MixedMedia

NetSquared’s N2 Think Tank asks, “What was the best example or lesson learned about leveraging social media from the political campaigns this year? We saw candidates speaking to citizens through various mechanisms, but we also know that candidates have a lot more money than most of our nonprofit organizations (even if the tools are free, staffing and strategy development isn’t). What social media tools, tricks, and strategies were employed that could be used successfully with nonprofits?”

So I’m not going to talk about a particular technology (its pretty clear from basic data available that the Obama Campaign ran a stronger presence across pretty much all platforms and tools, and part of that is money and lessons from ’04 and netroots connections into the campaign HQ) but rather about something I sensed is very unique to this year’s contest, and to the Obama campaign in particular, which is this:

Appropriation and DIY messaging. (more…)

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.

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… 

For the last several years, I’ve had the privilege of writing a monthly round-up of news related to the field of ‘deliberative democracy’ – participation as conversation, you might say. All of the recent news about a “food crisis” – which smacks of disingenuousness in the face of years of trade liberalization – got me thinking how public deliberation might play a role informing the policy debates. For that, we need active citizens.

The world’s growing food crisis highlights a modern challenge to democratic governments: participation in relief and development activities. Not only do citizens in many advanced industrialized nations have low levels of knowledge about foreign affairs, the aren’t particularly interested to do something about it. And so modern “disasters” – economically engineered rather than naturally occurring threats to humankind – result in sudden and dramatic changes in the quality of life for millions, if not billions, of people around the world (see commondreams.org’s The World Food Crisis).

Some theorists have argued in the past that deliberation isn’t good for activists, because it forces compromise when what their constituents need are clear victories that deliver the goods. The other side argues that a “win” isn’t sustainable unless it has buy-in from the broader public and a larger constellation of stake-holders. The latest global food crisis – which has precipitated rioting in the streets around the world and engendered political hand-wringing in the North and outrage in the South – surfaces many cross-cutting issues that illustrate the paradoxes of our age. Here are a few worth talking about:

• Agricultural subsidies and tariffs: when we “protect” local productive capacity by stimulating local investments while raising the costs of cheap agricultural imports, are we raising a defense against the shock of spiking food costs?
• Genetically modified foods: Do GMOs offer a way out of the food crisis? Proponents are vehement about the positives while opponents argue for greater local control of crop production.
• U.S. Leadership: The U.N.’s World Food Program faces a budget shortfall of $755million, in part due to declines in U.S. funding as well as its habit of not paying up.
• “Peak oil” and biofuels: One reason for the dramatic spike in food costs has been the growing market for alternative energy sources, namely “biofuels” – is this a devil’s bargain?

These are only a smattering of the issues brought into sharp focus by the latest food “shortage” crisis – and as ever, crystalizes the role an engaged public can play in setting public policy priorities, foreign and domestic.

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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