"Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds. Pity the nation that needs to jail those who ask for justice, while communal killers, mass murderers, corporate scamsters, looters, rapists, and those who prey on the poorest of the poor, roam free."

The Books

More from India

Oldie but goodie (recently scanned negative)

This American Life

This podcast is insane. I heard them the other day in Kevin's car via a burned cd from a friend, Janie. I think that this is something that people should hear and definitely contemplate. The second story (starting at min. 17 if you'd like to skip to it) is really the one that grabbed me. It should probably become a movie or something. I can't believe that we are supposed to find comfort in our police force after hearing this story.

heard this song this morning on my way to school. I like the lyrics.

Older Project

This was my monotype project that I did for a class last Spring. I just got some photos of it from a friend so I thought that I would share a few.


I made lots of tiny books out of monoprints that I printed with etching plates. All of the books were connected together by string and then installed around our building in random, somewhat out of site areas. Then for the critique I presented my class with a statement that what was hanging on the board was not my piece and then contained directions of how to find my little webs. It was fun. Everyone got to wander around the halls and see these prints in a different way. It became not just about the image or object but also the experience of finding them in places you wouldn't expect.

Vik Muniz

I saw this film last night at the High Museum and it totally blew me away.

Some photos from India

a little something silly :)

MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON from Dean Fleischer-Camp on Vimeo.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

The battle...has to begin here. In America. The only institution more powerful than the U.S. government is American civil society. The rest of us are subjects of slave nations. We are by no means powerless, but you have the power of proximity. You have access to the Imperial Palace and the Emperor's chambers. Empire's conquests are being carried out in your name.

-Arundhati Roy

At the school in Perithachoor

This is the main school that Communities Rising works with. We visited the school 4 times being greeted with dances and big smiles from the kids. The kids ranged from 3rd to 7th standard and even though they got a little wild at times, they were a joy to work with. Our last project was a large scale human loom weaving that the kids all participated in making. All of the fabric was free scraps from a tailoring center. It was a lot of fun.

An example of how fun (wild) the kids are. :)

The cutest little girl

Perithachoor

This is the school that Community Rising is most associated with and focused on. This was our first visit there playing a drawing game with the kids. They are so so cute!

Tailoring school

This was our first visit to the tailoring school where we are working with women to help suggest creative forms of expanding their market of craft. These ladies are very very talented. :)

Our Arrival to India

3:30 AM India time. Arriving in Chennai, we've traveled for about 24 hours.

Michell Joachim- fantastical vision for ecological supercities POP SCI MAG

"If the same people who design the roads also design the cars, he says, and the same people who create the suburbs also plan for ways to feed and transport residents, our cities will become healthier, friendlier and more sustainable."

In his vision, individual cars would be replaced by car-share systems that function like luggage carts at an airport. Pay, step into a smart car that communicates with the city grid, drive to your destination, and leave the car there. The cars would have soft, springy exteriors, inflatable protective bladders and transparent foil, which would enable them to bump together as they traveled in flocks. “The idea of sharp metal boxes is just done,” Joachim says. “We design cars with the principle that no one would ever die in a car accident again.”

I found Michell Joachim on the sputnik observatory a little while ago along with a lot of other very interesting, intelligent, and progressive people, whom I have been trying to look further into to investigate individual projects or ideas of theirs. Joachim is one who seems to be doing a lot. He is a co-founder of the group Terraform ONE, a non-profit design collective that works to explore fully-integrated urban planning. I looked at his blog today and found this article from Popular Science about Joachim's vision of his future ecological supercities. His energy and enthusiasm for creating spaces that he may not even live to see is very positive for me, along with his sense of taking responsibility for design decisions and every implications of each. I think for these types of visions to fulfill themselves there are going to need to be many other structural changes within how our culture functions and thrives but that there are people who are working so hard on this is exciting...

Mother Jones is sneaking around the oil spill.

Great work BP...

"Not that keeping a cleanup job necessarily equals getting paid: Elmer says the contractors continue to lose workers' paychecks, a problem he told me about the last time we talked and that has since been confirmed by the local papers."

Elmer said he'd recently come upon a dead crab and, knowing no one was going to come to examine it, decided to slice it open himself. Black oil poured out.

This is a page of a lovely history book that I'm cutting apart for an installation. Read the wonderful wisdom that they are feeding to the Young Americans...

Mother Jones+The Last Taboo

"One of every two underfed people on Earth lives here. Forty percent of Indian children under the age of five are underweight and stunted. More than 4 percent of the 26 million babies born here every year die within their first month of life, a neonatal mortality rate surpassing even India's war-torn neighbor, Sri Lanka."

