Vertical vermiponics: research project combines worms with hydroponics The practices of hydroponics, aquaponics and windowfarming (which allows urban folks to grow food vertically using their home windows) and vermicomposting (creating compost with worms) have become familiar ideas to many green-minded people for some time now. But what about adding worms to the windowfarming equation? Professor Ken Rinaldo, director of the art and technology department at Ohio State University's School of Architecture, has combined aspects of these practices in an experimental research project called Cascading Gardens. Seen over at Inhabitat, the project employs what is called vermiponics, where worm waste is used to fertilize veggies. We've seen a few examples of this previously, but it's intriguing to see an instance where the power of worm waste is directly integrated in such a way, resulting in a smaller growing footprint. © Ken Rinaldo
immanence This ad is making the rounds, but in case you haven’t seen it yet, here it is. It is brilliant. As Jeff Beer puts it, the stock video footage firm Dissolve illustrates the “marketing strategy equivalent of paint-by-numbers” by putting its own goods to the words of Kendra Eash‘s brilliant McSweeney’s piece. View full article » The Media and Environment Scholarly Interest Group just won the prize for best attended business meeting at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Or so we were informed by the SCMS interest group liaison present at the meeting.
Object-Oriented France: The Philosophy of Tristan Garcia continent. 2.1 (2012): 6–21. The French philosopher and novelist Tristan Garcia was born in Toulouse in 1981. This makes him rather young to have written such an imaginative work of systematic philosophy as Forme et objet,1 the latest entry in the MétaphysiqueS series at Presses universitaires de France. 5 ways to get the most out of backyard chickens Chickens give us eggs, and those eggs are a great source of high-quality protein. But they can also give us so much more. Below are some innovative ideas from backyard and small-scale commercial chicken keepers that may help chooks to reach their full, productive potential. Chicken tunnels for low-work cultivationChickens love to peck, they love to scratch, they love to dig, and they love to eat all kinds of little weeds, bugs and beasties—not to mention food/crop waste. Oh, and they love to poop too.
Building Dwelling Thinking Building Dwelling Thinking from , translated by Albert Hofstadter, Harper Colophon Books, New York, 1971. In what follows we shall try to think about dwelling and building. This thinking about building does not presume to discover architectural ideas, let alone to give rules for building. Objects as Temporary Autonomous Zones continent. 1.3 (2011): 149-155. The world is teeming. Anything can happen. John Cage, “Silence” 1 Autonomy means that although something is part of something else, or related to it in some way, it has its own “law” or “tendency” (Greek, nomos). The Tiny Project: "Less house! More Life!" You know that tiny houses have become a big thing when they are actually randomly passing each other on the highway. Here you see Alek Lisefski's Tiny Project passing a Tumbleweed Tiny House, as he moves to California. © The Tiny Project
Beyond 1984: 12 dystopian novels from the New East that are eerily relatable today — The Calvert Journal George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) made it back onto the bestsellers lists earlier this year, exactly a week after Donald Trump's inauguration. While some note that it might be wrong to evaluate real life through the prism of books written over half a century ago, with the White House shifting towards an administration led by “alternative facts” and Brexit looming on the horizon, it is no surprise that people are turning to dystopian novels to make sense of things. For those who want to keep riding the dystopian wave, or are desperate for a reality alternative to this one, the New East has various kinds of doomsday stories to add to your reading list, from dishonest alien regimes to a “great wall” dividing the world. We (1921)Yevgeny Zamyatin The Penguin Classics edition of Zamyatin’s We We is a Russian dystopian classic — George Orwell praised the book in his 1946 review in which he argued that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was partly derived from Zamyatin's novel.
SEMIOSIS Webpage:Language Brain and Evolution also now see:Ascent of Intelligence and Pinker:The Stuff of Thought Language and the Mind [Extracted from Nöth, Winfried ed. 1994. Sign Evolution in Nature and Culture, Part III Glottogenesis: Phylogeny, ontogeny, and actogeny, 255-268. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter] What is Object-Oriented Ontology? Recently I was speaking to a writer about my recent work. She's doing a feature for a local magazine on creativity research and design practice in the region. I've been fortunate to get a lot of press over the years, and it's become increasingly important to me to find ways to make my work comprehensible and applicable to a general audience. We talked about a number of projects, from games at the studio to my recent Atari work to my forthcoming book on newsgames. But this was the first time I'd tried to talk to a journalist about my new work in object-oriented ontology.
Vermiponics roundup: The beauty of worms in hydroponic gardens (Video) We know the benefits of hydroponic gardening, aquaponics and vermicomposting, and how practices like these can help the home gardener grow more food efficiently. Vermiponics combines the best of the three in a self-sustaining mini-ecosystem, using the castings of red wriggler worms as fertilizer. The idea is that the cultivated plants and worms mutually benefit each other, much like the fish would in an aquaponic system. Compared to an aquaponic system though, worms in a vermiponic set-up requires less water and maintenance than fish would, making it an advantageous operation. So if vermiponics is something you would like to try, then check out our mini-roundup of do-it-yourself vermiponics videos here, and feel free to suggest ideas or add your own vermiponics links in the comments below.
The Invisible Painting, 1960 Very generally: The future of art, if it is to have any future, must be based on a synthesis. I regard most modern art as an experimental field for separate discoveries and solutions, the unity of composition and form, color composition, illusions of time and space, poetic content, automatism and gesture, experimentation with material. A growing number of artists end up in a technical idiocy of style, cultivating a particular halfway solution.