MixedMedia

The Orion Nebula captured through NASAs Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope[A little unusual for here, but...crossposted from my day job] Just yesterday I was reading an article at physorg.org describing the remarkable discovery of an explosion within the Orion Nebula considered to be the youngest “star nursery” ever discovered. A star nursery – that phrase really stuck with me in a way it hadn’t before, and I think it must all be in the context of work.

That same day I came across a 2006 TED Talk by the inimitable Stewart Brand, who founded the Whole Earth Review back when the Internet was a glint in Bob Metcalf’s eye. It wasn’t even ARPANET (I don’t think). Anyway, Stewart Brand in his TED Talk was describing the explosive rate of growth of our cities, and how they represent one of our greatest hopes for a future without poverty. He said a lot of provocative things in his TED talk back in 2006, and one of them is that cities, especially slums, are vibrant nodes of problem solving and innovation. Not a typical view of a slum.

And then he did something remarkable – at least I thought it was remarkable – he played a video clip of the earth in dark. The camera slowly pulls away from the East Coast of the U.S. and its dense, nebula-like cluster of light. We see the dark expanse of the Atlantic Ocean and then London comes into view, then Paris and Cairo and Berlin and Istanbul and soon the entire surface of the earth is shining with these clusters of light and he says something breathtaking: “For the first time, the earth is shining back at the stars.

”Star nurseries. The Internet. Cities. Innovation. Changing perspective.

This is what I’ve been dreaming about for more than a year – the creation of a place where innovative ideas are born and carried forward, an global incubator for “invention as public service.” A place where the worldwide talent of MIT students, alumni and their collaborators can be directed toward some of the great opportunities of our time – from energy production and storage to innovations in international health and sanitation. Agricultural production and processing to new approaches to education and communication delivery.

These are some of the challenges we face, and it is my deepest hope that the MIT IDEAS Global Challenge can be an incubator of some of MIT’s new humanitarian stars.

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.

This past weekend I spent a couple of days in Ithaca, New York at the invitation of someone who runs something called ‘The Level Green Institute’ – which appears to have several offshoots, among them something called “Arts at the Heart of a Sustainable World.” Anyway, the symposium, titled “Greening the Arts” was, though poorly attended, was able to pull in a really interesting group of panelists.

Though I am pretty open to working with just about anyone when it comes to the arts, I am particularly eager to meet artists and critics whose work intersects with development in some way. Which is what drew me to the gathering: while I am not, and do not really consider myself a “green artist” (even the “artist” label is questionable, since I rarely show my own work) I was interested to learn how my work as an educator overlaps with artists whose work takes some kind of stand with regard to human impact in the natural world. And there were some great folks there:

• Steven Siegel is a New York artist working and living in the lower Hudson Valley whose work incorporates detritus of the material world. The forum made little room for us to get to know each others’ work, but I found out more at http://www.stevensiegel.net and was both struck by the range of media and its familiarity via my own friendships with artists like Jeff Spaulding and  Greg Hannan.
• Victoria Romanoff is a preservationist and mixedmedia artist whose work has had a greater impact in her home town than any other artist I know. She restored her first 19th century barn in the 1970s and has since then become an advocate for local preservation. She shared with me a wonderful manifesto-like publication she co-authored on New York’s business façades as we toured her studio-office-home in a former fire station she and her partner restored. Her vigor reminds me of the work of the Canadian duo, Martha Fleming and Lyne Lapointe.
• Sam Bower runs something called the greenmuseum.org. Himself an artist, Sam is leading an effort to promote works that raise awareness about the environment through the creation of an online museum. I can’t speak to that too much – yet, as its all new to me… but hopefully more to come.

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