18th October – 15th November 2010

Mobile Artistic Platform is a trans-disciplinary traveling platform that will move across different locations in South India . At the core of the project is a commitment to foster meaningful interactions and vital collaborations between Asian, Indian and International artists through participatory and new media tools.

The participation is open to 6 International/Indian/Asian participants from different artistic/creative backgrounds. DEADLINE FOR APPLICATION: 20th AUGUST 2010

The experimental format of this project will try to address a series of issues concerning sustainable tourism, cross-cultural exchange and hospitality. Some generic questions will lead the traveling residency and the creative collaborations between the artists and the people, places and practices encountered:

* In which ways the act of traveling can be understood as a learning process, as well as becoming a space for creative collaborations? * How can we approach mobility in terms of artistic process? * What forms of exchange can activate a critical reflection on the relationship between different sets of polarization (perception/projection, observer/observed,   inclusion/exclusion, artist/tourist)?

The group will travel through a series of locations that will frame the specificity of our investigations.  At the junction between travel and artistic production what is important for us to explore are the ways through which self-organization and creative exchange could be initiated and experienced collectively.

The project will culminate with an open studio presentation at 1Shanti RoadGallery in Bangalore. After the completion of the project a website and a web-based radio station/podcast will act as the archives of all the visual/textual/aural material  produced during the platform.

Organized by:

Carla Esperanza Tommasini, Roberto Cavallini, Beatrice Catanzaro for Reloading Images

Ram Bath, Ekta Mittal for Maraa Media Collective and

Prayas Abhinav for City Spinning.

Supported by:

ASEF (Asia Europe Foundation) and ANA (Arts Network Asia).

FOR FULL CALL FOR APPLICATION click here FOR APPLICATION FORM click here

This is my second interview with an artist who has walked into a space institute, asserting their right to an alternative perspective.

This is the moon over Edgware Road.

These artists are pioneers. When you go into a space institute the doors of possibilities open up. Its a magical world where consciousness, life itself can be transformed, but when you enter that world as an artist, what you are confronted with are closed doors. Your right to think, your right to consider that this could also be the domain of an artist, your identity as an artist and your contribution is questioned and diminished. For reasons of circumstance, the universe belongs to science and engineering. As a man in a village near Bangalore said, “the skies belong to the West”.

This is the central problem that Lorelei and I spoke to each other about. From her experience of going on a zero-G flight with NASA about eight years ago, it was clear to her that the aspirations of the space project would never be achieved without artists. Like Ewen Chardronnet, she said that experiencing zero gravity changed you forever - it is a life-changing experience - and yet she was astounded to find that of all the medical/physiological tests carried out, there was no subjective look at the emotional impact, so that this essential life-changing nature of zero-gravity was simply ignored. A quality of the utmost profundity to human existence if sidelined by a space project with a narrowly defined imagination and culture, will result in a project without vision or design. It seems shameful that humanity would push itself into space with a technology of such immense ingenuity, but with no philosophy.

Lorelei is I think a remarkable person who was captivated by a notice she saw on the bulletin board at San Francisco Art Institute saying that art students had been on NASA zero-g flights. She couldn’t believe that this had been possible and through sheer determination she managed to be part of a second group of art students to be taken up. The bureaucracy of justifying their ideas in scientific terms sounded utterly soul destroying and I think that what she did - she kissed a man in zero gravity, or I think it was moon gravity at that point and so she called it “Moon Kiss” - she did unofficially, in one of those faultlines of official projects where human dignity and the human spirit finds a place to assert itself.

What captivated her was the true nature of what the space project meant to a human being. How would people really survive in space, how would that feel? If that was the ultimate aim of the technology she wanted to go to the core of this, so she joined a community living in geodesic dome. She stayed with a group over time finding out about the agony of coexisting on a daily basis with the same people. She researched milleniumists - people who are preparing for the apocalypse and so in a sense thinking themselves into a survival mode, analogous to the conditions of space travel. She talked about finding the Whole Earth Catalog. It has an image on the cover of the earth taken from space and was produced in the seventies, a time when the idea of space travel, survival, drug taking, altered consciousness, alternative communities were all linked philosophies and were nurtured by this new conception of ’spaceship earth’. For her, as an artist, she responded to the possibility of exploring the space beyond earth by finding ways to make that projected future personal. She had to make and experience that idea in herself, through acting out an imaginary state. Boats and flotation are other analogies she works with that begin to simulate a state of being that very few people have the courage to confront.

