NYFA speaks with 2009 Digital/Electronic Arts Fellow: Hi Leila and Cary, please tell us a little bit about yourselves and what you’re currently working on.

We are an eco-art/theory collaborative and former New Yorkers now based in Rochester, NY. Leila’s academic training is in literature and Cary has made new media and performance-based art for over twenty years. We bring together our separate disciplines, histories, and practices through a shared interest in nature and the environment. For us, the “environment” encompasses a wide variety of networked systems, including biological habitats, global exchanges, industrial grids, digital networks, and the democratic imagination. Our works merge primitive with emergent technologies and navigate the intertwined terrain between nature, built environments, mobility, and electronic spaces. We are particularly excited right now about a residency program we are creating in the central Maine mountains where new media practitioners will be invited to make art in networked treehouses in the remote woods.

Continue HERE

It began as a housing marvel. Two decades later, it ended in rubble. But what happened to those caught in between? The Pruitt-Igoe Myth tells the story of the transformation of the American city in the decades after World War II, through the lens of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing development and the St. Louis residents who called it home. At the film’s historical center is an analysis of the massive impact of the national urban renewal program of the 1950s and 1960s, which prompted the process of mass suburbanization and emptied American cities of their residents, businesses, and industries. Those left behind in the city faced a destitute, rapidly de-industrializing St. Louis , parceled out to downtown interests and increasingly segregated by class and race. The residents of Pruitt-Igoe were among the hardest hit. Their gripping stories of survival, adaptation, and success are at the emotional heart of the film. The domestic turmoil wrought by punitive public welfare policies; the frustrating interactions with a paternalistic and cash-strapped Housing Authority; and the downward spiral of vacancy, vandalism and crime led to resident protest and action during the 1969 Rent Strike, the first in the history of public housing. And yet, despite this complex history, Pruitt-Igoe has often been stereotyped. The world-famous image of its implosion has helped to perpetuate a myth of failure, a failure that has been used to critique Modernist architecture, attack public assistance programs, and stigmatize public housing residents. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth seeks to set the historical record straight. To examine the interests involved in Pruitt-Igoe’s creation. To re-evaluate the rumors and the stigma. To implode the myth.

Via The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

About the Book

From Cairo to cyberspace, from Main Street to Wall Street, today’s social movements have a creative new edge that’s blurring the boundaries between artist and activist, hacker and dreamer. But the principles that make for successful creative action rarely get hashed out or written down.

Until now.

Beautiful Trouble brings together ten grassroots groups and dozens of seasoned artists and activists from around the world to distill their best practices into a toolbox for creative action. Among the groups included are Agit-Pop/The Other 98%, The Yes Men/Yes Labs, Code Pink, SmartMeme, The Ruckus Society, Beyond the Choir, The Center for Artistic Activism, Waging Nonviolence, Alliance of Community Trainers and Nonviolence International.

Contributors include Rae Abileah, Ryan Acuff, Celia Alario, Phil Aroneanu, Peter Barnes, Jesse Barron, Andy Bichlbaum, Nadine Bloch, Kathryn Blume, L.M. Bogad, Josh Bolotsky, Mike Bonanno, Andrew Boyd, Kevin Buckland, Margaret Campbell, Doyle Canning, Samantha Corbin, Yutaka Dirks, Steve Duncombe, Mark Engler, Simon Enoch, Jodie Evans, John Ewing, Brian Fairbanks, Bryan Farrell, Janice Fine, Lisa Fithian, Cristian Fleming, Elisabeth Ginsberg, Stan Goff, Arun Gupta, Silas Harrebye, Judith Helfand, Daniel Hunter, Sarah Jaffe, John Jordan, Dmytri Kleiner, Sally Kohn, Steve Lambert, Anna Lee, Stephen Lerner, Zack Malitz, Nancy Mancias, Duncan Meisel, Matt Meyer, Dave Oswald Mitchell, Tracey Mitchell, George Monbiot, Brad Newsham, Gaby Pacheco, Mark Read, Patrick Reinsborough, Simon Roel, Joshua Kahn Russell, Leonidas Martin Saura, Levana Saxon, Maxine Schoefer-Wulf, Nathan Schneider, Kristen Ess Schurr, John Sellers, Rajni Shah, Brooke Singer, Matt Skomarovsky, Andrew Slack, Phillip Smith, Jonathan Matthew Smucker, Starhawk, Eric Stoner, Jeremy Varon, Virginia Vitzthum, Harsha Walia, Jefferey Webber and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

Beautiful Trouble puts the accumulated wisdom of decades of creative protest into the hands of the next generation of change-makers.

www.beautifultrouble.org

Via OR Books

In our world of almost 7 billion, 1 billion suffer from hunger and malnutrition, while an equal number face obesity, diabetes, and other health issues related to “overnutrition.” TABLE FOR TWO (TFT) rights this imbalance by simultaneously addressing these two opposing problems with a simple meal. In effect, TFT seeks to transfer our excess calories to children in need.

