Quand l’art et la technologie se rencontrent pour permettre à la nature de s’adapter à une jungle de béton.
Si nous voulons vraiment remodeler nos vies urbaines afin qu’elles deviennent écologiquement durable il va falloir agir de manière tangible.
Mais où et comment pouvons nous créer des oasis de verdure dans la jungle de béton de nos cités ? Sur nos bancs de fenêtre, nos balcons, nos toits ?
L’artiste multimédia et activiste Annemie Maes nous donnera des réponses et des pistes pratiques.
Elle est depuis longtemps engagée dans l’éco-technologie et l’activisme de base.
En 2004, avec Guy Van Belle, elle crée OKNO, un collectif d’artistes dont l’objectif est de développer des projets culturels innovants qui unissent l’art et la technologie.
Par exemple : leur projet “connected open greens” (espaces verts, ouverts et reliés) : créer des lieux où la culture et la nature peuvent se rencontrer de manière symbiotique, où les technologies d’énergie régénérative rencontre les traditions de jardinage, et où des projets artistiques peuvent créer de nouveaux biotopes.
La question est la suivante : Jusqu’à quel point de nouveaux organismes, de nouveaux environnements, et de nouveaux paysages peuvent être générés par un mariage entre l’artificiel et le naturel ?
Les membres d’OKNO gèrent deux espaces de nature sur les toits à Bruxelles. Ils observent et prennent note du développement des plantes, de leur floraison et de leur mort. En même temps, ils gèrent un habitat disponible pour les abeilles et autres insectes.
Annemie Maes nous parlera de leur expérience avec la nature en ville et sur les toits, dont une des facettes est l’élevage des abeilles.
Visite du projet OKNO – mercredi 12 octobre de 14h30 à 17h
Over summer we are continuing our physical and digital research in our OpenGreens-lab. Describing plants, working with the bees (contributing to a University Ghent research program on the distribution of bee-virusses), collecting seeds and harvesting fruits and vegetables.
The gardens grow on the rythm of the light and we try to describe the ever changing colours in the urban OpenGreens … working towards a publication for the end of september, the first one in a series of Time Inventors …
An experimental and playful hands-on workshop (BEAM related) by Ralf Schreiber.
[*small unspectacular autonomous electronic machines – that attract attention by minimal tiny movements, light or soft sonic output.]
…it is a lot of fun to build your own robotic creature. As soon as the circuit starts working the robots begin to sing and jerk – there is always a great Hello.
It’s a magic moment and the constructor’s pride is often mixed with a little fear, that continuing soldering could possibly damage the just created little robot.
Time and again it is amazing to see, that such a wimpy, handcrafted creature can arouse empathy, can even activate a certain care in the builder…. (rs)
The most simple way to create and build “life like” machines or robots is by the use of analogue oscillator circuits. Oscillations can be feed-backed and thus simple interactions will happen and simple neuronal networks behavior can be simulated.
In this workshop we will build different kinds of machines. In combination with tiny motors and loudspeakers (piezos) they will generate smallest movements and soft sounds. All these machines are based on extreme low energetic circuits designs and get powered by the electric energy from tiny solar-panels or wimpy diy batteries.
All the finished machines can be exposed / set free in the garden. Furthermore some “creatures” can be connected or integrated to botanical or fungal organism (the plants resistance/capacity will get an integral part of the oscillating circuits).
For the design and look we will recycle & reuse wimpy stuff and elements direct from the garden: leaves, thin twigs, wax from the bee hives…
Schreiber is building solar-powered electronic insects that sing, chirp, swing and crawl. These little creatures get their energy from the sun and will probably outlive most of the fine electronic devices surrounding us today.
During the past few years Ralf has given numerous workshops around the world, teaching people to build their own robots from cheap components.
This knowledge does not only give people the possibility to build funny little toys, it also gives people more control and understanding of their increasingly technological surroundings.
(alessandro ludovico/www.neural.it)
The plastic bag is filled with willow woodchips mixed with pleurotus ostreatus spawn. It took 4 weeks for the mycellium to overgrow the woodchips. The 5th week, the mushrooms started to come out the fissures in the plastic bag.
During 5 days and 5 nights I took a picture of the growing mushrooms, every 30 minutes. Unfortunately, the flashes didn’t went off several times, which gives some jumps in the steady growth pace.
But the whole is a nice example of a natural time bending process, 5 days and nights compressed in 30 seconds.
