If you think coal is an inexpensive energy source, consider the price paid by the people of Southern Appalachia. For two years, filmmaker Michael O’Connell documented the struggle between West Virginia activists and coal companies over the mining practice known as mountaintop removal, during which explosives are used to remove 1,000 vertical feet of soil and rock. The process chokes the air and creates pools of toxic sludge, as the people of the region use every means of non-violent protest at their disposal, including a sit-in at the governor’s office, to save both their land and their lives.

O’Connell and activist Ed Wiley are expected to host a discussion following the screening at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York, Tuesday April 22, 2008 at 6:15 pm.

Here for an article.

Here for more info about the screening.

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.

In general, our daily lives seem to be dominated by our visual senses more than by any other. This may be because we tend to rely on the sense that provides us instantaneously with the most detailed and reliable information – seeing is believing- yet sometimes our visual judgment deceives us and distorts our spatial perception of our auditory and tactile surroundings.

Several members of The New York Society for Acoustic Ecology have come together and created the NYSoundmap project. They were interested in sound and its connection to places and spaces, specifically in New York City. Considering the visual overflow of information that the city has top offer, their projects deal exclusively with the audible experience of various places throughout the five boroughs. One of my favorite projects was created with the help of Google-Maps and is called Sound Seeker.

“Sound-Seeker is a map that privileges the ear over the eye. The project reaches across the city’s geographic, economic, educational, cultural and racial divides. It is at once a historical record and a subjective representation of the city. It is what each user wishes it to be and it is ever growing, ever changing and totally interactive.”

I would encourage everybody to visit this sight and also check out the other projects featured on the NYSoundmap website. So next time you are waiting at a red light, why not just close your eyes and listen…

“with the garden as metaphor and inspiration, los angeles comes together for a fusion exhibition / fair / convention / party / happening / meeting / classroom / exhibit / town square / performance to experiment, meditate and speculate on our current and future ecologies.”

Artists, architects, designers, environmentalists, gardeners, and writers have taken on the ecology of Los Angeles for a six-week-long show, the gardenLAB experiment. With over 50 installations and events, as well as weekly programs including lectures, talks, screenings, and picnics; the exhibit is an extensive comment on our environment. Considering the garden as a laboratory, the projects range from ‘a school for corn to teach about the humans that control their fate’ to ‘a compost pile that slowly decomposes as the plants it feeds grow’. On view at the Wind Tunnel exhibition space at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, until Oct. 16.

Here for more info.

Here for an article.

One of my favorite websites of the moment is AfriGadget. It is a site that showcases astonishing village ingenuity and innovation from across the African continent. The tech is amazing, the creativity and resourcefulness is inspiring, and the stories of the people behind the tech is frequently touching. This site is about people doing big things with precious few resources. Here’s a recent example:

The Bamboo Bike, an endeavour that aims at building bicycles in a sustainable fashion using bamboo as the primary construction material, is a joint project run by Craig Calfree of Calfree Design, a high tech bicycle design firm based in California and The Earth Institute at Columbia University.The bicycle is the primary mode of transport in Africa and it is used for everything from personal transportation to moving medicine and the sick to hospital. Sadly, the design used in most of Africa has not changed for the last 40 years to take into account the different ways in which the bicycle is used. In fact, most bikes in use in most of Africa today are based on a colonial British design tailored to individuals travelling short distances on smooth roads.

While making bike frames based on bamboo is not a new idea, most bamboo frame designs simply use bamboo for construction material in a traditional bike frame design. Leveraging the unique properties of bamboo such as its strength and flexibility to meet the specific needs of populations local to various parts of Africa is one of the primary rationale behind the Bamboo Bike project.

The team working on the Bamboo Bike project in the US, Ghana and Kenya among other locations have a interesting blog (last updated in the summer of 2007) that chronicles the struggles of the project team while on site in Africa.

Project gear including Bamboo Bikes and clothing is available on the Bamboo Bike and Calfree Design websites.

I got turned on to AfriGadget through Kevin Kelly’s also-wonderful Street Use, a site that looks worldwide to see how people make-do, modify, re-use, and improvise with the technology that finds its way into their lives.