How it Works

TFT partners with restaurants, corporate cafeterias, and other food establishments to serve healthy, nutritionally balanced TFT-branded meals. A 25 cent charge is added to the price of these meals, which is used to provide school lunches in countries including Uganda, Rwanda, and Ethiopia.

When buying a TFT-branded meal, one does good for oneself and for another less fortunate. We like to say that when you dine at TABLE FOR TWO, you never dine alone.

Via TABLE FOR TWO

Rendering of the Cloud during day and Close-up of the Cloud (Courtesy MVRDV)

Archpaper: Urban design historian Grahame Shane weighs in on the controversial project tracing MVRDV’s explosive imagery to its source in research.

When Ole Scheeren departed from OMA Beijing with the MahaNakhon Bangkok tower to found his own office in 2010, he had the idea to connect tower and urban village, marking a key moment in a very Dutch delirium that moved beyond OMA’s CCTV tower. In the Bangkok tower the developer’s website claims this skyscraper “melds with the city by gradually ‘dissolving’ the mass as it moves vertically between ground and sky.”

An early concept rendering of the Cloud tower and a rendering of the final design released last week. (Courtesy MVRDV)

MVRDV pursued this same research and logic in their Cloud twin tower development in Libeskind’s masterplan for the ex-US base in downtown Seoul. The firm had earlier developed the Sky Village project in Copenhagen in 2008, similar in concept to the MahaNakon project with its spiral upwards. Indeed, this spiral had long been a concern of Ken Yeang, the Malaysian architect in his “Bioclimatic” Malaysian skyscraper projects of the 1990′s. MVRDV pursued this research in their 2011 Vertical Village show in Taipei, Taiwan, that opened at the same time as the announcement of the Cloud. Continue HERE

SOUNDSCAPE DOCUMENTARY – IN PROGRESS

Some terrific footage was obtained during the initial launch of the Arctic Soundscape Project (Phase I) in 2006 by filmmakers Bob Hillman and Lawrence Campling, who accompanied the original team in the field. During the upcoming (Phase II) field research, we’ll obtain new video to add posts and use in production of a future documentary on this effort. The podcast (at left) provides a short, ‘sound-led’ preview of the audio/naturalists at work. To support production contact: kkrause@wildsanctuary.com

Why is this important?

The Arctic Soundscape Project/Phase II, examines the practicalities of extending baseline studies to other natural habitats, toward launching other major recording surveys in fragile eco-systems around the world.

We’ll raise awareness about bio-acoustic science, encourage academic curiosity, build understanding of soundscape ecology, and share the ‘special values’ that make the Refuge a singularly distinctive ecosystem.

The ‘audio adventure’ aspect of our outreach employs today’s new communication vehicles and accessible technology to help connect ‘digital natives’ with wilderness and wildlife – in ways that educate and engage – through the media they know best.

Text taken from www.arcticsoundscapeproject.com

Seeding Transcendent Consciousness Via Transmedia Explorations

The DMTrmx project aims to enrich the dialogue of entheogens specifically, and consciousness in general. Comprised of artists, thinkers, filmmakers, musicians, curious travelers, and anyone willing to facilitate positive change through hacking the endo-matrix, the project’s participants seek to do just that. The sophisticated storytelling voices guide us as we disperse the memes generated from DMT: The Spirit Molecule into culture. Furthermore, these change agents seed the DMTrmx project via other individuals, organizations, universities, and media outlets, creating an innovative and coherent entheogenic narrative.

DMTrmx utilizes DMT: The Spirit Molecule’s media library (100+ hours of interviews from over 50 brilliant minds, 30+ hours from the Peruvian Amazon, and over one hour of original visual effects, music, and sound files) as its foundation, and the base for discussion for the evolving MNTTKA Manifesto. The manifesto defines new possibilities for humanity’s connection to Spirit through consciousness, physicality, celebration, and representation/communication. Breathing life into the project, DMTrmx offers The Spirit Molecule’s content through a non-commercial Creative Commons license, making it available for viewing and reuse on a variety of online platforms. Continue HERE

What if you had the opportunity to explore all your city without owning a car? What if your city offered you great public transportation? This map was designed by the cartographer Jake Coolidge, 2011.