I was truly fascinated to find out that she had done an imagining workshop with people from NASA (http://www.pietronigro.com/zgac/news003frm.htm). The role of imagination in designing for space which is so clearly evident and yet so strongly denied by the space engineers, has been particularly fascinating me since the global lunar conference, and present throughout these many years of conversations with the people of the space projects. Lorelei had the group imagine a kind of avatar for themselves that would go into space and she had them draw their spaceship. I don’t know the details of the workshop, but my sense was that she used an unstructured format and that for the participants it was a transformative experience. She said that in order to imagine you needed to make a visualisation of what you were imagining, that the thinking and making - materialising the imagination - was a path to thinking yourself into a situation that you have no physical means of experiencing otherwise. It seemed to me that she was pointing out to NASA that the imagination is extremely powerful and under-utilized in the design process.

How imagination features for engineers designing for space, how it featured for the children that I worked with last year, who performed being Chandrayaan, the telemetry and the receiving dish and how it is used by artist’s as a method to foreground humanness is the area of investigation I find myself in now. And thank you Lorelei for your conversation.

“”Genomic Gastronomy: Food Systems, Security & Policy” at (CSTEP) Center for the Study of Science Technology & Policy in Bangalore, India.

Lecture at CSTEP in Bangalore, India from genomic gastronomy on Vimeo.

This talk gave a broad overview of international issues and policies in agriculture and food security, and showcased three research projects that explore Agricultural BioDiversity, Genetically Engineered Crops and the difference between European and United States food laws.

CSTEPpresentationPostSrishtiFinal2

Some Maps I made in the last few days:

When comparing economic and social data we generally compare like political types: we compare Brazil to China or Texas and California, or even Shanghai and Lagos. (See 19.20.21 for an example of interesting comparisons of megacities). However, in the case of such a populous nation such as India, more insights may be gleaned by comparing individual states such as Karnataka with entire nation states such as France. As this chart shows the population and land area of these two political entities are very similar even if they have very different governance structure.

Indian States Renamed For Countries With Similar Populations

Inspired by: US States Renamed For Countries With Similar GDPs

Indian States As Countries of Equal Similar Population

Inspired by: US States As Countries of Equal Population

Indian States As Countries of Equal Similar Population

I hate to post to a blog with just one link, when I can twitter it and you can choose, but today, at the Think Tank where I am employed I was trying to tease out what we mean by
“infrastructure.” I found myself returning to the writing of Malcolm McCullough, my mentor in grad school.

I was trying to understand if street signage is hard or soft infrastructure, and it seemed to me it might be neither. It is the informational layer of the city. Without Informational infrastructure the city might be reasonably negotiated by long-time inhabitants through embodied, local and iterative knowledge, but is totally opaque to new comers. And we know there are a ton of new comers to megacities, and many of them may not speak the local language (linguistic, cultural, economic etc.)

Malcolm’s new book is called Ambeint Commons - (the chapter abstracts and a “How to use this book”) are up on his website as a .pdf

Abstract

Rapid cultural shifts made necessary by planetary change generally place more value on surroundings. Ubiquitous information, once thought placeless, increasingly influences this transformation. Yet at this writing, “environmental history of information” yielded a null search on Google. Many people, particularly architects, believe that cultural outlook somehow lives in the way people dwell, and in what public places they choose to build and embellish. Fewer people see information enhancing the physical world, however. The effect more often seems like white noise, dematerialization, or escape. Where notions of a commons have applied to information, those have instead addressed intellectual property, especially where intellectual capital has been socially produced over networks. Now the move beyond the desktop into many more formats and physical contexts demands new approaches to shared resources. The genre of “urban computing” has arisen to explore this. How do the architectures of ambient information enrich urban experience, operate architectures, cultivate environmental sensibilities, or renew responsibility to some idea of a commons?

Ambient Commons is about attention in architecture. It is about information media becoming contextual, tangible, and persistent. It begins an environmental history of information. I am taking two phenomena that I see gaining currency in the rise of the “augmented city,” and exploring whether it makes sense to combine them. “Ambient” is that which surrounds but does not distract. Information is becoming ambient. Architecture is rediscovering environment and atmosphere. “Commons” is that which self-governs resource sharing, a process which political economists increasingly see complementing markets. “Information commons” has been topical since the mid 90s, but only now begins to merge with physical space. “Ambient Commons” does not exist except in a few niches of music: not in media studies, nor pervasive computing, nor urbanism. But should it?

Malcolm brings together a passion for good urbanism, complex systems thinking and IT like no one else. And I am thinking that I might better understand this whole informational infrastructure thing, and how we actively create humane augmented reality cities by intentionally designing informational infrastructure.

If you get a minute I recommend taking a look as we enter the adventures of always-on-electronically-augmented-urbanism of Bangalore, MegaCity Asia and beyond.

During the Q&A session of the talk curator Lucas Evers of the Waag Society asked me about genetically engineered Rennet which I had never heard of. Here is the wikipedia post with more information about GE Rennet.