SPTNK

Here's an example:

SPTNKOBSRVTRY

So I am writing a paper about this art piece/website. It's designed and created by Jonathan Harris for a not-for-profit educational organization called the Sputnik Observatory. The organization focuses on connecting ideas from art, science, and technology together and encouraging life long learning. The interface is really great and full of compelling information and ideas. Dive in and get lost! Their slogan:

Ideas are energy.
Your brain is a satellite.
Out there is your mind.

Show at the Bean!

So I'm having an exhibition of my artwork at the Sentient Bean on May 3rd. Everyone should come!! :) It will be up all month

The Books

"It wasn’t just “a bad thing.” Littering is a bad thing. Slavery was this nation’s Original Sin, and yet many people will not look at it except through a gauze of Spanish moss."

-Eugene Robinson

•• •- -- •• -• - • • -- • • • •• ••• • •• • • • -•• •

i've been into writing in morse code lately...


do-wah-diddy-diddy-dum-diddy-do

New installation project: Phase one

i had to.

New Scientist – Climate change may trigger earthquakes and volcanoes

by Richard Fisher September 23, 2009

FAR from being the benign figure of mythology, Mother Earth is short-tempered and volatile. So sensitive in fact, that even slight changes in weather and climate can rip the planet’s crust apart, unleashing the furious might of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and landslides. That’s the conclusion of the researchers who got together last week in London at the conference on Climate Forcing of Geological and Geomorphological Hazards. It suggests climate change could tip the planet’s delicate balance and unleash a host of geological disasters. What’s more, even our attempts to stall global warming could trigger a catastrophic event (see “Bury the carbon”).

Evidence of a link between climate and the rumblings of the crust has been around for years, but only now is it becoming clear just how sensitive rock can be to the air, ice and water above. “You don’t need huge changes to trigger responses from the crust,” says Bill McGuire of University College London (UCL), who organised the meeting. “The changes can be tiny.” You don’t need huge changes to trigger a response from the crust. They can be tiny.

Among the various influences on the Earth’s crust, from changes in weather to fluctuations in ice cover, the oceans are emerging as a particularly fine controller. Simon Day of the University of Oxford, McGuire and Serge Guillas, also at UCL, have shown how subtle changes in sea level may affect the seismicity of the East Pacific Rise, one of the fastest-spreading plate boundaries. The researchers focused on the Easter microplate – the tectonic plate that lies beneath the ocean off the coast of Easter Island – because it is relatively isolated from other faults. This makes it easier to distinguish changes in the plate caused by climate systems from those triggered by regional rumbles.

Since 1973, the arrival of El Niño every few years has correlated with a greater frequency of underwater quakes between magnitude 4 and 6. The team is confident that the two are linked. El Niño raises the local sea level by a few tens of centimetres, and they believe the extra water weight may increase the pressure of fluids in the pores of the rock beneath the seabed. This might be enough to counteract the frictional force that holds the slabs of rock in place, making it easier for faults to slip. “The changes in sea level are tiny,” says Day. “A small additional perturbation can have a substantial effect.” Small ocean changes can also influence volcanic eruptions, says David Pyle of the University of Oxford.

His study of eruptions over the past 300 years with Ben Mason of the University of Cambridge and colleagues reveals that volcanism varies with the seasons. The team found that there are around 20 per cent more eruptions worldwide during the northern hemisphere’s winter than the summer (Journal of Geophysical Research, DOI: 10.1029/2002JB002293). The reason may be that global sea level drops slightly during the northern hemisphere’s winter. Because there is more land in the northern hemisphere, more water is locked up as ice and snow on land than during the southern hemisphere’s winter. The vast majority of the world’s most active volcanoes are within a few tens of kilometres of the coast (see map). This suggests the seasonal removal of some of the ocean’s weight at continental margins as sea level drops could be triggering eruptions around the world, says Pyle. The suggestion that some volcanoes erupt when sea levels drop does not necessarily mean that sea levels rising under climate change will suppress volcanism.

In Alaska, Mount Pavlof erupts more often in the winter months, and previous research by Steve McNutt of the Alaska Volcano Observatory puts this down to a local sea level rise of 30 centimetres every winter due to low air pressure and high storm winds. Pavlof’s location means that the extra weight of the adjacent sea could be squeezing magma towards the surface. In other regions, additional ocean weight at continental margins as sea levels rise could bend the crust, reducing compressional conditions, says McGuire. Magma may then find it easier to reach the surface at adjacent volcanoes. All these examples may seem contradictory, but the crucial point is that any change in sea level may alter regional stresses at continental margins enough to trigger eruptions in a volcano already primed to erupt, he says.