Here for AfriGadget
Here for Street Use

Physics 101
Thermal expansion: When water heats up, it expands!
It’s no breaking news that the rise of the global temperature is melting our glaciers, ice caps and ice sheets, which in return is causing our ocean to warm up. By now we have all come to the realization that the rise of our sea levels will effect many coastal cities, particularly heavily populated cities in Asia and Africa. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development however estimated that the top 10 cities expected to be hit the hardest economically are located in the United States, Japan and the Netherlands.
Hitting home with some people, the study has caused architects in the Netherlands to put on their creative thinking caps and completely revise their philosophy on urban design. The rational seeming decision of building houses where flooding is less likely to occur is being replaced by the concept of building houses in areas where flooding is to be expected.

Waterstudio.NL is a dutch firm specialized in architecture and urbanism related to living, working and recreation on water. You see, they build houses with “floating foundations“, where flexible pipes keep the houses connected to sewer and electrical lines. From a technical and design point of view this is a great opportunity for innovation! On the downside, and I cannot help to be a little bit pessimistic about the simple fact that this is once again only a reaction, but sadly not a solution to our initial problem of global warming. Any thoughts?

Have you recently strolled along the waterfront of the East River, right next to the Brooklyn Bridge and wondered about the strange red cloud hovering over the East River?

Well, the River Glow is not simply some kind of new, hip river art installation, but an indicator of the state of the river’s health. Designed by NYC architects The Living and Eric Forman, the team was interested in combining interactive technology and architecture to create objects that are aware and responsive to their environment. A solar powered pH sensor tests the acid level of the river and switches the light from green to red if the Co2 level rises. The project visually informs the New York public of the quality of their water, inviting them to become conscious of their everyday life surroundings.

The Japanese electronic composer Ryuchi Sakamoto, a fervent critic of copyright law, will soon release Ocean Fire, a collaboration with experimental guitarist Christopher Willits. After the breakup of the highly influential and pioneering electropop trio Yellow Magic Orchestra, Sakamoto has continued to cross musical, technological and environmental boundaries. Through his projects, he has raised awareness about ecological issues, while at the same time being active as an anti-war activist: Life and Zero Landmine raised millions of dollars for landmine removal, while Stop-Rokkasho, an evolving art project, brought attention to the dangers of a nuclear reprocessing plant which opened in Japan. Not much has been published yet about the upcoming Ocean Fire, except that “the artists are exploring their relationship to each other, new sounds, and the ocean’s boundless force and importance. The release is dedicated to the healing and restoration of our fragile oceans.”

Here for a listening track.

DJ Spooky’s new project Terra Nova – The Antarctica Suite, will premier at the Sundance Film Festival on January 22nd. After last year’s much acclaimed Rebirth of a Nation, a remix of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation that explored the film’s inherent racist character as a necessary American fiction, his Spookiness will now deliver a multimedia portrait of a rapidly changing and even vanishing environment – Antarctica. He has set up his portable studio to capture the acoustic qualities of Antarctic ice forms: “Coupled with visual material from Getty Images’ vast collection, The Antarctic Suite is a seventy minute performance, creating a unique and powerful moment around man’s relationship with nature.”

Other recent art projects have also focused their attention on the harsh nature of Antarctica and the Arctic regions, most notably Pierre Huyghe’s A Journey That Wasn’t (see image above), a search for a mythical white creature – the albino penguin, and Isaac Julien’s True North, a remapping of the journey of Mathew Henson, the African American explorer who was the first man to the North Pole.

Here for DJ Spooky’s project.
Here for an interview.

In a recent article, NY Times journalist Andrew Revkin writes about three recent books on global warming. Instead of focussing on the obvious battle between the left or the right, these publications contribute to the subject matter by moving towards the center:

[…] in three other recent books, there seems to be a bit of a warming trend between the two camps. Instead of bashing old foes, the authors, all influential voices in the climate debate with roots on the left or the right, tend to chide their own political brethren and urge a move to the pragmatic center on climate and energy.

All have received mixed reviews and generated heated Internet debate — perhaps because they do not bolster any one agenda in a world where energy and environmental policies are still forged mainly in the same way Doctor Dolittle’s two-headed pushmi-pullyu walked. (It didn’t move much.)

Here for the article.