GylleSMS ("ManureSMS") is a new Danish SMS service designed to optimize the relationship between farmers and their neighbours.

The popular service enable farmers to send their neighbours an SMS containing information about where and when they are spreading manure (the smelly fertilizer stuff that can spoil a beautiful day at the countryside).

The service-friendly farmers are now pondering whether to extend the service to include a voting system that allow neighbours to have a say about when the farmers should/shouldn't fertilize their fields.

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Jan Chipchase is Principal Researcher in the User Experience Group of Nokia Research Center. A part of his fascinating job is to observe and describe how different cultures use mobile technologies differently - often in ways unintended or unpredicted by the industry that he represents. He has carried out ethnographic fieldwork around the world, such as in Uganda where access to electricity and mobile phones is limited and the user need thus quite basic.

As a consequence of these limitations, people have developed an alternative solutions and service economies, such as phone-sharing systems and battery-charging services (photo) where batteries can be recharged for a relatively small price.

Documentation of this and other of Jan Chipchase's interesting findings are available for download at Nokia Research Center.

• Street Charging Service Uganda (PDF file)

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Poetics of Cinema + Narrativity

Poetics of Cinema 2 by Raoul Ruiz
Eleven years separate these lines from the first part of my Poetics of Cinema. Meanwhile the world has changed and cinema with it. Poetics of Cinema, 1 had much of a call to arms about it. What I write today is rather more of a consolatio philosophica. However, let no one be mistaken about this, a healthy pessimism may be better than a suicidal optimism. Following his research in Poetics of Cinema, 1 on new narrative models as tools for apprehending a fast-shifting world, Raul Ruiz with Poetics of Cinema 2 makes an appeal for an entirely new way of filming, writing, and of conceiving the image. Read more >>

Narrativity: How Visual Arts, Cinema and Literature are Telling the World Today by Audet Ren, Romano Claude, Dreyfus Laurence, Therrien Carl, Marchal Hugues: To tackle the question of narration in its ruptures and mutations in an age of media culture and influences of video where the ludic and interactive principle is an important element is a way to draw up an inventory of the Nineties, a time when art starts to function like some kind of editing table on which the artists can recreate daily reality. Through that reflection on time, the question is to show how its new languages and new ways of writing are representative of the contemporary imaginary expressed in it and to reaffirm that the work of art is an event before being a monument or a mere testimony, an event which constitutes an experience drawing in the spectator. Read more >>

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The first comprehensive, historical exhibition to examine the international foundations and legacy of feminist art, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution focuses on the crucial period 1965 to 1980, during which the majority of feminist activism and artmaking occurred internationally. The exhibition includes the work of 119 artists from the United States, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Comprising work in a broad range of media including painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, and performance art the exhibition is organized around themes based on media, geography, formal concerns, collective aesthetic, and political impulses. Curated for The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, by Connie Butler, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), the exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

IMAGE: Berwick Street Film Collective, still from Nightcleaners, 1970-1975, Film, Courtesy of LUX

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Cary Peppermint:
The Department of Ecology, Art, & Technology

Recent Works http://www.ecoarttech.net/quicktimes -------------------

Wilderness Trouble V1.0, 2007 (9.2MB) http://www.restlessculture.net/mov/wildernesstroublev1_web.mov A Quicktime video and DVD, inspired by William Cronon’s article entitled “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” This article, which was critical to ecocriticism’s recent shift from deep to social ecological models, argues that the concept of “wilderness” has no basis in nature but is a historical and cultural construction. Cronon points out that the U.S. preoccupation with conserving “natural” spaces untouched by humans was a guise of American colonialism (throwing indigenous people off their land to make national parks), and his concern is that it fails today to imagine new, healthy, and sustainable relationships between humans and their environments. This meditational DV attempts to add a consideration of the digital to this reevaluation of wilderness—by refusing to separate modern human life from relatively “natural” environments and by thinking about nature and the digital technologies that make this work possible in the same frame.

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Wilderness Information Network, Summer 2006 (31.8MB) http://www.restlessculture.net/mov/wildinfonetdoc2_web.mov

Quicktime documentary of an installation at the intersection of artist-curation and collaboration. Initiated by Cary Peppermint, this project included sound-art works from over thirty international artists. WildInfoNet encouraged artists to create sound works in the “voice” of ecological other, or to make works in which the artists’ considered themselves as human animal; beings within “nature” producing sound for unknowable others. The project was located 173 miles northwest of NYC, in the Catskill mountains of New York state, Hikers to the back-woods installation used wireless technologies and transistor radios to receive the information-art via .mp3 downloads and radio transmissions. This documentary is featured on DVD ...

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