A Recession at Work: The Personal Side of the Working Poor

Our Cupboard was Bare, by Heather Ryan, is a powerfully personal look at the struggles of being a single parent in a time when people are loosing or unable to find decent work. As part of Salon.com's Pinched "a new series of personal essays about life during a recession," Ryan's essay is as powerful for the response (both vicious attacks and heartfelt support) as its content.

Exposing What is Hidden, BLF Rocks

I'm a really big fan of The Billboard Liberation Front who, like Reverend Billy, use culture jamming to challenge the supremacy of consumerism to dictate our physical and social landscape. By making minor alterations to billboard the BLF

Expose(s) what is hidden. Some advertisers are too shy about what they really mean, BLF will help them make their message clearer. Case in point: the 2005 improvement of Johnny Walker where "Drink responsibly" became "Drink yourself blind".

Check out the piece about their talk at the Vooruit over at We-make-money-not-art.

On The Mind

Some stuff I’ve been checking out

The Happy City: Paris goes happy, and discovers interacting with people (even strangers, even just enough not to collide while walking down the street) makes people happy.

SAN FRANCISCO IN 2108? - The Hydro-Net Vision of the Future: A plan to transform San Fran (yeah I said it) into the Ecotopia we all knew it could be. Really pretty pictures.

Sk-interfaces (Part 1): Sounds like a really interesting exhibit in Liverpool. Immolation, which explores the US’ use of incendiary weapons (think fire bombs) on civilians, through both the macro (landscape) level and the micro (cells of skin) level.

Seeing Like The Beasts: Human-Anmial Sensory Perception

Here is an interesting project I found on We-Make-Money-Not-Art. Chris Woebken and Kenichi Okada, in collaboration with MBA students from the Oxford Said Business-school, have developed toys that alter human sensory perception in order to imitate animals’.

(Image: We-Make-Money-Not-Art)

Art Projects That Are Actually Interesting

I really neat exhibit from Platform 11, a lab out of the Royal College of Art in London. Check out we-make-money’s post on it.

I really like open-source protesting, where students from the lab brought blank green signs to “protest” in front of the Westminster's Houses of Parliament in order circumvent The Serious Organized Crime and Police Act 2005. The law states that it is illegal to protest within 1 km of the building. However, Tony Mullin found a loophole allowing for blank signs. The students are making the protest available online for any group to past in their own political message onto the blank green signs using green screen technology. Pretty cool.

Dash Macdonald’s Imagine Being a World Leader is a neat project where he plans on providing training 8-9 year olds to give their own professional political speech.

Human Powered Technology: Be the Power You Want to Use in the World

In a world where sustainable energy creation is one of the largest problems facing the world, The Human Power Objects Workshop looks like a really important re-focusing of our conception of what is and what is not a source of energy. The workshop was headed by Myriel Milicevic and there is an interesting (efficient, i.e. short) interview with her at We-make-money-not-art. Milicevic wrote in the introduction to the online report that "While technology so far has been developed towards a state of minimum human effort, this workshop now explores the potential of using the human body itself as a renewable power source." There seems to be convergence from many different angles that humans should be actively engaging with technology. From one angle, lots of people are talking about how games like Dance Dance Revolution can be used as a weight loss option, especially for kids. There is also the fact that many places in the world are not connected to a power grid. For the millions who cannot afford generators, human powered technology is a possible solution. MIT D-Lab or Design that Matters - Kinkajou Power Challenge are two examples of great work being done in this area. Finally, human generated electricity is a sustainable alternative, especially if it is connected with normal day activity. For example, charge your Ipod while walking to class or using natural human traffic patterns (like walking through a turnstile at a train station) to create power. The whole interview is really worth a read.

Rural Community Development with a Scandinavian Twist

Check out “Social Design for Scandinavian Towns” at We-make-money-not-bombs.com. It is about:

how art and architecture can play an important role in social development of small towns.

and is worth a look.