this craft creates new species of crochet organisms and we have come to see the project as a collective experiment in textile-based evolution. Just as all living creatures result from variations in an underlying DNA code, so the species in these handi-crafted reefs arise from deviations in a single simple algorithm. Slight variations in the kind of yarn, changes in the rate of increasing stitches, even shifts in crochet tension make significant differences to the morphology of the finished form. Sarah Simons in Culver City has invented an entire taxonomy of “radiolarians” by combining the insights of hyperbolic crochet with traditional doilies patterns.

HYPERBOLIC CROCHET was itself the outgrowth of an unexpected branch of geometry. For two thousand years mathematicians attempted to prove that the only possible geometries were the flat, or Euclidean, plane, and the sphere. Great minds expended themselves on the effort, only to discover in the nineteenth century that a third option was logically necessitated. The discovery of this new “hyperbolic space” ushered in the field of non-Euclidean geometry, the mathematics underpinning general relativity, which aims to describe the shape of the cosmos. Mathematicians’ skepticism about hyperbolic space had been based in part on their inability to imagine how it would look, for they had no way to model it physically. Most were thus astounded when, in 1997, Dr. Daina Taimina, a Latvian émigré at Cornell University, presented a hyperbolic structure made with crochet.

Nature, meanwhile, had discovered the form in the Silurian age. Lettuces and kales - the crenellated vegetables - are manifestations of nearly hyperbolic surfaces, while in the oceans, corals, kelps, sponges, nudibranchs and flatworms all exhibit hyperbolic anatomical features. And so a woolly manifestation of a reef is not as unlikely as may first be supposed. Through the lens of crochet we may thus discern a hitherto unsuspected line connecting Euclid to sea slugs. Ways of constructing once perceived as “merely” women’s craft, and dismissed from the cannon of scientific practice, now emerge as revelatory forms of a more complex, embodied way of thinking about the world both mathematically and physically.

“EVERTHING has been created out of sea-mucous, for love arises from the foam” wrote the German polymath Lorenz Oken in his Elements of Physiophilosophy, a poetico-scientific account of evolutionary processes that preceded Darwin by nearly half a century. From simple mucul protoplasts, Oken imagined the spectrum of life unfolding over the eons. Coral reefs, too, are generated from protoplasmal seeds: On a single night, timed to the cycles of sun and moon, whole sections of reef release gametes into the water in a mass-synchronized spawning ritual. These spectacular displays allow sessile coral polyps, which cannot move themselves to disperse offspring over vast distances. So too crochet reefs send out spawns. Starting from an initial garden of anemones and kelp, the IFF and our contributors have now produced a variety of different sub-reefs, while other crafters have been inspired to their own fully formed wonders: among them, the mysterious Dr Axt in Portland, Inga Hamilton in Belfast, and Barbara Wertheim in Melbourne. The Chicago Reef exhibited here is a magnificent result of this spawning, a communal triumph created by more than a hundred Windy City women, who have each, as it were, inhaled a hyperbolic spore.

But this collective celebration is motivated also by an ecological urgency, for coral is being devastated by global warming, agricultural run-off, urban effluent and marine pollutants. 3000 square kilometers of living reef are lost every year, nearly five times the rate of rainforest elimination. Ironically, as reefs disappear a sinister substitute is growing beneath the waves: In the north Pacific ocean the world’s plastic garbage is accumulating, fifty years of plastic trash building into a vortex twice the size of Texas and 30 meters deep. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, as it is known, is a ghastly analog to the Great Barrier Reef, an aquatic “wonder” of appalling dimensions that continues to accrete. To highlight this monstrosity and our own role in its making, the latest spawn of the IFF is a toxic reef called Bikini Atoll - a hybrid assemblage made from yarn and plastic garbage. Our challenge for the future – and the reason we have chosen to exhibit this work– is to help raise awareness of this plastic problem, an ecological cancer whose stain will mar our planet’s face for geological time.

Christoph Büchel's "Minus" (2002)

In the Los Angeles community of Hacienda Heights, residents can dine at the first ever Feng Shui themed Mcdonald's. The ultimate goal: to create a harmonious fast-food environment. Ridiculous in its irony, patrons are encouraged by the surroundings to stay in the restaurant as long as possible and to hopefully experience feelings of serenity before the bloating sets in.

Paul W. K. Rothemund manipulated molecules of DNA to create smiley faces that are one one-thousandth the width of a human hair.

due to the weather reports for tomorrow, the really free mobile market has been moved to next saturday, march 15th.