thoughtsandtalks

TRIANGULAR WALK is een experimentele stadstocht rond de kanaalzone, waarbij kunst, wetenschap en activisme mekaar kruisen. Drie gidsen leiden drie groepen deelnemers middels een speels concept door drie stedelijke tuinprojecten en de omliggende straten. Na de 4 uur durende ‘driehoeks’wandeling ontmoeten de verschillende groepen mekaar voor het eerst voor de afsluitende presentatie in de Open Green Rooftop Garden.
Deze informatieve, interactieve en performatieve tocht draait rond de voedselsketen als symbool voor de alomtegenwoordige sub-culturele en ‘sub-natuurlijke’ processen in een stedelijke omgeving.

TRIANGULAR WALK is an experimental city walk around the canal area where art, science and activism meet. With the help of three guides participants explore three urban gardening projects and the area around them in a playful manner. After the four hour triangular walk, the groups meet for the first time at OKNO’s OpenGreen `rooftop garden, to attend a presentation that rounds up the event.
This informative, interactive and performative journey takes the food chain as a symbol for sub-cultural and sub-natural processes in an urban environment.

info: http://okno.be

On saturday september 18th, three Brussels art labs invite you in Koolmijnenkaai 30-34. OKNO opens their rooftop garden and Open Greens-project to all. You can taste urban honey and drinks made of plants from the garden. You can nibble on FoAM’s detoxifying treats to help you fight urban afflictions, spiced up with plants from the Kanal area. Q-O2 invites the sound artist Pierre Berthet for a concert using waterdrops as an instrument.

After a day of walking between various urban gardens alongside the canal, FoAM will serve a range of detoxifying bites, especially crafted to eliminate toxins and pollutants from the human bodily ecology. The aperitif combines ingredients, methods and performance-eating techniques that can assist your body in fighting some of the most prominent urban afflictions, including allergies, stress related disorders, diabetes and cancer. In collaboration with OKNO and Irma Firma, the cooks will incorporate edible plants gathered and grown in the Brussels’ Kanal area.

More: http://www.platformkanal.be/nl/acties/22-festival-kanal

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

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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CALL FOR PARTICIPATION!
Prelude to another time
Online 25-26-27 April 2010.

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 online sessions on 25-26-27 April are a starting point. These days, we will try to work out some ideas, using simple tools like a wiki and a chat server. We will try to generate some basic textual material together for developing collaborative works based on the idea of Wind Clocks, ecology and time.
For more information: http://timeinventorskabinet.org/wiki/doku.php

Each session introduces a couple of subjects we can discuss and write out together. Just to see what the creative interests could be and to link them to relevant existing resources and documentation. We hope to come to already some preliminary ideas, that can be further developed within the future TIK Project workshops.

Participation is possible either from OKNO’s space in Brussels (see http://okno.be/node/194), from home, or anywhere else with internet access. We encourage not to work alone, but to invite other interested artists as to encourage collective creativity.
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Net als in andere agglomeraties ontbreekt het ook in heel wat Brusselse wijken aan tuinen. Diverse vormen van (milieu)hinder, zoals verontreiniging, stof, lawaai en overstromingen worden steeds groter. Groendaken dragen bij tot meer natuur in de stad en tot de oplossing van heel wat milieuproblemen.
Bijdragen tot een toename van de oppervlakte groen en van de biodiversiteit en zorgen voor een betere waterretentie door zowel platte als hellende daken te beplanten met langzaam groeiende gewassen of, nog beter, met ware tuintjes.

Meer info : download de info-fiche eco-bouwen van leefmilieu brussel

With the urban garden project we want to blend the natural and the digital world in one and the same eco-system. We will explore how this fusion takes place: investigate in a digital way the growth, blossoming and decay of plants while they are submitted to the natural elements as wind, rain, snow, etc.
Can this evolution be generated, controlled, enhanced or imagined in artworks? Is our environment programmable? How does the fusion of natural and artificial matter produce new organisms, new environments, new natures? How does technology animate nature and space, and how do users and programs animate matter?

We observe the physical connections between people, nature and sensor-networks. We introduce natural processes as composting and organic gardening in a creative meshnetwork that combines natural and artifical elements in one media-ecological system.

Can we talk about ‘urban permaculture’, as an intrinsic part of this media-ecological system? What is Permaculture? Permaculture is about designing human environments that have the stability, diversity and resilience of natural ecosystems. Permaculture integrates renewable energy systems, energy efficiency, food/gardening systems, natural building, rainwater harvesting, urban planning along with the economic, political and social policies that make sustainable living possible and practical.
Permaculture is an approach to everyday life that integrates all the facets of people’s lives to enhance environmental sustainability within a permanent, sustainable agricultural and cultural system - a diverse, complex eco-system, where all of the elements interact in mutually beneficial ways to produce a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts. It is is a valued way of designing and creating sustainable systems. It has relevance for anyone with a concern to improve the environment and the quality of life.

aronia melanocarpa - appelbes - chokeberries
eucalyptus gunnii - cider gum
ficus carica - vijgenboom - common fig
philadelphus coronarius - boerenjasmijn - english dogwood
prunus spinosa - sleedoorn - blackthorn
ribes odoratum - kruisbes - golden current
rosa canina - hondsroos - dog rose
rosa glauca - bergroos - redleaf rose
rosa moyesii - muskaatroos - rosa moyesii
rosa rugosa - rimpelroos - ramanas rose
sambucus nigra - vlier - elderberry
vaccinium corymbosum - bosbes - blueberry
deutzia gracilis - bruidbloem - slender deutzia
spiraea cinerea - spierstruik - meadowsweet
potentilla fruticosa - vijfvingerkruid - shrubby cinquefoil
salix purpurea - bittere wilg - purple willow