Eyebeam’s expansive exhibition FEEDBACK brings together a wide variety of artists, designers, architects and engineers on the topic of “sustainability”. Projects range from public art projects and industrial design to DIY energy solutions and software tools, to inspire discussion and action around a topic that is becoming increasingly meaningless and overused.

The works on display are intended to enlighten and entertain, and ultimately compel viewers to move beyond passive spectatorship. Some of the projects explore civic engagement: Lean Gauthier’s Sow-In (see image above) activates the public, in partnership with local community gardening groups, to sow the seeds of those food plants most in danger of extinction.

Rebecca Bray and Britta Riley’s DrinkPeeDrinkDrinkPee questions the role that our bodies play in larger eco-systems. The project includes an installation and a DIY kit for turning your pee into fertilizer. Other ones, such as Andrea Polli’s Queensbridge Wind Power Project, offer conceptual proposals. Polli investigates how clean renewable wind power might be integrated into the landmark architecture of the Queensboro Bridge.

FEEDBACK is there to challenge and inspire, and while doing so offers pro-active but critical alternatives to the unsustainability of our way of life and culture in general.

Here for Eyebeam.

African cartoon and comic strips have a long-standing history, which in some countries reaches back for more than 40 years. Drawing upon the rich traditions of storytelling, portraiture, mask-making, pictograms, and ideographic carvings, the cartoonists typically lace these cultural elements with a healthy serving of satirical French journalism. By using caricature as a form of resistance, names such as Messager Popoli and L’Oeil du Sahel have made a deep impact on the African journalistic landscape, blatantly attacking and ridiculing the hierarchies and contradictions of African societies and politics with their work. Considering the political dynamic of the African nations between 1960 -1990, many cartoonists have been threatened, harassed, exiled, kidnapped and some even killed.

Today however, the comic strip is no longer limited to political commentary, but is evolving into a powerful vehicle for education, development, information sharing, and empowerment. Thanks to the internet, artists are able to produce and distribute their comic strips more easily and evade censorship stipulations. Covering problematic and sensitive topics such as human rights violations, HIV, torture in prison, child soldiers, the role of women in society, politics, tribal conflict, and the empowerment of minority groups, the comic strips have become a vital tool in raising awareness, educating the people and promoting social change.

Even though the majority of the comic books tend to be grim and dark they are always vivid and highly expressive. The artistic and thematic diversity is infinite, as books and strips range from political cartoons to pop-cultural formats, may come in color or black and white, can be hand drawn, painted, collaged, or even created on the computer. As some artists are slowly beginning to win international recognition, domestically the comic strips are central in shaping modern African consciousness and culture, as they are able to galvanize, educate and give a voice to the underprivileged.

Although it is hard to come across these comic strips or books on this side of the world, once you do get your hands on one of them, you are guaranteed to be holding a beautiful piece of art in your hands and a unique insight into the mystical world of African modernity.

Here’s a thought-provoking article from Eurozine on the legacy and meaning of Nietzsche as it relates to contemporary society. Exploring his often offensive attitude towards morality and politics, his attacks on monotheistic religions and nationalism, his project of the revaluation of all values, and his critique of egalitarianism in relation to liberal democracy; six philosophers answer questions in relation to his views. Excessively sensitive, anti-liberal and irrelevant, or radical, prescient and misunderstood? Nietzsche still divides opinion.

Paul Patton: Some of his remarks about women are among the most offensive of Nietzsche’s writings. I take these to be indications of the extent to which he was a man of his time who could not see beyond the existing cultural forms of the sexual division of humankind. Like the vast majority of nineteenth century European men, Nietzsche could not divorce female affect, intelligence and corporeal capacities from a supposed “essential’ relation to child-bearing. His views on women are representative of his attitude toward morality and politics in the sense that they are in tension with possibilities otherwise opened up by his historical conception of human nature. For example, at times he recognizes that supposedly natural qualities of women or men are really products of particular social arrangements. We can conclude from this, even if he could not, that these qualities are not natural but open to change. In this domain as in other of his social and political views, he was not able to foresee some of the ways in which the very dynamics of human cultural evolution that he identified could lead us into a very different future.

