- UrBan WILDerness AcTioN CEntEr
The Urban Wilderness Action Center (UWAC) is a project initiated by Jon Cohrs, in collaboration with the Eyebeam Student Residents (New York), Stephanie Pereira, and UK-based artist Kai-Oi Jay Yung (UK). The UWAC project includes a web platform uwac.anewfuckingwilderness.com and a day of action where people from NYC, Berlin, and London will design and disseminate guerrilla gardening projects.
UWAC DAY is Saturday, March 20. Each of four lead cities will host a day of free artist-led interventions that respond to urban wilderness. We will document the day through a live Twitter, Flickr, and video feed streamed through the UWAC website.
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
Live video chat with all four sites: 3PM EST
Ongoing live Twitter feed from each project site at #UWAClive1–6PM EST, NYC:
Join us at Eyebeam for a series of FREE and open to the public events:
- Eyebeam Student Residents Caroline Spivack, Jade Highleyman, Luther Cherry, Spencer Brown, and Zoe Penina Baker are working with artists Doris Cacoilo and Sonali Sridhar and gardener / window farmer Maya Nayak to workshop a guerrilla gardening andventure. Participants on UWAC Day will craft and distribute their own plant-based urban intervention.
- Tattfoo Tan (artist) will be onsite at Eyebeam collecting pledges for environmental stewardship, and teaching people the basics of urban friendly, worm-based composting. Free worms!
- Matthew Slaats (artist) will be at Eyebeam signing up participants to join Freespace, an initiative which will be made up of are forgotten spaces, private spaces, lost spaces. People are invited to go out and find and reclaim a space, or donate a space they control in some way for a period of time.
- Boswyck Farms will be demonstrating hydroponic systems, and introducing their new Mobile Guerrilla Kitchen
- Liz Neves (healthy home consultant) will invite participants to re-establish wilderness in NYC by recreating a lost world where beavers dammed and turtles swam in flowing streams, and foxes frollicked under towering trees.
- Safari 7 will invite participants to embark on a self-guided tour of urban wildlife along the No. 7 Subway line. Listen in, grab a map, and go!
- Jay Weichun (filmmaker/artist) will be onsite from 2-6PM making flower bombs. Using a simple mixture of regional wildflower seeds, soil and clay, flower bombs are a fun way to spread color and life to places of neglect. Participants are invited to make their own flower bombs and form their own flower bombing collectives!
2–6PM CET, Berlin:
Myriel Milicevic + Jon Cohrs are organizing the Berlin Micro-Turf Expedition. With a team of self-defined experts they will survey parking lot ecosystems, abandoned infrastructures, trade routes, and micro habitats of Berlin by dissecting the fringe-ecologies within the city. The expedition will report back live with its band of specialists who will setup up camp in several different areas in Berlin. Using a methodology that analyzes ecological succession the expedition will collect samples, map wildlife, illustrate the topography, detect seismographic data, and observe the micro-climates to create scientific models of future urban habitats.3–6PM GMT, London:
Everbloom Pocket City Pollination: Kai-Oi Jay Yung Kai-Oi Jay Yung organises Everbloom Pocket City Pollination, a day of urban wilderness activity between 3-6pm, Saturday, March 20 across North and East London. Everbloom will unify rogue concrete cultivation experts and integrated social gardeners in synchronised urban wilderness activity across Harringay to Shoreditch. Private and public action will share skills and deploy guerrilla tactics across multiple sites and activities; from inner city housing, parking lot and religious grounds to council endorsed Memorial site. Actions involve a chance to share skills, meet fellow green belts or beginners and undertake some clandestine activity; from edible wild flower patchwork exchange, vegetable balcony advisory, pumpkin planting and mistreated yard clear up to a geo-map seed bombing walk.There are two public urban wilderness events to get involved in on the day, with Tim Osborn at Furtherfield, and dispersal of the latest seed vegetable capsule technology in an exploratory walk across Shoreditch. This is a chance to join forces, bring some seeds and experiment in subversive gardening tactics to cultivate our forgotten, unlikely concrete settings for a healthier, self-regenerating city garden
Everbloom resists inertia of urban environment beyond risk of getting arrested and into walk to work. Yung serves cohesive mulch, pollinating communication between the loci events to generate and configure process, stimulating healing landscape.
Pocket City Pollinators include: Stoke Newington Transition Group, Friends Of Arnold Circus, The New Hanbury Project, Tim Osborn, Vanessa Harden and Sam Varney. Participants include: local residents, recovering addicts, university students and passers by.
