How sustainable is the city?
Can we provide for our own food, our own energy, our own media ecology?
Can we grow a selection of fruits and vegetables in rooftop gardens or collect wild edible plants in wastelands and on building sites – enough to live on?
Are you interested to start your own OpenGreen, on your balcony, your rooftop or your window sill?
Come and talk to us, we can advise you on how to set up green patches in unusual places … and get the best out of it.
You can find all information on OpenGreens in the first edition of our OpenGreens catalog, download the catalog here: https://so-on.annemariemaes.net/SO-ON/OpenGreen/COG-catalog/v.1.0-smallspread.pdf
And on the flickr page below you can visit an overview of the participation of okno’s OpenGreens in the Changing Tents Village of the Burning Ice#4 festival – rehearsals for a changing world.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/souon/sets/72157625894603306/
Good Afternoon!
We are in 2025. We know by now that there has been a one week settlement here, at the Quay des Péniches 2, 14 years ago.
After 7 days, everybody was gone. We know by now that on the 6th day, on saturday 22 of january 2011, a big crisis appeared which caused a moment of panic and despair. Short after, people were recognizing that the alarm were false. There was a party whole night long.
We don’t know what happened the next morning and early afternoon. We only know that everybody and everything was gone by sunday 23 january 16:00 in the afternoon.
We invite you to now have a look together with us on what was going on.
Feel welcome to the future!
Step in, and please note: you will enter a recorded situation as soon as you step into CHANGING TENTS.
[radical_hope, Brussels – january 2011]
Read here the collapse text, written by Jacob Wren and read by Katja Dreyer.
More Changing Info: http://www.open-frames.net/changing-tents/
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.
The Okno participation in Burning Ice #4 consists of an OpenGreens Exchange Corner. The trading basis is the Connected OpenGreen Catalog … this is a book to be written in a collaborative way. It lists all goods and services that can be exchanged between OpenGreen users.
The maquette of the book is the basis for the discussions in the OpenGreens exchange corner, and the shared information and services cover different urban topics.
You can consider the book as a manual/proposition for living in the cities in a different way …
If we want to alter our habits, we’ll have to change our ideas on what is most essential and necessary in our lives. We’ll have to break with the common rules, deviate from the norm and create dynamic structures. Therefore we’ll use temporary places as the OpenGreens.
Six tents and a car together form a temporary zone for social and economic change. A group of artists have been invited by Radical_Hope (Heike Langsdorf) to set up this out-of-the-ordinary “camp”. On Monday January 17 everyone is welcome to come and learn to erect the hexayurts. A hexayurt is a special kind of tent, designed by Vinay Gupta as incredibly cheap shelter for those in need. You can then stay and get involved in the week-long process of action that aims to generate ideas: ideas about new ways of organising work, urban food production, alternative energy management, innovative financing schemes and so on. As from 5 January you can programme your own activities as part of Changing Tents by adding them to the Changing Agenda: www.changingagenda.be.
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
sostenuto conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia – 1/5 december 2010
presentation of the OpenGreens project in the section: New Collectives – 2 december 18:40
Ljubljana community garden project by obrat.org
Numerous artistic and cultural actors in the Mediterranean area, in Europe, and throughout the world have noticed the important changes in our societies and the difficulties resulting from these changes. As experimenters and explorers, they are putting their efforts into proposing new ways of operating in the cultural sector and beyond.
In this moment of multiple and confusing crises, the European Union is also searching for new perspectives through its EU 2020 strategy. Within this context, it seems important to highlight how cultural actors are coping with social transformations, with transformations of public policies, or with transformations of cultural and artistic practices (new collaborative practices, the integration of communication technologies, etc.).
During the Ready to Change Forum, we are hazarding the following questions: is it possible to combine our knowledge, our experiences, and our desires in order to take a collective position? Is it possible to demonstrate the determinant role that we are assuming in this moment of our history, one which is illuminating the meanings and reconstructing models of solidarity, and proposing new ways of thinking and new forms of organization and relationships?
Continue reading →
Open Greens : marginal zones where culture and nature overlap and enter into a symbiotic relationship. The Kabinet : a collection of city gardens, abandoned agricultural and industrial spaces or miniature parcs on your balconies and window sills. Discover how you can expand your creative space by participating in an ecological network, studying the interactions between organisms and their environment.
[flashvideo filename=http://opengreens.archive.okno.be/wp-content/plugins/flash-video-player/OpenGreens_research.xml width=448 height=635 displayheight=248 overstretch=false thumbsinplaylist=true /]
Research on the ecology of urban habitats, guided by the observation of city honeybees.
The range of habitats in urban areas is surprising. Most of the major terrestrial habitat types are represented in towns and cities, either as remnants of previously rural environments, or as artificial analogues of semi-natural habitats.
The Open Green project focuses on two rooftopgardens located in Brussels’ city center on 400 m from one another : an edible forest rooftop garden on top of a parking lot and a wild flower rooftop garden on top of an old warehouse.
The Open Green project blends organic and technological matter into one and the same nature. Through analogue and digital means we do long term observations on the growth, blossoming and decay of plants and insects submitted to natural elements such as wind, sun, rain and pollution in an urban context.
We monitor and extract data from natural processes both on micro garden level as on macro city level and make these data in realtime available online via open wireless citynetworks.
Continue reading →
a workshop about a hypothetical content, method and style for new ecological media writing today. 17-19 November 2010 @ OKNO – Brussels
In a concise 3-day program, we try to lay the foundations for a common style in treating the TIK themes and materials. Conform to the purpose of the 2-year project, and its bottom-up but collaborative strategies, we deal with the several blind spots that are still open, for thinking about a changed creative output in any media form: text, code, image, sound, word,…
The real subject of workshops is closely related to the TIK project scheme and deals with:
– the available documentation of the previous events and activities
– the representation and creative media writing throughout the project
– the outline of a common strategy for dealing with artistic research currently
– the content of the future conferences and publications
Daily we organize 5 short and to-the-point 1-hour sessions: working scheme, theoretical intro, practical exercises, evaluation/aftertalk and online reviewing. The themes of the planned days are as following:
05.11.2010 // 18h: Preliminary online preparation: a TIK chat on Guy Fawkes’ Night… (check wikipedia)
17.11.2010 // 11h: OKNO brussels : Introduction, and the TIK-methodology of writing with all-media
18.11.2010 // 11h: OKNO brussels : Aestetical, and stylistic considerations of TIK-writing with media
19.11.2010 // 11h: OKNO brussels : From papers to abstractions, or how TIK-writing can make media
Tic [pronounced: tik] = a habitual spasmodic contraction of the muscles; origin early 19th cent., from Italian “ticchio”
Plexiglass windclock, based on a Da Vinci anemometer model. The clock has a gradient range from black to white and a photosensor reads out the temporary values generated by the wind.
Location 1: grey)(area gallery in Korcula, Croatia – presentation of the windclocks-workshop of TIK/ time inventors’ kabinet.
Location 2: so-on’s OpenGreen rooftop, Brussels – measuring windtime and describing the OpenGreen.
[flashvideo filename=http://opengreens.archive.okno.be/wp-content/plugins/flash-video-player/textual-gardens.xml width=448 height=440 displayheight=248 overstretch=false thumbsinplaylist=true /]
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 …