Here for the article.

The above picture is by San Francisco photographer Naseema Khan. Inserted into fruit are fragments of Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil”, a text that challenges the concepts of meaning and reason.

Would you associate Palestine with beauty? According to mainstream media the area is only characterised by ongoing conflicts and continuous aggression. But here is a book by Dutch artist Annelies De Vet showing a moving, beautiful, poetic, at times even ordinary, side of Palestine. The Subjective Atlas of Palestine was initiated during a workshop in which four Dutch artists worked together with Palestinian designers, artists, photographers, architects and students. It shows a variety of drawings, photographs and maps that reveal individual and subjective life experiences giving a different angle on a nation in occupied territory. Here’s what Culiblog had to say:

Reading the Subjective Atlas of Palestine, one feels it is about home, and certainly it is an hour’s perusal in which you will not think about war or occupation. More likely you’ll be triggered to remember lingering for a whiff of fresh sesame bread sold on the street, or of the social obligations associated with a cultural agenda filled with entirely too much Mozart. Palestine, it’s just as much alike and different from everywhere else, right? Could be that an admittedly subjective view is in fact the most accurate.

Here for more info on ‘the atlas’.

At the risk of having too many of my Provisions DIY pieces being about me, or flogging my own projects, I’d like to… er flog my latest book project, my first title as an editor for Make: Books. It’s called The Best of MAKE and it’s a collection of 75 DIY projects from the first ten volumes of MAKE magazine. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, MAKE is a magazine created by Dale Dougherty of O’Reilly Media (the computer book publisher of record) and Mark Frauenfelder (of Boing Boing, former Wired editor). Each issue has a theme (alt.vehicles, home electronics, backyard biology, etc.), news, views, and profiles related to the growing DIY movement, creative reuse and recycling, hardware hacking, and the like. And each issue has a number of projects, from quickie hacks you can do in a few minutes to weekend-long endeavours. For the book, we went through the first ten issues and chose our (and the readers’) favorite projects. Here are a few examples of some of what’s covered in the book:

* How to make a guitar out of a cigar box and an amp housed in a cracker box
* How to turn an analog computer mouse into a light-seeking, obstacle-avoiding robot
* How to run a car on fryer grease
* How to build a soda bottle rocket
* How to create a small wind power generator from a treadmill motor
* How to make a mint-tin headphone amp

There are also tutorials on getting started in electronics, outfitting a workshop, using microcontrollers, circuit-bending, and other DIY skill sets.

I’m really proud of this book and think it offers an amazing collection of fun, useful, and educational projects. Reading through the list above, some may sound silly, the kind of projects seen in old Popular Mechanics issues that nobody, maybe not even the author, actually bothered to build. This is not the case with MAKE. These projects are built and re-built to make sure they perform as advertised. I also incorporated any feedback/glitches found from the forums on the makezine.com website into the book, so these are the most trouble-free version of the projects to date.

If you’re not familiar with MAKE, or haven’t been a subscriber, this collection would be a great way to get up to speed. Okay, I’ll shut up now… (and promise that next week’s column won’t even mention my name).

Here for the Best of MAKE page at the Maker Store.

Saul Griffith, one of my cohort at MAKE magazine who does “Howtoons” as a regular comic strip there, has had a big couple of weeks. First, he received a MacArthur Fellowship “Genius Grant” and then a book version of his (and Nick Dragotta and Joost Bonsen’s) DIY project-oriented comics came out in book form. OKFuture says of the book:

Here is a tremendously creative new cartoon comic series called Howtoons that teaches kids how to use ordinary items around the house to create cool things. It is, in short, a safe version of The Anarchist Cookbook for kids. The site for Howtoons has a very detailed but appropriately accessible glossary and library for the curious adolescent (or even adult) mind that wants to know where to begin in the trip MacGyverville.

