NEWS

The Green Wall – The Largest Leafy Wall in North America

The Green Wall – The Largest Leafy Wall in North America

Posted on by Kbaumlier

A new sustainable interior wall at Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania has plants growing from floor to ceiling.  Called The Green Wall, the walls were designed to resemble a lush, green jungle and are 14 feet high and 300 feet long making it the largest green wall in North America.

The walls were developed by GSky and are comprised of 47,000 plants. The space has a greenhouse roof, and the walls are able to eliminate about 15,500 pounds of toxins and dust from the air within its location of the East Conservatory Plaza.  The walls are self-irrigated, and are a example of a sustainable interior.

If you want to check the walls out for yourself, head to the Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania.
Images and Links:

The Green Wall – longwoodgardens.org

longwoodgardens.org

 

 

 

EAT LOVE – A Book of Food Concepts by Eating Designer Marije Vogelzang

EAT LOVE – A Book of Food Concepts by Eating Designer Marije Vogelzang

Posted on by Kbaumlier

Since 2000 Marije Vogelzang has been designing eating concept, and exploring the verb ‘to eat’.   Her work explores everything that surrounds the act of eating including atmosphere, the people involved, and the stories behind the ingredients.  The work will often explore the taste and texture, sound, smell and color of food and the way it is prepared and served.

Some of her work has explored the process of design of the travel of food to your body including “the journey of food from seed all the way to poop.”  Her work is developed in her studio and restaurant, and has evolved in the last ten years.

A new book called EAT LOVE, has won the award for Best Designed Cookbook of the Netherlands, and presents some of the research and projects of Vogelzang.  The book which has 160 pages  has images, personal stories, sketches, and designs.

I took a peek at the book website, and found there were some interesting projects featured in the book.

Some of pages include:

Cupcakes With a Lack of Attention (With pictures of cupcakes labeled with “no!,” “take me,” “come here,” “eat me,” “you can resist me,” and other messages.)
Cressware, Gardenware for the body (The designs include a watercress hat and cape.)
Funeral Dinner  (The phrase white food is suitable as “solace food,” is on the page with an image of white food on a table.)
The Binding Strength of Food (A large sculptural sausage structure, with a description about the artists’ process.)

I recommend getting a snack from the fridge, and checking out the book webpage, or ordering on Amazon.

 

Images and Links:

EAT LOVE – www.marijevogelzang.nl 

EAT Love – on www.amazon.com

 

 

Food Phreaking – 38 Stories of Experimenting with Food

Food Phreaking – 38 Stories of Experimenting with Food

Posted on by Kbaumlier

The Center for Genomic Gastronomy is an independent research institute that examines the technology, ecology, diversity and open culture of human food systems.  Their mission is to map food controversies, prototype alternative culinary futures and to imagine a more just, biodiverse, and beautiful food system.

Recently they put out a new publication called Food Phreaking – issue #0, which outlines stories of  what Food Phreaking is and is not.  In the book, Artists Cat Kramer and Zack Denfield share stories about Colony Collapse Cuisine (eating non-bee- pollinated ingredients), raw milk vending machines, seed saving clubs, and beans tattooed with DNA-laced ink.

Food Phreakers are defined as individuals interested in experimenting with human food systems and promoting open, free and accessible knowledge about food.  The introduction to the book talks about how farmers, chefs, biohackers, food scientists, and people who have chickens in the yard, can pickles, or love to grow are doing Food Phreaking.

The book is organized into four sections:

LEGAL & OPEN  – Open Source Food Science & Participatory Food Design
ILLEGAL & OPEN  – Culinary Civil Disobedience & Outlaw Ingredients
ILLEGAL & CLOSED – Black Hat Food Hacking & Food Crime
LEGAL & CLOSED – Proprietary Food Engineering & Closed Source Food Design

I took a peek at the free .pdf of the book and found the stories and images to be some of the most engaging ideas about food that I have seen this year.  Some of the stories included direction on how to make Beet Petals (kind of like beet chips), informatoin about the  United Nations 2013  International Year of Quinoa, directions on how to limit your diet to non-bee-pollinated ingredients, and how to make open source mineral water.

As the authors write, “ Taste the future, today. And be prepared.”

This is one of the most interesting food books I have seen for a while, and you can download for free as a PDF of FoodPhreaking #0. (15 mb) or order online.

Image Sources and Links:

http://genomicgastronomy.com/

http://www.foodphreaking.com/issue0pdf/Food_Phreaking.pdf

 

 

CAMERAS – An Installation of 150 Fake Security Cameras

CAMERAS – An Installation of 150 Fake Security Cameras

Posted on by Kbaumlier

Ever feel like someone is watching you?  In the Great Britain, there is one surveillance for every six people in the country. To explore issues of surveillance, the Spanish artist SpY recently installed 150 CCTV cameras on a building façade in Madrid  The fake security cameras were put up to “not watch over anything,” as the artist writes on his website.

SpY has been doing projects in urban spaces for over twenty years starting with graffiti and public intervention art.   His ideas stems from the observation of the city and how to use irony and humor to get others to think.

You can see more images of the making and installation of the piece, and see others of SpY’s work on his website.

Image Source and Links:

Cameras – www.spy-urbanart.com

 

Pro-Folio – Create A Fake Artist’s Portfolio In Two Seconds

Pro-Folio – Create A Fake Artist’s Portfolio In Two Seconds

Posted on by Kbaumlier

Are you are an artist who does work that explores issues of football and the role of color in our perception?  Did you create a design campaign for a soft drink company? You can be with Pro-Folio.  Sures Kumar has created Pro-Folio.org, where you can create a fake artist website as a part of a Scientific Hoax project at the Royal College of Art, London. To make your website, you type in your name and in seconds you get a website with “stolen art,” or borrowed images from websites such as Behance.net and Squarespace.com.  When you make a site, you get a fake bio that lists your education, exhibitions, and artist statement.  Your site will most likely be a combination of photography and  design work.

The project explores issues of falsified information, identity, and open source access.  On the Pro-Folio website, Sures Kumar writes:

“Given the availability of information online ranging from open source names to college databases, computers can construct a believable identity in no time. All it takes is to carefully lay the facts in a logical sequence, which can be coded as an algorithm. If this is possible, can computer programs create all sorts of human identities in future? And what will be the motivation to do so? Will it be just populating identities and adding noise to our already overloaded Internet or will it give birth to interesting, engaging, avant-garde, mysterious identities and art works?”

The project was made using alogorithms to combine technology including PHP, MySQL, Processing, HTML, CSS, Javascript  and text and  images from Behance.net, Cargocollective.com, Squarespace.com, and Artybollocks.com.

You can watch a video about the making of the project, and make your own portfolio on Pro-Folio right now!

 

Image Source and Links:

www.pro-folio.org

Pro-Folio – Video of the Making Of 

Sures Kumar Portfolio Site