Small changes in rainfall can also trigger volcanic eruptions. In 2001, a major eruption of the Soufrière Hills volcano on the Caribbean island of Montserrat was set in motion by particularly heavy rainfall. This destabilised the volcano’s dome enough for it to collapse and unleash magma within. Now it seems even typical tropical rain showers could trigger an eruption. And climate models suggest that many regions, including parts of the tropics, are likely to get wetter with climate change. Adrian Matthews of the University of East Anglia, UK, and colleagues measured the minute-by-minute response of Montserrat’s volcano after more than 200 bouts of precipitation over three years. The team found that these events, which Matthews says were typical of tropical weather, were followed by two days of increased volcanic activity.

A rainy day increased the likelihood of dome collapse from 1.5 per cent to 16 per cent. “It wouldn’t have to be spectacularly heavy rainfall,” says Matthews. “You don’t have to have a hurricane.” (Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research, DOI: 10.1016/j.jvolgeores.2009.05.010) Perhaps the greatest geological hazards during climate change will be the result of melting ice sheets. Apart from the risk that loose sediments exposed by melted ice could slip into the sea as tsunami-generating landslides, the removal of heavy ice could also trigger volcanic eruptions. “Even thinning of a few tens of metres could make a difference,” says Andrew Russell of the University of Newcastle in the UK. For example, Iceland’s Vatnajökull ice cap sits over a plate boundary and several volcanoes. That ice is likely to disappear within the next two centuries. “If that happens you’ll get rid of an awful lot of weight that will allow an increase in volcanic activity,” says Russell.

In the wake of the last ice age, volcanism was up to 30 times greater in northern Iceland compared with today (Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, DOI: 10.1002/esp.1811). Icy eruptions could reverberate round the world. In 1783, the Icelandic volcano Laki sent a sulphurous smog over Europe, plunging it into an extreme winter that killed thousands. For now, it is unclear just how much climate change will affect the frequency and intensity of quakes and eruptions, says McGuire, because Earth’s sensitivity to climate is only now emerging. There is not yet enough data to build predictive climate models linking the two systems. But it’s crucial that we consider just how easily our actions could provoke the planet, he argues. “It’s serious science, not scaremongering.”

Bury the carbon, set off a quake? It all looked so promising – tidy carbon dioxide away underground and forget about it. But even as the US’s first large-scale sequestration operation is getting off the ground at the Mountaineer plant in West Virginia, geophysicists are concerned that burying the carbon could trigger earthquakes and tsunamis. In a carbon sequestration power plant (CCS), CO2 is extracted from the exhaust then pumped into aquifers and old gas fields several kilometres beneath the Earth’s surface. So far so good. But the CO2 expands as it rises through the porous rock, increasing pressure inside.

“As CO2 is injected into an aquifer it may induce microseismicity. However, CCS operations carried out in line with the recently published European Union regulatory guidelines would not pose an earthquake risk,” says Andrew Chadwick of the British Geological Survey. Chemical reactions between the injected CO2, water and rock could also destabilise the rock, says Ernest Majer, a seismologist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California who briefed the Senate on CCS hazards this week. “It’s such a new technology that none of these issues have been addressed,” says Majer. Shanta Barley

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327273.800-climate-change-may-trigger-earthquakes-and-volcanoes.html?full=true

a GOOD infographic

Comparing the Chile and Haiti Earthquakes.

esto no es america

i love these things

picture by alee

this is from a few weeks ago when we went on a lovely road trip. i love this picture that alee took with her polaroid.

Printstallation

So Im doing an Independent study this quarter with three other girls that is going to be a print installation class. I'm very excited to dive into this medium and make work that is both spatial, interactive, and immersive. We have a blog that we will be discussing our ideas and plans on and also that we will be posting the dates and times that we will be exhibiting or hosting events. We talked about having an event possibly every week for people to come and view our work/experiments. I hope that we get some people interested and i welcome you to follow along with us on our blog at printstallation.blogspot.com

This is an image I really enjoy.

I found this a long time ago and unfortunately can not remember the artists name. But I love it.

The new political party: The COFFEE PARTY!

Coffee Party USA aims to reinvigorate the public sphere, drawing from diverse backgrounds and diverse perspectives, with the goal of expanding the influence of the People in America's political arena. We do not require nor adhere to any preexisting ideology. We encourage deliberation guided by reason amongst the many viewpoints held by our members. We see our diversity as a strength, not a weakness, because we believe that faithful deliberation from multiple vantage points is the best way to achieve the common good. It is in the responsible and reasonable practice of deliberation that we hope to contribute to society.

Coffee Party USA is made up of people acting independently of political parties, of corporations, and of political lobbying networks. To this point, all products created and hours logged for Coffee Party have been carried out in the spirit of volunteerism. In the coming months and years, we hope to transform our disappointment in our current political system into a force that will return our nation to a course of popular governance, of the People by the People for the People.

We are diverse — ethnically, geographically, politically, in age and in experience.

We are 100% grassroots. No lobbyists here. No pundits. And no hyper-partisan strategists calling the shots in this movement. We are a spontaneous and collective expression of our desire to forge a culture of civic engagement that is solution-oriented, not blame-oriented.

