MixedMedia

I sure would like to be in New Orleans Saturday when Prospect.1 New Orleans opens in the Lower Ninth Ward and throughout the city. Its going to be, “the largest exhibition of contemporary art” in the U.S. – ever. Well, that’s according to the New York Times, with a bit of hedging with a “billed as” bit.  Nevertheless, 81 artists, 50,000 out of town visitors and installations scattered across the city – some of which are overtly Katrina related – cited are Wangechi Mutu and her “Ghost House” and “Mithra,” a massive ark-like creation by the LA painter Mark Bradford. Both look like they’re using lots of reclaimed materials. Brilliant.Read the full article about Prospect.1 at NYTimes.com 

I’m settling into my new role here at MIT as the IDEAS Competition coordinator. Its a great place to be – the Media Lab, Arts department, Architecture and Urban Studies – all contained within this vast engine of applied research. My role here is to support student interest in applying their ingenuity to community development problems they care about. This involves a healthy dose of partnership building, mentor recruitment, administration… in the context (or service?) of international development, innovation and experiential education – right up my art + technology + participation in development street.

At the top of my reading list as I settle in – my daily diversion – are Paul Polak’s Out of Poverty and Paul Miller’s Sound Unbound. While these two titles might seem at first pass to be world’s away, I find that both are mediations on creativity, appropriation and problem-solving.

Reading Out of Poverty is like stepping off a plane and onto an arid desert, dry wind tugging at your eyes as a total stranger hands you a glass of water and welcomes you to their world. Along the way, your guide offers some straight forward guidance on working with the local people who happen to have extremely limited incomes – in most cases farmers earning less than $1 a day from a plot > 4 acres – to break the cycle of poverty. That glass of water, by the way: it comes from beneath your feet, pumped by the same people you’ll meet as he introduces ’round. Paul’s experience in this landscape is impressive: as the founder of International Development Enterprises, he has traveled the world over the last two decades listening to how poor farmers talk about being stuck. And has come up with some really basic solutions, namely a pump and irrigation system that, in the right conditions, increase crop yields of profitable produce and thereby raise incomes.

Sound Unbound is another universe. Its an aural and literary tropical jungle of ideas so rich they reach back, way back, to expose vine-covered ruins. And at the same time the essays contained in the book push upward and outward, pointing out the changing constellations in our rapidly evolving digital universe.

Sound Unbound is the perfect kind of book to swallow – like the bird, to duck and dive into suddenly; to withdraw. Repeat. Dodge around Cory Doctorow’s pithy introduction but pause long enough to catch Steve Reich get excited about sampling, not synthesizing. Enter Paul’s world of mixed up, mashed up, layered energy. Collisions reveal ecstasies; catalysts are crucibles. Start anywhere, just begin. Free associate with Jonathan Lethem, feint ‘colored noise’ with Ron Eglash. Its a ripping read I’ve just begun.

What I see that brings these two books together is the curiosity of their respective authors, who happen to be at very different moments in their lives. Paul P. opens talking about his grandson. Paul M. is trying to DJ in your mind. But they are both fundamentally curious about creativity and its roots – whether in poverty or in the prima materia of culture. Both see the dialogue, the synthesis, and the re-production as fundamental to our well being, as farmers and per sons.

Read either? Drop a line, pull a quote, mix it up.

Thanks to dear friend Jon for this must see international video collaboration. I am completely taken with the idea of using the urban landscape as a canvas. And even though the subject is kind of dull and reductive, the inspiration is brilliant!

Great looking announcement that was passed along today. The sponsors, PBS and the creators of the television show Design Squad, are looking for some sport. Hook up with some yung’uns and pitch in – looks like fun!

Click here to download the Trash to Treasure Flyer

Vaguely interesting article on Yahoo!News today about “scientific research” (that gets me every time) into the effects of absinthe, that drink I was turned on to by late 19th century French writers like Paul Verlaine and Charles Baudelaire. In addition to its intoxicating effects of near-mythological proportions, absinthe cast enough artists into abject poverty that the drink was eventually banned. And voila: today it is the stuff of science. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

In recent years, the psychedelic nature of absinthe has been hotly debated. Absinthe was notorious among 19th-century and early 20th-century bohemian artists as “the Green Fairy” that expanded the mind. After it became infamous for madness and toxic side effects among drinkers, it was widely banned.

The modern scientific consensus is that absinthe’s reputation could simply be traced back to alcoholism, or perhaps toxic compounds that leaked in during faulty distillation. Still, others have pointed at a chemical named thujone in wormwood, one of the herbs used to prepare absinthe and the one that gives the drink its green color. Thujone was blamed for “absinthe madness” and “absinthism,” a collection of symptoms including hallucinations, facial tics, numbness and dementia.

Prior studies suggested that absinthe had only trace levels of thujone. But critics claimed that absinthe made before it got banned in France in 1915 had much higher levels of thujone than modern absinthe produced since 1988, when the European Union lifted the ban on making absinthe.

“Today it seems a substantial minority of consumers want these myths to be true, even if there is no empirical evidence that they are,” said researcher Dirk Lachenmeier, a chemist with the Chemical and Veterinary Investigation Laboratory of Karlsruhe in Germany.

Lachenmeier and his colleagues analyzed 13 samples of absinthe from old, sealed bottles in France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and the United States dated back to the early 1900s before the ban. After uncorking the bottles, they found relatively small concentrations of thujone in that absinthe, about the same as those in modern varieties.

Laboratory tests found no other compound that could explain absinthe’s effects. “All things considered, nothing besides ethanol was found in the absinthes that was able to explain the syndrome of absinthism,” Lachenmeier said. (Ethanol is a word for common drinking alcohol.)

The scientists are set to detail their findings in the May 14 issue of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Access the full story online…