first assignment for making

touch organism movement network

Object One:
Due 2/18
at the scale of touch, create an ecology.

bring your object to class in your pocket.

you may only display your object by handing it secretly to another person in the class.

we will pass around the objects silently until they return to their owner.

we will then discuss what we understand about each object

be prepared to turn in your object and a digital copy of it

Hi catherine, am i blogging in the right place. My title still says art and ecology. just testing thanks. jennifer

for laurie lange

_______________________________________
ON walking practice

Our other projects introduced meaty material to chew on but for me walking practice took the cake. This kind of practice can be done in two distinctly different ways. One was clearly laid out in our assignment----create a rule for what to note, quantify the amount and kind of activity involved. I found the other way butting into the formulaic approach: more a dreamtime, a way to be in metaphor with the beings of the natural world. Walking to be with Earth's tribes---- Pinon, Juniper, Pack Rat, Rock and Bee. Walking practice is rich. Thanks, Catherine, for an introduction to it.

In an ecological art practice I think it's important to plumb our relationship with the natural world alongside measuring and quantifying how we're there. I question whether some of the practices I've seen portrayed as ecological walking practice present the right sort of message. For instance the guy who walked back and forth in a line til he'd made his mark on the land, worn the land to bare dirt where there was vegetation. Artists make marks, it's our stock in trade. But what is the environmental validity of a walking practice that creates denuded land? In ecological art, don't we need to think about creating a practice that offers both ourselves and our audience a way to be WITH the land and not impose ON the land?

More and more this distinction between being with the land rather than on it seems necessary to the sustainability we seek. We've already made and make more than enough marks on her, outside of “environmental art”, on a massive and damaging scale. If our intention in ecological art is to foster a consideration of ecological imperatives, we as artists need to speak to this softly and not holler “look Ma, I made marks!”.

If we weere to diagram what I'm suggest as a guideline for evaluating how ecological a walking practice is we would have on the questionable side a thick black line between 2 points made from many footsteps being down on the same ground, and on the other little dashed lines where individual footsteps each time step in a different place on slightly different routes at each pass, so the imp[act on the ground is never more than a footstep once on any patch of ground. That would be an ecologically sound way to walk repeatedly between 2 points.

for laurie lange

Guggenheim fellow Michael Berman offers a gallery full of lovely pictures of his walks in the middle of nowhere. These are carbon pigment prints, and the spectrum of textures and shades of grey is rich. The landscape shots are of a piece with the southwestern landscape-as-scenic-icon oeurve. It's a plentiful oeurve. As lovely as Berman's landscape images are---and they truly are lovely---I can't honestly say I think they contribute anything new, except perhaps to point a bit more pointedly to the beauty of and need to preserve our extreme southwestern landscapes, the ones ranchers tend to size up with an assessment such as, “that land could grow a lot o' head”.

Berman also adopts the pictorial idiom of the abandoned object---a TV without innards in the window of an long uninhabited stucco building. We also have a lot of this oerve. They mean less to me, personally, than the landscape lionized as icon: gorgeous landscapes fetchingly presented offer a place for the mind's eye to inhabit, but is there really something in a gutted television to lionize? Such images hold my attention for a minute hinting at something profound in the cultural detritus, but I'm unable to find anything behind that momentary surface tension. It seemed a mistake for 3 images of this sort to be among the few chosen for inclusion as larger prints, 18 x 24 or so, on the wall opposite the couple hundred 8” x 8” prints. Several more landscapes to roam in at that size would have been my choice for enlargements on display.

The most compelling of Berman's images are the handful of closeups of animal life. Rattlesnakes curled peaceably in the middle of a cliff notch ( and some rattlers are this pacific), the remains of rodents and birds skeletonized by their desert habitat. The mummified wildlife speaks volumes about the meteorological extremes our grasslands encompass: inland oceans drenched in solar exposure, whipped bone dry by winds, the creatures both taken down and preserved by the extremes of the place they haunt. One in particular caught my eye: a wasps' nest protruding from the empty space inside a mummy of ?squirrel? or ?rabbit? or? Not possible to identify the animal, nose turned aside toward 2 leaves on the sand as if to speak to them in its state as spirit. Though the image is a bit buried in grey tones, the content here over-rides the greyness. This is one of those visuals to come back to and explore for a long time without losing interest. Some images hold up under prolonged scrutiny. This one is of that sort. I pray for our wild neighbors these days when I see and hear them, and these pictures moved me to that prayer.

