thoughtsandtalks

Okno participates in the e-culture fair : ‘Future of the Labs’.

As part of the E-CULTURE FAIR 2010, BALTAN Laboratories is organising and hosting a presentation of Dutch, Belgian and German media art laboratories, brought together around three shared themes. This is an international presentation of BALTAN’s Future of the Lab research and one of the 12 projects from the Netherlands at the ECF.

The E-CULTURE FAIR 2010 will be showcasing innovative projects in the cross-over fields of creative industry, research, education and media art from August 23 – 25 on the second floor of the Dortmunder U – Centre for Art and Creativity. It is the first step of the envisaged long-term cooperation between the three partners, namely Virtueel Platform of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, BAM of Ghent, Flanders, Belgium, and medienwerk.nrw of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, organised by Hartware MedienKunstVerein (Dortmund, DE). In line with previous events held in the Netherlands since 2000, the E-CULTURE FAIR is being presented for the first time in Germany as a partner event and cooperation project of ISEA2010 RUHR, 16th International Symposium on Electronic Art.

Mal au Pixel festival is looking at connecting technology, urban electronics and social transformation issues, and to investigate our contemporary beliefs. The festival brings together young digital artists and unconventionnal electronics: unexpected technologies, prototypes and open ended events.
For its fifth edition, Mal au Pixel further explores environmental issues and looks at the signals coming from the South, through initiatives from the worldwide DIY community.
ALTLABS MEETING au 104 • June 27 • 14h-19h
104 rue d’Aubervilliers - 5 rue Curial, Paris 19
with : Okno | Trias Culture | Ker Thiossane | TMPLab | HONF | CRAS | APO33 | Refarm the City | DakarLug | …
http://www.le104.fr

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The 8th of march 2010 we started to setup a permaculture rooftopgarden on the 6th floor of a parking in the center of Brussels. It was a very cold day, -6° , cloudy and snowy. The next day we got some icy sun but all of us were freezing, working outside! At the end of the second day, the basic structure of the garden was in place. To follow the evolution of the edible forest rooftopgarden you can check the ‘Open Green’ category in http://padma.okno.be - in this video-repository you get a lot of descriptions and annotations on the how and why and the evolution of the garden.
Following video is a timelapse account of the 2 setup days, with a framerate of 1 image/second. The length of the video is 49 minutes but it spans 2 days of work!

Why garden on rooftops in the city?
Gardening on rooftops in ever-increasingly dense and sprawling cities is an original way to take back unused and sterile spaces like rooftops, patios and balconies and to transform them into livable spaces that are lush, productive and purifying. In addition to embellishing the urban landscape with food-producing gardens at the tops of buildings and producing fresh food, these new spaces for the community enable us to reduce the ecological footprint of the houses and institutions of which we are an integral part. Recovering and decontaminating water, cultivating organic food, composting organic waste as well as ?ltering and cooling down air are all part of a mindset to make our established landscape more sustainable. Therefore, in the current context of environmental degradation, over-consumption and junk food culture, taking care of ourselves and our environment enables us to take a step down the path to healthy cities and communities.
Rooftop gardening means taking up an inspiring, ecological and productive activity, and developing new links with the food chain, the seasons, the environment and the community. This utopia’s vision is to turn the city into a garden and its inhabitants into gardeners.
Guide to setting up your own edible rooftop garden: http://rooftopgardens.ca

Since 2006, City Mine(d) devote themselves to the issue of economic paradoxes in Brussels. Under the banner MICRONOMICS, they look for answers at the micro scale. They have brought together a wealth of micro-initiatives, who are actively building an urban micro-economy that is fair to those who take part in it and that is at the heart of the way our cities are shaped.
During the 2010 Micronomics festival, Klorofil, FoAM and OKNO join forces to spread the green virus in the city. In a collaborative action they organize seed-balling workshops, construct small vertical gardens and give all information on how to grow your own vegetables on the tiniest spaces in the city …
Interested to join us? The workshops start on May 1st at Micromarché, from 11:00 am.
Check the Micronomicsprogram here.

http://www.happynewfestival.be/Klinkende_Stad.html

MAHILA is a multi media project that engages with women empowerment in small communities, here especially focused on Indian countrywomen affected by climate change. The project is presented in a twofold installation. One room unveils a multiple speaker ante-chamber that guides to the second room where a film is shown. The first room gives a taste of the material and atmosphere that the artists captured during their research in India. By the use of polyphonic principles and theatrical setups Billy Bultheel creates a simple yet elegant sound installation approaching the contemplative Indian landscape.
The second room shows a film made by Annemie Maes, which is a reflective documentary on women empowerment, going from west to east and vice versa.
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Soon OKNO, ESC and COL-ME will start a 2-year long project called Time Inventors’ Kabinet. The idea is to rethink the way we are perceiving time, relate it to ecological concepts, and see what the impact could be on creating media art works. For more information, please read below the “Introduction to the “Time Inventors’ Kabinet” [TIK]“.

The project TIK (Time Inventors’ Kabinet) will take place over 2 years, as a collaborative action by 3 core partners(OKNO in Brussels, COL-ME in Bratislava and ESC in Graz) and numerous other contributors. We will organize a distributed research and creation lab, with ongoing workshop points in each partner region, taking an ecological approach(in the etymological sense of the term : a study approach taking into account relations of organisms to one another and to their physical environment and overall context) to observing patterns in time and time control systems.

Our shared work will be an investigation into time relations within biological and circumstantial ecologies, through the lens of system aesthetics. Using media technology and electronics as research tools in our shared laboratories, we will collect data from various ecosystems over a period of time. The artistic output of this data collection process will be the creation of electronic interfaces that will then be used to reinterpret the data with goal of exploring time related poetics such as synchronicity and (ir)regularity through electronics, and of developing a common language about time.
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