9PM CET, Amsterdam:
Urban Wilderness Amsterdam: ElectroSmog goes Schijnheilig. Amsterdam, a city once known as a happening place, is suffering from the bureaucratic drive to over regulate. In the nineties, an abundance of underground initiatives marked Amsterdam as a home of spontaneity and experimentation. Squatted cultural centers lined the waterfront, free radio stations populated the air waves. Due to sparked up property prices and an ever growing political pressure to formalize everything and anything, Amsterdam underground culture has dissipated. Instead of the metropolis it claims to be, it has become the village we all know it to be. Where one has little chance of running into the unexpected.As a necessary antidote, the closing event of the Amsterdam Electrosmog festival will take place in the squatted gallery Schijnheilig. There will be lectures on branding and public space, streamed guerilla gardening actions from around New York, London and Berlin, performances, ex-pirateers of radio 100 behind turntables, and much much more. Come along and play!
UWAC has been conceived of as part of ElectroSmog, a new, three-day, international festival that will introduce and explore of concept of “Sustainable Immobility”: a critique of current systems of hyper mobility of people and products in travel and transport, and their ecological unsustainability.
- Glacier Emergency Blankets
Switzerland is covering its glaciers with mega-blankets; protecting it’s only natural resource, snow. This has been going on for 5 years now and appears to be successful, at a cots of $12 million per square mile.
(from Times Online)
- Potty training pig farms
In the U.S., one pork factory farm can house more the 500,000 pigs. They produce more waste per year then the residence of Manhattan. The unregulated wastes causes massive damage to ground water.
What better way to control the waste then to potty train them pigs.
“Taiwan’s 6.5 million pigs are a source of river pollution. But one Taiwanese farmer has found that potty training is porkers goes a long way in both conserving water and keeping it clean. He’s trained his hogs to use a litter box, and has had such great results that he’s starting to advocate the practice to other farmers.” – from treehugger.com
Will it does cut down on waste? Yes, but it still needs to be deposed of somewhere. Shit in = shit out.
- POst Global warming Survival Kit
In the running up to the climate summit in Copenhagen, we’re featuring two approaches to the subject.
1. One approach to the subject is an installation by Petko Dourmana which “portrays a dystopian scenario: a “nuclear winter” initiated by political groups or governments in order to solve the problem of global warming and the melting of the polar icecaps.” Using night vision goggles and infrared projections one can navigate the dark post-apocalyptic north pole. It suggested a future where we may be blind without technology and thus highlighting the contradiction this dependance has been created by unchecked technology and its subsequent damage to the environment. Part of Transmediale ‘09.
2. Another approach suggested by Amazon is “The Global Warming Survival Kit: The Must-have Guide to Overcoming Extreme Weather, Power Cuts, Food Shortages and Other Climate Change Disasters” by Brian Clegg capitalises on the fear of ..” Don’t wait until it’s too late: your survival could be at stake.” While we may face these issues, I doubt that the “how to survive a shark attack” type literature will do much prepare you. But the fact that bandwagon authors are seizing the day causes pause.
- Grow Pork, without the hassle of turds.
“Researchers in the Netherlands have created what was described as soggy pork and are now investigating ways to improve the muscle tissue in the hope that people will one day want to eat it.
No one has yet tasted the product, but it is believed the artificial meat could be on sale within five years.
Vegetarian groups welcomed the news, saying there was “no ethical objection” if meat was not a piece of a dead animal. ” from the Telegraph via next nature.
Maybe they mean animal right activists welcome the news. Somehow, I don’t think many vegetarians would jump at the chance to eat test-tube pork, nor pork lovers. But as the companies website markets mickey-mouse shaped pork, this could become the perfect new lunch-able.
- Serial Killer Otters
by mikebaird
from SF Gate
“Their motive is a mystery. All I know is we suddenly have a couple of otters killing seals at a fairly fast pace,” said Jim Harvey, associate professor at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, which trains students from the California State University system.
“And if we get five or six of these otters in the slough, we won’t have a seal pup left.”
- Hunting Minefields in the Dark.
“The bugs can be mixed into a colourless solution, which forms green patches when sprayed onto ground where mines are buried.Edinburgh University said the microbes could be dropped by air onto danger areas.
Within a few hours, they would indicate where the explosives can be found. ” then wait until it’s dark and walk quietly across the Korean border.
Glowing bugs could find landmines (via cory @ BoingBoing)
- Top Sirloin and Roasted Potatoes – Taking over the World
Beautiful landscapes of meat and towering slices of juicy hide. Carnivores delight. Vegetarians look elsewhere.
Thanks to www.morganclevy.com.
- more insects under our control
“By connecting electrodes and radio antennas to the nervous systems of beetles, the researchers were able to make them take off, dive and turn on command. The cyborg insects were created at the University of California, Berkeley, by engineers led by Hirotaka Sato and Michel Maharbiz as part of a programme funded by the Pentagon’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).” - new scientistIt’s stunningly similar to pulse based microcomputing.
- Spiders harnessed for weaving; forced labor
“The spiders are harnessed … held down in a delicate way,” Godley says, “so you need people to do this who are very tactile so the spiders are not harmed. So there’s a chain of about 80 people who go out every morning at four o’clock, collect spiders, we get them in by 10 o’clock. They’re in boxes, they’re numbered, and then as they get silked, about 20 minutes later, they get released back into nature.” -npr