[flashvideo filename=https://so-on.annemariemaes.net/SO-ON/OpenGreen/pleurotus/mushroom.flv height=315 width=448 image=https://so-on.annemariemaes.net/SO-ON/OpenGreen/pleurotus/pleurotus.jpg /]
Next week we have the first public presentation of our OpenGreens database. This will happen at ESC in Graz, Austria – our partner in the TIK/ EU project.
The Connected OpenGreens project is a collective OKNO project.
COG is a project around marginal zones [in the city] where culture and nature overlap and enter into a symbiotic relationship.
The project researches different bottom up approaches for designing green human environments that have the stability and diversity of natural ecosystems.
In the COG database we keep scrutinuously track of the monitoring of these ecosystems. We insert technology in the gardens and take a closer look on how the fusion of natural and artificial matter produces new natures.
The COG database is initiated by Annemie Maes spring 2010, the first public presentation took place in Graz, Austria, march 2011.
Credits:
Database concept & structure: Annemie Maes & Danielle Roberts
Database design: Annemie Maes and Danielle Roberts
Frontend design & code: Danielle Roberts
Backend design & code: Balthazar de Tonnac
Voronoi code: Lee Byron
Adaped by: Marcio Dominguez
Intern: Jozef Devos
Production: Annemie Maes for OKNO vzw
The Connected OpenGreens database is part of the ‘Time Inventors’ Kabinet’ – a transdisciplinary project setup in the framework of EU-culture, with the partners OKNO, ESC and Col-me.
Version 2 of the windclock describes the OpenGreen rooftop garden in the center of Brussels. The wind-values, registrated by the photosensor, are linked to the description of the plants in the rooftop garden. The stronger the wind blows, the more present the plantnames are – expressed in fontsize.
The overall movie gets a voice-over by the bees of the garden: they comment on their foraging area and add another layer to the wind movie.
More on padma.okno.be …
http://padma.okno.be/Vgduxoku/00:00:06.000-00:11:58.000
Watch the interview on the OpenGreens at Changing Tents by clicking the padma-link above.
Everyday we set a different topic for discussion in our connected OpenGreens exchange corner, at Changing Tents during Burning Ice#4.
monday 17.01.11 – building the hexayurts
tuesday 18.01.11 – the economic value of the honeybee
wednesday 19.01.11 – compost – recycle day, spring cleaning
thursday 20.01.11 – the connected OpenGreens database
friday 21.01.11 – gift economy, the Kanal euro – complementary currency
saturday 22.01.11 – bee monitoring, enhanced beehives
sunday 23.01.11 – collaps
You can download the connected OpenGreens catalog (v.1.0):
https://so-on.annemariemaes.net/SO-ON/OpenGreen/COG-catalog/v.1.0-smallspread.pdf
The catalog will function as a basis for discussions at the OpenGreens corner.
On Friday 10 december Constant continues to interrogate the active potential of online media archives. After a short introduction to the work done at Active Archives* so far, Michael Murtaugh tours us through the Active Archives Video Wiki software he is developing.
We will than speak with Pieter Geenen about his work-in-progress using the Active Archives system to experiment with displacement, both in text and image. We also invited Annemie Maes to present pad.ma, “an online archive of densely text-annotated video material, primarily footage and not-finished films”, and she will explain how it is being employed in the OKNO project The Time Inventor’s Kabinet.
Last but not least, Peter Westenberg demonstrates how and why he worked on multiple transcriptions/translations using the Active Archives Video Wiki. We’ll conclude the evening with a toast to the pre-release of the AA software: a developers version is available for testing as of this weekend.
http://www.activearchives.org
creative writing on collective basis, korcula seen in slow motion:
Location: croatia, korcula, grey area
Keywords: windclock, workshop, time inventors’ kabinet, TIK, screwing
Closeup of a hand making a bolt spin along a rod of metal. Glimpses of the transparent construction it is a part of. Hand screwing a nut on a tige, inside studio/workshop.
A black screen is followed by some compression errors in the video. Then we see a hand screwing down a nut on a rod, first with the index and middel fingers, then with support of the thumb. In the background we see a piece of clothing on a chair. Light falls in from the left. The nut descends into a clear plastic object, a WindClock in construction. The hand secures the nut. We hear people in a room, objects being moved.
We hear a dialogue:
Guy:“Great idea ????”
Barb:“Who had this great idea?”
Guy:“Alexandra”
Barb laughs.
pause
Guy: “I know it sounds radical, to ?? data from the server”.
Barb laughs.
Ralf talks, unintelligible, a metal object falls.
Nut is screwing down.
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