We demand a government that responds to the needs of the majority of its citizens as expressed by our votes and by our voices;NOT corporate interests as expressed by misleading advertisements and campaign contributions.

We want a society in which democracy is treated as sacrosanct and ordinary citizens participate out of a sense of civic duty, civic pride, and a desire to contribute to society. The Coffee Party is a call to action. Our Founding Fathers and Mothers gave us an enduring gift — Democracy — and we must use it to meet the challenges that we face as a nation.

http://www.coffeepartyusa.com/

Show tomorrow night!

Our Lithography class is having a show tomorrow night of our collaborative prints and our trade portfolio. Come to check out the work and the free food. It's at Alexander Hall from 6-9.
See ya there!

First Proof of my New Print.

"Ann'aconda" Coulter: Wrastlin' for Jesus

The print is for my Lithography class. We are doing an exchange portfolio which the theme for is "Wrastlin'" So I choose to make this one. It is light hearted but pretty hilarious, in my opinion.
I'm going to add a fourth layer also and the print will be in our exhibition at Alexander Hall on the 26th of this month. Free food and there should be some fun things to see.

"Universe" Ring

Polished "Universe" Ring Models Our Insignificance

new favorite person

beauty to its lair

i forgot how much i love Yann Tiersen

The Inspiration for my newest project.

Farewell, Great Man.

Howard Zinn died yesterday. He was a great man, who influenced the thoughts of many, and will be oh so missed.

I am an all powerful amazon warrior 

not just some sniveling girl 

so no matter what i think i need

you know i can't possibly 

have a need in this world

Why can't all decent men and women call themselves feminists?

Out of respect.

-Ani Difranco 2004

Print Finished.

So Ipad: Magic?

So I've been hearing all of this gossip about the mystical islate, ipad, itablet, whatever. Everyone's been anticipating it and now it is here. But is it really anything special. There are opinions on both ends. Apple thinks it's their best innovation yet. Some disagree...

Truthdig.com

New Green Cell Phone Design on Good

I want this! It doesn't exist yet but this is a pretty cool concept. One that should have been the initial goal years ago when phones came out.

It's good to see when designers aren't thinking about planned obsolescence any more and are reaching for sustainability instead. Let's save everyone money people, and the world's resources.

Prints Update

I'm proofing my woodblock today for critique. Hopefully all goes well. I spent about 10 hours carving yesterday and have a sore arm as a result.

Birthday weekend. The King and I

So this past Saturday was my birthday. It was a nice relaxing day that ended with a pleasant vegan potluck with a bunch of friends which then turned into a dance party.

My best friend Evan and I made sushi (fake) for everyone and I'd say it was a success.

Also Monday was MLK day and some friends of mine did a couple of civil awareness activities for Haiti. I'm sorry that I missed it but I heard they successfully got kicked out of City Market.

This is a gist of what they did.

"Scale is important. Reports are confirming at least 50,000 have died in Haiti over the past two days. It is likely tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of brothers, sisters, parents, children and friends will join that number. More people dead (let alone injured) than the entire population of the Savannah metro area. I find the numbers to be simply beyond representation. By going into the streets with friends, family and strangers to impose their numbers, their lose,their struggle on Savannah's population both permanent and temporary we may begin to generate a shred of the empathy deserved by this battered and abused group of persons. If like in Haiti one cannot walk beyond the spot they stand without stepping on a person laying motionless under their shadow we have still not come close to doing enough, but will be on heading the right direction.

I suggest...

• Donate the resources at your disposal (Human power, skills, knowledge, money to name of few).
• Encourage everyone else you know to do the same.
• Encourage tourist to donate the money they would have spent on a trolly ride to an aid organization (Doctors Without Borders, CARE, Lambi Fund of Haiti, MADRE, Partners in Health, RN Response Network, Oxfam).
• Generate awareness. "

Also today an article was written by, (Capri and my "boyfriend") Chris Hedges, on behalf of Martin Luther King Day and what is stands for and the point that we are inevitably missing in the whole thing. It's on Truthdig.com, which is a great source of news.

A friend's buisness

This is one of my good friend's dad's buisness, Rapid Change. His name is Dan Suwyn and I find what he does to be a great thing. His blog is pretty interesting and has some good points about how a business should be run.

The Bridge Project

The Bridge Project is a "visual excersise on free association and internet search procedures. There were some images of theirs on the Space Collective that i thought were pretty cool. It's like accessing the internet as it was a room that you were in. Pretty neat.

Notebook Scans

Beginning some new prints.

The start of a new litho print includes this fancy little think that I made in illustrator today. It's not too impressive but I am proud of myself.
This will be one of three layers on a aluminum ball ground plate. The other layers will be posi-litho and a stone. I think it's going to be a good one!