“Materials & Applications is a non-profit organization that produces installations twice yearly and hosts open air discussions, workshops, performances and other public events. We also create outreach programs to educate and inspire property and business owners to make choices that increase the sustainability of their buildings and properties. M&A was created to experiment with public space at a scale proportional to a community, a space that can be understood, worked with, reconfigured and used. M&A is located in front of the offices of infranatural, and is a testbed for us to work with a community to realize new and important concepts in building. “

Materials & Applications / Architecture and Landscapes Research.

Hairy Children Portraits by Erik Mark Sandberg. His show opens tonight at Johanssen-Gallery in Berlin.

Yes!

This music video was shot for Sour’s ‘Hibi no Neiro’ (Tone of everyday) from their first mini album ‘Water Flavor EP’. The cast were selected from the actual Sour fan base, from many countries around the world. Each person and scene was filmed purely via webcam.

Director: Masashi Kawamura + Hal Kirkland + Magico Nakamura + Masayoshi Nakamura

SOUR official site: http://sour-web.com

As this is another dying custom of Ancient China it is difficult to find much about pigeon whistles and flutes.

The China Fancy Pigeon Conservation Center was created by its founder “Wang Shixiang” now ninety three years old. This center is dedicated to the breeding and preservation of as many ancient Chinese pigeon breeds as possible. It houses some 137 breeds and Wangs interest in many of Chinese cultures lead him to write the definitive book on Chinese Pigeon Whistles.
I was shown around the center by Mr. Hou the head technician and given a demonstration to the whistles in flight.

Go to the end of the website and see the video to understand how perplexingly amazing this is.

CLICK HERE

A Refuge for Species

“Located in southeastern Ecuador, near the Peruvian border, the Nangaritza River valley is mountainous, heavily forested and relatively inaccessible to most people. The upper river valley is known for its Tepuyes, or tabletop mountains, which are home to many species that are found nowhere else on earth, as well as other species whose populations are threatened in other locations but remain plentiful here.

Nangaritza’s isolation has not only helped to protect the mountain ecosystem from destruction, it has also long posed a challenge to detailed scientific study. Part of the region is under the protection of the Nangaritza Protected Forest, but wildlife experts believe that more land must be protected for this unique environment to thrive.

The Shuar indigenous association and a local farming organization have been granted management over much of the protected forest, but these groups are proposing that the lands be upgraded to a higher protection status, where they will be more sustainably managed. Before this step can be taken, however, more scientific data is needed.”

Text by CONSERVATION INTERNATIONAL

Play this and ENJOY (venetian snares)

“The countries of the world in their own languages and scripts; with official names, capitals, flags, coats of arms, administrative divisions, national anthems, and translations of the countries and capitals into many languages”) to get to the meat of the site, a collection of links to various pages: Days, Months, Planets, Mountains, etc.; a huge list of languages with each name given in the original (with transliteration where appropriate); various other random items (including a small set of famous people: it’s fun to see the varying forms of Charlemagne); an Alphabets section; and finally a set of Glossaries, with a few hundred English words translated into, well, everything (divided into manageable sets: Albanian|Greek|Armenian, American|Polynesian, Asian, Balto-Slavic, Basque|Caucasus, Celtic, Constructed, etc.).

http://www.geonames.de/

http://www.billdunlap.com/

A mini cooper filled with cooking gas, the gas is release from 2 large tanks. in the window a small hole was drilled, letting the gas that is trapped inside escaping and burning as a small flame. An installation by Ariel Schlesinger.

Eleven Heavy Things«, 2009, a series of eleven outdoor sculptures by Miranda July.

Click on image to see it.

Thomas Cole / Romantic Landscape, about 1826.
Close-up of Rain on Butterfly Wings (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

Beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder. It’s embedded in our genes.

“Demonstrating that we have a biologically programmed positive response to nature is more difficult, because we don’t respond as dramatically to something that’s not a threat.

But numerous studies since the 1970s suggest the subtle power of natural scenery to heal both body and mind. Texas A&M researcher Roger Ulrich, for instance, has shown that people who watch a calming nature video after a stressful experience have markedly lower muscle tension, pulse, and skin conductance activity after less than five minutes. This translates into significant medical benefits.

Ulrich monitored patients after gallbladder surgery and found that those assigned to a room looking out on trees needed far fewer painkillers than patients in rooms that faced a brick wall.

Heart surgery patients in rooms with nature scenes on the wall experienced less anxiety and smoother recoveries than patients with blank walls or abstract art.

Likewise, cosmonauts confined for months in outer space quickly lose interest in video programs and other diversions. They prefer to stare out the window at the untouchable Earth.”

Read about it: The Natural History of Art

“The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use” (Arthur Koestler).

A University of Toronto study provides the first direct evidence that our mood literally changes the way our visual system filters our perceptual experience suggesting that seeing the world through rose-colored glasses is more biological reality than metaphor.

“Good and bad moods literally change the way our visual cortex operates and how we see,” says Adam Anderson, a U of T professor of psychology. “Specifically our study shows that when in a positive mood, our visual cortex takes in more information, while negative moods result in tunnel vision. The study appears tomorrow in the Journal of Neuroscience.

The U of T team used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine how our visual cortex processes sensory information when in good, bad, and neutral moods. They found that donning the rose-colored glasses of a good mood is less about the color and more about the expansiveness of the view.

The researchers first showed subjects a series images designed to generate a good, bad or neutral mood. Subjects were then shown a composite image, featuring a face in the center, surrounded by “place” images, such as a house. To focus their attention on the central image, subjects were asked to identify the gender of the person’s face. When in a bad mood, the subjects did not process the images of places in the surrounding background.

However, when viewing the same images in a good mood, they actually took in more information — they saw the central image of the face as well as the surrounding pictures of houses. The discovery came from looking at specific parts of the brain — the parahippocampal “place area” — that are known to process places and how this area relates to primary visual cortical responses, the first part of the cortex related to vision.

“Under positive moods, people may process a greater number of objects in their environment, which sounds like a good thing, but it also can result in distraction,” says Taylor Schmitz, a graduate student of Anderson’s and lead author of the study. “Good moods enhance the literal size of the window through which we see the world. The upside of this is that we can see things from a more global, or integrative perspective. The downside is that this can lead to distraction on critical tasks that require narrow focus, such as operating dangerous machinery or airport screening of passenger baggage. Bad moods, on the other hand, may keep us more narrowly focused, preventing us from integrating information outside of our direct attentional focus.”

Info and details by SCIENCE DAILY.