Tag Archives: open green

time inventors’ kabinet

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

bee monitoring research

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Observations from the enhanced beehive in the okno garden.
On may 4th, 2011, we moved a swarm into this hive, and from than on we are filming with 2 webcams the behaviour of the city honeybees. This research (15 frames a second, from 4/5/2011 till now) gives us a lot of terrabytes of bee-monitoring. We’ll work out some bio-artistic projects with it over time.

jardins en fête – bibliothèque Pechère

40 tuinen te bezoeken op zondag 25 september 2011
Na het grote succes van de edities in 2008,2009 en 2010 en dankzij de steun van het Brussels Hoofdstedelijk Gewest (Leefmilieu Brussel), beleeft het initiatief Tuinen in Feesttooi dit jaar haar vierde uitgave. Het grote publiek zal nog eens de gelegenheid krijgen om 40 privé- en semi-private tuinen te bezoeken, de ene nog origineler dan de andere, vol verrassingen!
Er zullen enkele tuinen bezocht kunnen worden die van Natagora het label “Natuur in de tuin” gekregen hebben.
De eigenaars van deze tuinen, de ontwerpers of voor het evenement opgeleide gidsen zullen het publiek uitnodigen om de charmes van deze “geheime tuinen” te ontdekken.

[flashvideo filename=http://opengreens.archive.okno.be/wp-content/plugins/flash-video-player/COG.xml width=448 height=252 displayheight=260 overstretch=false thumbsinplaylist=true /]
TV Brussel, Vandaag – 25 september 2011

experimentele tuin op een plat dak:
De hedendaagse experimenten van het internationale project TIK (Time Inventors’ Kabinet), in Brussel, gesteund door OKNO, zijn geestelijke verwant met de antieke tuinen, tuinen uit de renaissance- en barokperiode waar wetenschappen, kunsten en filosofie zich vermengen tot één enkele kunst. Men heeft het mis om een tuin alleen maar te zien als een charmant plekje met bloemetjes en vogeltjes …. Volgens Michel Le Bris, “moeten de twisten van tuinmannen worden gezien als metafysische twisten” (Le Paradis perdu. Parijs, Grasset, 1981). Op het plat dak van een saaie garage in het centrum van de stad vindt u een moestuin met kolen, een honingbosje, oude olijfbomen, bijenkorven, jonge vijgenbomen,… die gedijen in een vulkanisch substraat met het stadhuis van Brussel als achtergrond, alles goed georkestreerd door enthousiaste kunstenaars.

article in the magazine of the René Pechère foundation:
https://so-on.annemariemaes.net/SO-ON/articles/pechere_OpenGreens.pdf

link to the online newsletter of the bibliothèque René Péchère: http://www.bvrp.net/Portals/0/Newsletters/RENDEZ-VOUS%20AU%20JARDIN%2018/HTML/

summer school in Kravín, Czech Republic

august 23 – 25
Double barrel heating
How to make a double-barrel stove, suitable for heating bigger spaces in an ecological way? The results will be presented during the weekend beekeeping event, especially when it is cold in the evening.
august 26 – 28
Beehives
Creating beehives, inspired by traditional construction designs and sustainable and bee-friendly principles. With the participation of local as well as international beekeepers, artisans and artists. We will construct the Leaf Hive, invented in 1789 by François Huber, a TopBar Hive and a Warré Hive.

additional program
Friday August 27th screening of the bee movies
Saturday August 28th concert by Double Barrel Band with combustion and bee music set
Sunday August 29th visiting the local beekeepers and the exhibition From nectar to Honey at the Museum of the Czech countryside, Chateau Kacina
The additional program includes also the walks in the woods with the mushroom hunter, and a continuing discussion on apiculture, bee art and ecological culture, tasting of honey etc.

summer research and publication


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 …

sculptural bees

Working together with my bees to create natural sculptures. In the fablab in Ghent I collected some nice found material which I adapted to the needs of the bees and the hives. It’s a first try – i’ve put 2 adjusted frames in one of my ‘split-off’ colonies from this year. I hope they’re yet strong enough to build into the strange materials. First check after 2 weeks, when back from Greece.

fibonacci number sequence

Yes! this week diving into the mathematical formulas. Planning to decypher Voronoi and Fibonacci sequences during the Processing workshop at Okno. Another moment to study the links between nature and mathematics. Leonardo Pisano Bigollo (c. 1170 – c. 1250) also known as Leonardo of Pisa, Leonardo Pisano, Leonardo Bonacci, Leonardo Fibonacci, or, most commonly, simply Fibonacci, was a Mathematician, considered by some “the most talented western mathematician of the Middle_Ages.”
Fibonacci is best known to the modern world for the spreading of the Hindu-Arabic_numeral_system in Europe, primarily through the publication in the early 13th century of his Book of Calculation, the Liber_Abaci; and for a number Sequence named after him known as the Fibonacci numbers, which he did not discover but used as an example in the Liber Abaci.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number

desert numerique 2011

Annemie Maes participates in the workshops, presentations and experiments of the festival Desert Numerique. She will present okno’s OpenGreens project. Desert Numerique is an artistic event gathering media artists, curators, producers, scientists, activists and publics around practices linking art, science and technologies; an invitation to bring digital arts in a unusual place, the village of Saint-Nazaire-le-Deesert (Drome, in France). It aims to transform the village into an electronical oasis, an effervescent laboratory.Desert Numerique combines a summer’s professional network meeting in the countryside and an exhibition made as an extension of the host village itself.
all info: http://desertnumerique.incident.net/2011/
http://www.youtube.com/user/bidouillelectronique#g/c/DEEE0B4657A267A7

ecological restoration, urban nature, and the reclamation of public spaces

Jonathan Prior (University of Edinburgh, Institute of Geography) gives us insight in the ecological restauration of landscapes. The previous decades there has been a slow adoption of ecological restoration principles within the built (urban) environment. During his lecture ‘Ecological restoration, urban nature, and the reclamation of public spaces’ Prior wants to guide us in the methods and underlaying values (esthetic, social and political) of the recovery of damaged ecosystems and habitats.

Ecological restoration is the practice of assisting the recovery of damaged ecosystems, habitats or landscapes, to a point in time before the degradation occurred. Ecological restoration can therefore be conceived of as both a spatial and temporal human intervention within non-human nature.

Since the ‘mainstreaming’ of ecological restoration over the last 30 years or so, there has been a slow adoption of ecological restoration principles within the built (urban) environment. Using examples from Europe and North America, in this presentation I want to reveal the types of values that play a role in the construction of ecological restoration policy in urban environments, including aesthetic, ecological, and social values, as well as the notion of the public good. Further, I will look at how these values – sometimes competing, sometimes harmonious – need to be considered within urban green space projects, so as to ensure that they are socially as well as ecologically sustainable.

The lecture is followed by an introduction to the OpenGreens database, by Danielle Roberts and Annemie Maes.

lectures @ okno, thursday june 16 – 8pm