A recent New York Times Magazine article by Jon Mooallem discusses the research and assumptions surrounding “gay animals”. One of the more interesting issues that becomes a thread in the story is how often humans anthropomorphize animals in particularity using sexual orientation as a way to either prove or demonize the legitimacy of homosexuality.
“we’re quick to conceive of that great range of activities in the way it most handily tracks to our anthropomorphic point of view: put crassly, all those different animals just seem to be doing gay sex stuff with one another. ”

Sleeping Beauty on the Tracks

Gilberto Esparza builds electronic “beam-bot” like robots that feed off of the environment. The urban parasite is device that crawls along the powerlines sucking on the electricity to fuel it’s movements. His more recent Nomadic Plants, on view at Laboreal Centro De Art

Excellent exhibit by Walton Ford where he explores the style of Audubon books, but twists Hemingway big game hunters era concepts.
from his bio:
“Each painting is as much a tutorial in flora and fauna as it is as a scathing indictment of the wrongs committed by nineteenth-century industrialists or, locating the work in the present, contemporary American consumer society.”
It’s a stunning exhibit at the Hamburger Bahnhof in berlin.

Switzerland is covering its glaciers with mega-blankets; protecting it’s only natural resource, snow. This has been going on for 5 years now and appears to be successful, at a cots of $12 million per square mile.
(from Times Online)

In the running up to the climate summit in Copenhagen, we’re featuring two approaches to the subject.

1. One approach to the subject is an installation by Petko Dourmana which “portrays a dystopian scenario: a “nuclear winter” initiated by political groups or governments in order to solve the problem of global warming and the melting of the polar icecaps.” Using night vision goggles and infrared projections one can navigate the dark post-apocalyptic north pole. It suggested a future where we may be blind without technology and thus highlighting the contradiction this dependance has been created by unchecked technology and its subsequent damage to the environment. Part of Transmediale ‘09.

“Researchers in the Netherlands have created what was described as soggy pork and are now investigating ways to improve the muscle tissue in the hope that people will one day want to eat it.

No one has yet tasted the product, but it is believed the artificial meat could be on sale within five years.

Vegetarian groups welcomed the news, saying there was “no ethical objection” if meat was not a piece of a dead animal. ” from the Telegraph via next nature
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by mikebaird

from SF Gate
“Their motive is a mystery. All I know is we suddenly have a couple of otters killing seals at a fairly fast pace,” said Jim Harvey, associate professor at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, which trains students from the California State University system.
“And if we get five or six of these otters in the slough, we won’t have a seal pup left.”