Apparently Berman walks at random for days on end to capture his shots. Having just completed our walking piece, and finding nothing especially new about his images per se, I left the gallery thinking that I'd like to have seen his walking practice included somehow in the work. The places he's walked are truly an oceanic subject and the picture plane here embodies so much: auditory vastness, topographic and environmental mysteries, elemental and wild power that goes beyond carbon pigment. Walking practice is both an activity to take us deeper and a challenge to convey in an artform. I'd love to see what Berman might do with an inclusion of how he walks alongside or in his prints.

Sllllooooolow cities

Slow cities reading seemed to jump around. yes it is a good cause but the article was restless.
not slowly.
Yet.. the concept of enjoying each moment as it comes is not new.
Very much a part of Asian thought.

How did USA get so behind? That is what I don't get. It seems that life just kinda went on while this country was 'busy making other plans.'

I would like to live in a slow way. I feel guilty if I drive slowly and now perhaps I can change that around to being part of the neighborhood pace program.
I am grateful the movement is there. And yet, the comment inside the article is telling.. that cities who commit to being slow and who get added to the list fill up with tourists and become not slow.
This would seem true as I googled images and many of them turned up as tourist advertisements. It would seem that citta slow can be a double edged sword. But -I am encouraged that this movement is gaining momentum ..slowly.

reading Las gaviotas

o but this is not an elegy. I am glad I read about the trees first.What a lovely solstice present.
It was so hopeful! I too want to go there! Really. I would like to be immersed in a culture who is trying. To live with people who play music. To invent things that would help. To honor the trees and the life which has grown with them. It is remarkable indeed that this green world is existing inside the country whose notion I had of guerilla_US Drug cartel world police force violencia. As if just because it can.
often i return home disgruntled. after reading Las Gaviotas I had insight as to why.
It is driving around Albuquerque that does it. The alienation. Makes me irritable and lonely.
So contrary is the story of what can happen if whole communities come together and look for other ways. maybe it is the scale of the community also?

The elegy piece was full of grey scale and emotions unearthed with the trash heaps
denied. There is not much to say I think. I have from this the smell and feel of my home town and a particularly desolate piece of road that led to the dump.
I wanted to shoot rats there when I was little. But my mother wouldn't let me.

Now the rats I want to shoot are the demons that despise hope.
Who tell me that it will never be different than driving around Albuquerque looking for things that I 'need'


The first image that came when I googled elegy is this painting of a woman mourning over a pedestal_Greek column that has flowers twining around it. 'Elegy'by William-Adolphe Bouguereau

Interesting that her pedestal is sneakily be- flowered. As if even in lament we put forth something that we can live with .. after all.

Yesterday
21 cigarettes a day.
147 a week, I see.
7,042 a year give or take a few.
$4.80 a day up in smoke.
$33.60 a week blown away.
$1,750 give or take a dime or two;
Departed from my bank
Today
400 steps or more I walk so I do not inhale.
8,400 step a day; I will not be blown away.
$1,750 in the bank in one year,
A cruise perhaps?
A walk about???
For I am stronger;
More now than yesterday.

Happy Holidays!

I wanted to be sure and tell everyone happy holidays. It has been such a pleasure to get to know everyone within the virtual "walls" of this classroom. It has been thought-provoking and has made me do some serious reevaluating of my studio practices and my life habits. Thanks Catherine, for providing such a wonderful forum to grow within!

Lois

slow

Have to say, reading about the speeding struck a chord in me, not harmoniously, as I had just received a speeding ticket....in the mail. That's a reminder of city life when you don't even have a human being writing you tickets any longer. I can't sweet talk an envelope. I decided that I would aim to drive like the Dalai Lama is in the passenger seat. I'm sure he likes music really loud.
When I went to Portland the first time, I fell in love with the transit system.What an odd thing to fall in love with, but larger lanes for bicycles than cars!?!?!? Bike racks everywhere, riding on the max, and even renting a car for the day was only $26. It takes a lot of stress off of people, when they don't have to worry about their car being broken into or broken down, the raising insurance prices as a result to drunk driving, ridiculous accidents and gas stores on every corner. I wonder how much stress cars alone causes the average Albuquerqian.
I also enjoyed, in Portland, that at the amazing farmer's market, the coffee was all brewed drip while you wait and in coffee shops it was all french pressed. There is something to slowness.
I wonder what finals are like in CittaSlow.

Response to "Cities"

The slow cities sound wonderful, almost like a fictional fairy tale compared with the constant go of my life. The descriptions of Bra remind me of the lifestyle in Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises." -A little too romantic? I hope to one day enjoy this lifestyle but even as I read this Im "multitasking" by assisting with a "see n' say." It seems as though city planners over here should read this, even a fake "village atmosphere" sounds great. Ugh cars! I'm must agree are horrible, I find myself to have a horrible temper as soon as I enter my car, its crazy! No where else do I get so angered or find myself against humanity than when it comes to driving. Even parking at my apartment is troublesome, I constantly hold grudges against my neighbors who can't park. That was a great read, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I long for a slower life, eventually.