On his site: Based, in part, on the original Bay Area Rapid Transit plan published in 1956. BART logo and “Bay Area Rides Together” © 2011 San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District.

On a side note, I wrote my thesis on rapid transit development in the United States and Canada in the mid-twentieth century and the plan mentioned above features strongly in that work; have a look at my blog post to read more.

This is the Bay Area Rapid Transit map used at the moment.

Photo by Bill Orcutt

HIGH LINE BILLBOARD
John Baldessari, The First $100,000 I Ever Made
On View Friday, December 2 to Friday, December 30, 2011
Billboard next to the High Line at West 18th Street

High Line Art, presented by Friends of the High Line, today unveiled The First $100,000 I Ever Made, a new work created by legendary artist John Baldessari for the 25-by-75 foot billboard next to the High Line on 10th Avenue at West 18th Street. This is the first of three works to be presented as part of a new series called HIGH LINE BILLBOARD, thanks to the generous support of Edison Properties, the owner of the property on which the billboard stands. The First $100,000 I Ever Made will remain on view until Friday, December 30, 2011. Continue HERE

HIGH LINE BILLBOARD BLOG Q&A with the Curator

Urban Research: Open call for film and video works!

The program Urban Research, curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr for Directors Lounge 2012, reaches beyond the genre “city films”. Contemporary artists are engaged in local politics, they are concerned with specific urban problems and developments, and they are directly interacting with the public with performances and public interventions. Due to rapid changes of urban environment, place is no more a reliable urban structure connected with consistency and collective memory. Place must be reinvented and newly defined over and over, and this does not only apply for spaces of temporary use. Public space in the sense of social interchange and interaction — as well as just a space free to use — is not a given opportunity any more, which can be taken for granted. International artists address these themes and issues with a variety of forms, experimental, documentary, abstract, and narrative; they intervene directly or they show there visions of public space, and a new urban landscape. For the festival presentation all screening media (besides 35mm projection) and art-related projects are welcome.

Urban Research 2012 will be first presented at Directors Lounge 9—19 February 2012. The program has also been presented internationally in screenings in London, Mannheim, Hannover, Poznan, Freiburg, Essen, Dordrecht, Senigallia, St. Petersburg and Berlin. Urban Research Submission Form HERE

Roadtrip Timelapse / Drivelapse video from my 12,225 mile cross country roadtrip around the USA from August 2011 – October 2011 compressed into 5 minutes.

*** Turn on annotations to see what state is being displayed in the video ***

More details and a map of my cross country America Roadtrip Timelapse Drivelapse Project can be found here:

http://briandefrees.com/featured/usa-drivelapsetimelapse-project/

This September ScanLAB Projects in collaboration with Cambridge University traveled to the Arctic aboard Greenpeace’s Icebreaker The Arctic Sunrise.

This year satellite imagery suggests that it is very likely there will be a near record low in Arctic ice extent. We have been documenting ice floes with our 3D scanner to understand their condition. The data will also help the sea ice scientists from Cambridge formulate detailed computer simulations of its movements and behaviour.

This video documents the trip and was produced by Greenpeace’s Stephen Nuget & ScanLAB Projects

Alison Furuto: The Earthscraper, designed by BNKR Arquitectura, is the Skyscraper’s antagonist in the historic urban landscape of Mexico City where the latter is condemned and the preservation of the built environment is the paramount ambition. It preserves the iconic presence of the city square and the existing hierarchy of the buildings that surround it. More images and architects’ description after the break. Continue HERE

Pulse: Inside your mind, subconscious judgements about your surroundings are made in real time. Do you feel safe? Does the area you are in seem unique? Does it appear wealthy, clean or even energetic? You may not think about, let alone understand, what goes into making these anecdotal determinations, but when elicited, your opinions can be understood as part of a more substantial collective and used in powerful ways.

Place Pulse is a website that allows anybody to quickly run an urban perception study and visualize the results in powerful ways. HERE

The Clipperton Project has invited a group of 20 artists and scientists, from 9 different countries, on the three-week journey to this completely isolated French atoll in March 2012, in order to addresses public disassociation with key social issues by presenting scientific and other relevant information through creative processes.

The Clipperton Project uses artistic and scientific collaboration to increase public understanding of social issues, particularly environmental concerns. The project uses Clipperton as a springboard from which to approach challenging debates relating to the issues of international relevance.