thoughtsandtalks

okno’s harvest day is set up as an open_lab where visitors can explore the projects conducted by artists and researchers in the open_green rooftopgardens. We will exchange ideas about the different processes of social and cultural issues related to the urban, green environment. We will share everyday procedures as cooking algorithms with ingredients forthcoming from the seasonal harvest of the connected urban gardens. We intend to explore via public discussions and onsite/online presentations the character, properties and the expressions of different natural processes.

2pm: Your hosts of the day are Olivier Meunier and Annemie Maes.
Throughout the afternoon they will give an overview of the setup of the okno gardens (materials, decisions, technology) and introduce the artistic projects -the beehive observatory, the spiral-dye, the connected domes and webcams- located in the gardens.
2:30: we start for a walk through the city to collect berries and plants for Bartaku’s mini-lab on solar cells.
4pm: workshop featuring natural dye sensitized solar cells and Preb 501, an experimental light amplifier. This arts/science research project is fused by Bartaku’s PhoEf.
4pm: workshop on absinthe-making. Various Artists will go beyond Toulouse Lautrec and create natural alchemy with local plants: Aude Thensiau - 50%.
6pm: the honeybee observatory by Christina Stadlbauer.
Spring 2009 the 2 honeybee colonies arrived at the connected rooftop gardens. The ladies enjoyed a rich season of urban blooms and rewarded us with the first harvest! A taster of urban beekeeping techniques and a view on the harvesting fields will be offered as well as some spoons to evaluate the city honey of Brussels.

Across workshops and presentations samples of homemade bio products can be savoured: pickled russian cucumbers, sundried tomatoes, pinjur, city honey, absinthe, blueberry wine, kosovar pita, courgette-soup, … Bring your recipies to share them with us!

and some other micro transformations by Bartaku

recipies by Various Artists

Pad.ma is a web-based video archive, launched as a public website http://pad.ma in February 2009, that works primarily with footage and not finished films. Pad.ma’s interface offers some exciting new ways in which moving images, timelines, text and maps can be linked. It offers a practical technical and legal framework through which footage can be shared. It makes an appeal for thinking about film and video “production” in a number of different ways: as a filmmaker publishing video that is not a film, as a film editor organising footage using the archive, as a writer across one or many video clips, as a scholarly researcher or film student contributing notes or using links to clips as references, as a filmmaker reusing another’s material, as a programmer building further applications using pad.ma’s open source software base, for example.

Pad.ma a collaborative project initiated by five organizations: oil21.org from Berlin, the Alternative Law Forum from Bangalore, and three organisations from Mumbai: Majlis, Point of View and Chitrakarkhana/CAMP. The entire archive is searchable and viewable online, and is free to download for non-commercial purposes. This offline exhibition reveals the many potential ways in which pad.ma can be used.

The idea is to detect bio feedback of plants from the okno open_green, send these data from the garden (over a radio frequency connection) into okno_inside, transform them into generative music and stream them over the okno_radio.
After a collective brainstorm, different parts of the project are setup and worked out by different people. At the end everything fits into one project.
We discussed possibilities to measure subtle activities of plants and create a human/plant interaction. We discovered that all plants in the open_green are showing a highly complex biodynamic response to their environment.
We conducted experiments to try and find out how plants react to wind, air pressure, touch, light, movement, sound etc.

1. sensors:
We were experimenting with different sensors on stems, flowers and leaves observing data and biodynamic responses. First we looked into measuring the bio resistance of the plants. We tried to build a galvanometer based on the Backster experiments.
Simultaneously we were working with stretch sensors: long thin pieces of stretch fabric were attached to the sunflower stems. When the flowers move in the wind, the fabric becomes more or less resistive and generates different data.
We worked with all kinds of conductive and natural materials used for measuring variable resistance: stretch fabric / conductive thread / graphite / metal wool / foil / wire / and the plants themselves.
We decided to work with 2 data types: the Slow Input where plants are growing and moving, changing absorbation of light and temperature (plant as actor); and the Fast Input: drumming, touching, knocking, talking, rubbing and pressing the plants (using plant as interface).

2. alternative powering:
We put small 4.5V solarpanels in serie to power arduino’s and sensors.

3. wireless connections:
The data are send via an internal radio network. We configured Xbee Radios with Xbee Shield via Serial connection (USB). Each Xbee is given an address/name/destination via AT commands. The arduinos are programmed to handle the data.

4. sonification and streaming:
The numbers we are getting in from the garden are becoming parameters and generators of our open_green sound. The data coming out of the 14 analog input streams are sonified via Supercollider create a nice ‘zen-sound’.

music from sunflowers
# Artist: Isjtar
# Title: Music for Sunflowers
# Length: 4:46 minutes (10.59 MB)
# Format: MP3 Stereo 44kHz 311Kbps (VBR)

Part 1 of the Connected Domes-workshops, the building of Geodesic Domes out of recycled materials, will be held at OKNO from august 10th till august 14th.
The workshop will be facilitated by Dirk Hendrickx, co-founder of the artist collective Maquette.
Part 2 of the Connected Domes-workshops will be led by the media artists Audrey Samson (Rotterdam) and Stefanie Wuschitz (Vienna) and takes place from august 17 till august 21st.

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“Imagine living outdoors indoors in a transparant dome, picking organically grown vegetables right in your kitchen, sleeping in a bed under luxuriant trees, comfortable regardless of the weather outside.
Your autonomous garden home is heated and cooled by the sun, which also provides electricity and heats water.
…
Your Garden of Eden captures, treats, and recycles it’s own water.
…
the plants provide the oxygen-rich, clean air of a forest.
There is no connection to city power, water or sewage systems. It is truly organic architecture.”

Excerpt of Bucky Works, Buckminster Fuller’s Ideas for Today - by Jay Baldwin, co-founder of the Whole Earth Catalog.

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Noise pollution at my place (brussels, center) as visualized by Michal Kinderlay, Czech media-artist, during his residency at okno.