“Part comic strip and part science experiment, Howtoons shows children how to find imaginative new uses for common household items like soda bottles, duct tape, mop buckets, and more–to teach kids the “Tools of Mass Construction”!

Howtoons are cartoons that teach 8– to 15–year–old readers “how to” build, create, and explore things. Combining a fun, full–color cartoon format and real life science and engineering principles, Howtoons are designed to encourage kids to become active participants in the world around them.”

Here for the the Howtoons website.
Here for a wonderful profile of Saul from Tim O’Reilly.

I love all of the media and tech hacking groups and centers that are popping up in various cities around the globe. They provide space, technology, technical assistance, other resources, and community, to those who want to “hack the system,” engage in “media jamming,” or just make cool stuff with repurposed technology. One new center, located in Southend on Sea, England, is called MediaShed. They provide all of the above and have a unique mission — all of the gear and gadgets they employ is what they call “trash tech,” found, recycled, repurposed, freebees, etc. Like “Freegans” who are intent on living off the waste of others, MediaShed wants to see what sort of media art can be made with the detritus of modern media- and techno-culture. For instance, they use only free, open source, software at their center and in all their work, all recycled computers, cameras, and other gear. They say, of their charter (and what they call “free-media”):

The MediaShed is the first “free-media” space to open in the east of England. It’s a place where members can come hang out, learn, propose some training, create and propose new projects using free-media or show things they have made on one of our screening nights. The MediaShed is designed to be as open and accessible as possible, welcoming all. Free-media is best thought of as a means of doing art, making things or just saying what you want for little or no financial cost by using the public domain and free software and recycled equipment. It is also about saying what you want “freely”, using accessible media that can be taken apart and reused without unnecessary restrictions and controls - “free as in free speech.”

Here for more about MediaShed and free-media.

The time when the impenetrable logic of old mass media (and its very active counterculture of underground press activities) ruled, sound like an echo from a distant past. Nowadays, through blogs, broadcast platforms and easily accessible soft- and hardware, there are popular alternatives available that make it easy to spread your own perspective on the news en masse. But it’s not always clear how to do this. That’s why Knight Citizen News Network, a self-help portal that guides both citizens and journalists in launching and responsibly operating community news, has published an online toolkit called Make Internet TV. They guide you in a clear and accessible way through six basic steps to broadcast your own take on video journalism: equip – shoot – edit – license – publish – promote. Do it!

“Not A Cornfield is a living sculpture in the form of a field of corn. The corn itself, a powerful icon for millennia over large parts of Central America and beyond, can serve as a potent metaphor for those of us living in this unique megalopolis. This work follows a rich legacy of radical art during the 20th century on a grand scale. I intend this to be an event that aims at giving focus for reflection and action in a city unclear about where it’s energetic and historical center is.”

Here to find out more about Not a Cornfield.

One of the many great features on TreeHugger is their weekly “Ask an EcoGeek” advice column. The “EcoGeek” offers very clear, sound, balanced advice of environmental, energy, and tech questions. This week’s column:

Dear EcoGeek,

My parents are always bugging me about computer usage and how the computers are sucking up energy. I want to know what I can do so that my computer doesn’t waste so much energy? I totally wanna go green and save the Earth from Global Warming!

- Lukas

Hey Lukas,

You probably won’t be surprised to discover that I spend quite a bit of time thinking about this very question. First, you should let your parents to know that your computer, with all of it’s amazing opportunities for educational, economic and social advancement likely uses less power than the light bulbs in that share the room with it.

Most desktop computers use between 100 to 150 watts. Now, this goes way up if you’ve got some kind of monster high-end gaming system, but 100 watts is a pretty good energy investment for what these glorious machines give us…in my opinion anyhow.

But that doesn’t mean that they’re aren’t steps you can take to decrease your computer’s power usage…

Here for the rest of the answer.