Mediated Environments, the first book of the Transdiscourse series on Springer press edited by Jill Scott, Angelika Hilbeck and Andrea Gleiniger includes a chapter I wrote. I presented in a book launch for both this book and the Artist-in-Labs series by Jill Scott at the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in NYC alongside the Bio-Rhythm Music and the Body exhibition created by Trinity College, Dublin’s Science Gallery featuring works by Eyebeam and international artists. Here is an article about the exhibition on Huffingtonpost

Work in the exhibition

My former student and Eyebeam artist Andrew Demirjian presented a new interactive work called The Week in Review in the Eyebeam project room:

The Week in Review from Andrew Demirjian on Vimeo.

Current and former Eyebeam artists Andrew Demirjian and Morgan Barnard

In the Eyebeam studios

Todd Shalom’s Elastic City hosted two public walks on City Island in the Bronx led by SMW director Polli where participants performed a series of observation exercises designed to increase environmental awareness. Some of these exercises were inspired by IDEO’s Human Centered Design Toolkit, an important (and free) resource for social media designers.

I presented and performed excerpts from ‘Sonic Antarctica’ and ‘Ground Truth’ at the Antarctica Music Festival and Conference at Australia National University in Canberra alongside master wildlife recordist Douglas Quin and others.

Quin has traveled to Antarctica several times to record seals and other wildlife and his work can be heard in the films of Werner Herzog and Jurassic Park III. His shockingly beautiful spatial recordings of the complex underwater vocalizations of Weddell seals under the ice highlighted how much we as humans have to learn about movement, space and communication.

Here is a clip from Herzog’s ‘Encounters at the End of the World’ that features Quin’s Weddell seal recordings

And here is a video of Quin presenting at Gel 2007:

Doug Quin at Gel 2007 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

Quin’s work and that of many others in the festival transform expectations and understandings of Antarctica and may have a positive influence on research directions on the continent.

As C. Lenay wrote in 1997 (parentheses added):

Technical (and cultural) artefacts should not merely be understood as means that allow human beings to achieve certain pre-set goals. On the contrary, the process of their development and integration by individuals and societies transforms, or invents, the very goals of human activities.

I presented projects of the Social Media Workgroup at the Now Future series in a conversation entitled ‘Atmospheric Commons’ with Meteorologist Erick Brenstrum at Massey University, Wellington NZ.

Pioneer City by Bronwyn Holloway-Smith is the last of a series of Letting Space projects in Wellington New Zealand. Letting Space seeks to transform the relationship between artists, property developers and their city. It commissions temporary art works from leading New Zealand contemporary artists for commercial CBD (central business district) spaces, exploring creative ideas for urban renewal and growth. Staged as a storefront real estate developer’s office, the Pioneer City project invites homesteaders and investors to help to form the first Mars settlement.

Artist Holloway-Smith is surprisingly serious about this venture, she says:

With NASA scientists aiming for a human mission to Mars in the next 20 years, and private innovators also paving the way, a Martian colony is not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when.’

Despite looking to the stars, the project also addresses life on Earth, as Letting Space manager/curators Mark Amery and Sophie Jerram observe:

At a time when the Wellington City Council is developing a 30-year vision for Wellington, this project also implicitly asks the public who controls our visions of the future and what kind of future we want for ourselves and our cities.

Letting Space curator Sophie Jerram at the Pioneer City showroom

Architectural model of Pioneer City

Holloway-Smith gathers feedback an expression of interest form at the showroom and on the Pioneer City website created to echo familiar NZ government forms. The project uses contemporary real estate industry language and marketing techniques but evokes the romanticized picture sold to early settlers of New Zealand, Australia and the US site-unseen.

In 2009, artist Kim Paton created Wellington’s first Free Store. The store was open from 10 till 6pm for two weeks, supplied by local retailers keen to reduce waste and provide excess stock to the community for no cost. As she describes:

Free Store is making public the point in the supply chain that is usually unseen. I hope to raise discussion around how we define the value of a product and what we do with our waste.

Here is a television news item about the Wellington store: http://www.3news.co.nz/Giving-away-food-in-the-name-of-art/tabid/367/articleID/157500/Default.aspx

While the store in Wellington was popular, Kim observed that most shopped out of curiosity rather than need. When she opened a Free Store in Auckland in 2011, however, she found herself overwhelmed by the extreme poverty and desperation in the city. Speaking with Kim this week, it was inspiring to hear that the New Zealand Council is going to keep the Free Store in operation permanently. Kim is now working to build a toolkit to help cities and towns around the world create their own Free Stores.

Kim is shown here with Wintec Media Arts faculty members Xavier Meade and Marji Moore

Bioprinting is computer-aided, automatic, layer-by-layer deposition, transfer, and patterning of biologically relevant materials. While some experiments in printing human tissues are in process globally, the technique is thankfully far from printing human beings. Instead, bioprinting has potential applications in diagnostics, as Olaf Diegel, manager of the AUT Rapid Prototyping Lab explains:

Diagnostic bioprinting will allow us to print sophisticated medical diagnostic tools using standard ink-jet printers. These will test for a number of diseases with the results of the test simply appearing, in writing, on the test strip.

Here are images of one of the lab’s experiments using simply a modified inkjet printer, the printed material responds to a diagnostic sample:

The AUT VR Lab provides an experimental space for VR and AR (Augmented Reality) development at the University.

VR Lab manager Roy Davies looks for the epicenter of the recent devastating Christ Church earthquake using a 3D screen visualization.

The lab also develops interfaces for medical rehabilitation, using for example this custom device designed for victims of stroke to use to increase movement:

Trudy Lane of Intercreate and I conducted a fascinating interview with NIWA climate scientist Darren King who explores the climate change matrix facing Māori society and how Māori oral histories can serve as documents of past catastrophic events in the region, helping to validate and inform computerized climate models.

Darren is shown here with a pou toko manawa from his ancestors now housed at NIWA.

Here are some examples of his research group’s work understanding local weather and climate using Maori environmental knowledge:
http://www.niwa.co.nz/news-and-publications/publications/all/wa/14-2/maori
and his NIWA profile:
http://www.niwa.co.nz/our-science/te-kuwaha/key-contacts/all/darren-king

Stephen Reay’s postgraduate teaching and research at the AUT Rapid Prototyping Lab questions every aspect of product design, and although he aims to remake the industrial design and production industry in a more sustainable fashion, as a trained environmental scientist he believes approaches such as ‘cradle to cradle’ popularized by William McDonough and Michael Braungart don’t provide a deep enough analysis of ecological systems.

His current research project is the design and production of ceramic tiles that not only enhance human living environments but provide a way for humans to live harmoniously with spiders and wetas (yes, spiders and wetas, what every New Zealander fears when putting boots on in the morning). The following images illustrate his process and the results.