Citta Slow - a response

The movement is limited to towns with less that 50,000 inhabitants. Too bad for that - Albuquerque does not meet the requirement. But the concept of Citta Slow can be applied to life within an urban setting. A Citta Slow within a city.


“...a slow city is more than just a fast city slowed down...A Slow City asks the question: Does this improve our quality of life? If the answer is yes, then the city embraces it." We do not have to wait for someone to tell us to do this. While I am already adhering to some of the principles, I can see where there is room to expand my way of thinking about all aspects of life. Living in a rural environment, I treasure the days where I don't have to go into the city. We make an effort to support our local businesses since the true cost is not really the stickers on the products for sale.


I had not really thought about this phrase: “In the modern world, speeding up is the most common form of civil disobedience.” The thought of being a lawbreaker is not pleasant, yet I just recently received a speeding-photo ticket, realizing that I don't remember speeding through that intersection. Yet the photo is undeniable proof of the infraction.

for laurie lange

On Beauty ( the zen garden piece)

Enjoyed this essay on the garden, with it’s mélange of the wild and untrammeled along with the measured planning of garden paths. It’s a subject dear to my heart as a gardener, and so interesting to hear what another gardener thinks and how she sees.

There are some choice quotes here:
“Every garden worth its salt becomes paradise by being both a safe refuge from the madness of the world and a field of action within the cacophony of this very world.”
“Consult the genius of your place in all things and plot paradise with every breath as you garden.”
“Don’t just consider your own joy at the surprise lily fragrance: think of the delight of the ball-headed cabbages as well.” ---I especially like this conceit about the cabbages.

And splendid advice for drylands dwellers:
“If you live in the desert, please don’t replumb paradise and create acres of emerald lawn and sunken water gardens on arid land. “

…a lesson we still need to pay more attention to in New Mexico. Among landscape customers, there’s been rather a surfeit of folks wanting water features in the last decade. Understandable, how do we quench our thirst for the refreshment of water here, its sounds, and those verdant colors not plentiful here that water promotes? I’ve come up with some solutions to that question; we need a lot more to assuage varied tastes.

And I concur with this gardener in her comment that how the garden is marked out and defined is of primary importance. I learned this thoroughly in one of my New Mexico gardens. It was in an old cattle corral, below a windmill and a “dirt tank” (the term ranchers use for a pond by the windmill) that had gone to grasses. There was a distinct layout there already with the enclosure of the corral, but I planted orchard trees outside the corral, and found myself perplexed about where my garden was, until I fenced around the whole, orchard and garden combined. Then the weeds extending in all directions no longer called me to attention. I knew what to tend and what not to; the fence provided a way to delineate where active attention was required and where attention could be of a more contemplative sort, unmoved by any need to perform garden tasks. The end of that confusion was a distinct relief.

There is also a visual energy flow to be mindful of in garden layout. Even if the garden is enclosed, it’s useful to create a visual pathway out, The Way Out. This is where and how the garden joins the world, and how we, in the paradise we’ve carefully nurtured, find spatial reflections of within and beyond, of safety and venture, for all the things we may be musing on when we go to the garden. Here in Albuquerque, I especially try to find this for people with a view of Sandia---and especially for the watermelon moment at sunset when she blushes all-out red.

Farmer in Chief

Michael Pollan hits a lot of nails on the head. He has done so in this letter to Obama. I like the idea of calling the changes we need in fod production solar farming; that relates it to our energy shifts away from fossil fuels and I think suggests forward positive change to people.

The appearance of the White House vegetable garden this past summer had something to do with this open letter. Unfortunately it doesn't seem that the press followed up on it after the announcements that Michelle was putting it in. I kept trying to imagine who and how it was going to be tended---that would have been some good human interest coverage to further promote backyard vegetables.

I hope Pollan's mention of Wes Jackson's work at the Land Institute is the beginning of more press for the efforts underway there. If we can perennialize our major food crops it will save a major amount of energy and water (I thought Pollan could have focused on how much water it takes, and the concept of virtual water, a little more) in food production. Both perennial grain crops and virtual water are pretty new concepts, and publicity for these forward-thinking ideas is good.

Just 2 nails weren't hit quite squarely. Seems to me we need to forego meat on the menu more than just one day a week. One day a week doesn't provide much experience cooking altenatives. The other square hit I believe we need in an open letter is to clarify the thinking that the meat industry produces "waste". It is only waste because we think of it that way. In nature there is no such thing as waste. All manures can be recycled back to the land, where they are one of just 2 major natural sources of nitrogen fertilizer---the other being the legumes fixing nitrogen from the air. So to start thinking sustainably, i.e. in terms of the natural planetary cycles that sustainability is really all about, it's useful to begin identifying manure as a resource rather than as waste.

Polymers are Forever.

A couple years ago I realized for the first time that plastic is a resource. What that means is that, after the impact-intensive process of creating it from petroleum, we should reserve it for things with essential functions, like computing, drilling, sawing and cashier’s drawers, and not for trinkets, disposable water bottles and the merchandise packaging that every year now gets more difficult to pry off the goods, where it’s designed to make the object of our desire look bigger than it really is.

Nurdles are sobering stuff. I knew about the rubber duckies who now float around the world. I wasn’t aware that plastic bits have become food for zooplankton, working their way up through the food chain. Nor was I aware that we can now beautify our skin with plastic exfoliants. Or that there was any such thing as a nurdle, and certainly not that they’re magnets for PCBs and DDT.

Woe on us clever humans. In the book Ishi, Last of his Tribe the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber records in the frontispiece that Ishi, who was captured and went to live in the Anthropology Museum in Berkeley, where he gave demonstrations of how his tribe before annihilation made fire from flintstones---looked on us as children, smart but not wise.

I wrote Precautionary Principle all over this article. Some years ago the city of San Franciso adopted the precautionary principle. Haven’t heard how far they took it. The principle seems to have dropped from significant mention, but we need to bring it back. It posits that instead of organizing the introduction of new substances (eg plastic, DDT) and processes (e.g.AC electricity, wi-fi, neither of which humans were evolved for exposures to) so that the substance/process ends up proven unsafe by harm to those subjected to it, that the burden of proof instead be on those who want to introduce and profit from it---think GMOs, RGBH, and on and on.

In the short term, it appears there is really nothing we can do about all the plastic we’ve released into the environment. I am intrigued, however, with the epochal time frame mentioned at the end of the article. That it took microbes a long time to learn to eat plant lignin and cellulose, and that perhaps microbes will be able in an epoch or two beyond us to learn how to digest plastic. It reminds me of a wild idea I heard this summer from the body-work community: that if we do obliterate the feasibility of human survival on the planet, there is always the possibility that the viruses (swine flu perhaps?) will carry human genes through to start human-like life here again. Not able to immediately check facts here, but isn’t it the case that viruses live by incorporating themselves into our DNA to replicate themselves? A wild idea that may not be so wild from the human perspective if that’s correct.

interesting NY Times piece running the gamut of questions and characters we covered in the food section..... and hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving.

amazing project

The Desert Museum of Rajasthan

ny times agri-imperialism
oh man.

interesting and thank you all for the food

http://www.conversations.org/

Jeanne-Claude, Cristo's collaborator, has passed away.

are we all but potential had

i found the elegy reading a little dull and wistful. isn't that a good ground for motivation and action? it was like a poetic tantrum. lovely, don't get me wrong, but that is the stuff that art and ecology is made of. invade the wasteland and place signs of birds that once lived there and do no more. host meetings, post posts asking if there might be others that might miss that as well. do something. complaining nostalgically is still complaining.
and then there's gaviotas. oh my goodness, let's go! NOW! i had to look up the pisolithus tinctorius (spelled pizolithus in the text) and it's beautiful.

it literally looks like a turd. pardon my language, but it's quite an interesting metaphor. as a printmaker, this stuff is gold.
this accidental experiment that brought the forest and all its critters back to life. the community, the energy, the devotion, the equality, the respect should be our model. "papa, sing to the flowers to help them grow". i grew up saying, " daddy take me to disney".
we should all, all over the globe, get to a point where we can make the claim that we produce over 70% of our food and energy needs.
very inspiring. i'd like to go. and stay forever.

glass airplanes & jacaranda trees

oliver's brief elegy to a cape cod dump and weisman's paean to gaviotas in colombia tell stories of landscapes lost and found, and humanity's role, embraced or denied, in the complex and often redemptive processes of healing.

the waste land elegy is an ominously quiet portent of the effects of human overpopulation, every day more clearly a matter for nature, not engineering, to resolve.

the story of gaviotas' pines, on the other hand, extols simple human effort and generosity bringing to mind jean giono's tale of elzéard bouffier in the man who planted trees (l'homme qui plantait des arbres) and the far reaching effects that unselfish stewardship of earth's resources can still have.

we will always need such stories, and i'm glad to have these.