Any conversation about the environment inevitably comes to the automobile.  Automobiles are essential to the lives of most New York City residents, but with these benefits come serious consequences: polluted air, dangerous roads, noise and congestion.

Chuck Varga and Cloud Car at Transportation Alternative's Park(ing) Day September 19th, 2008, click on picture for more

The connection between the automobile, life and air in NewYork City is explored through Cloud Car, a car fitted with special effects equipment that produces a cloud of mist, enveloping car and rider. As a public artwork, Cloud Car focuses attention on air and the automobile with a cloud of mist.  Air is made tangible and visible.

 At designated times, in-person guides will be stationed near the car, distributing fact sheets related to air quality issues and encouraging passers-by to discuss the environment, automobiles and traffic in the city.  Visitors will be invited to sit in the car accompanied by a guide and listen to sound compositions related to the environment on the car stereo. The car becomes as a semi-private space of contemplation and exchange.  

Scheduled dates and locations:

September 19th - Park(ing) day test drive, 21st street and 43rd Avenue, Long Island City Queens

October 4th - Solar One, Stuyvesant Cove Park, Manhattan in conjunction with The Ear to the Earth Festival

October 18th, 12-6PM - Eyebeam Block Party, Chelsea in conjunction with The Ear to the Earth Festival

October 25th, 10AM-3PM - The New York Hall of Science, Queens in conjunction with The Ear to the Earth Festival

By Andrea Polli and Chuck Varga. Made possible (in part) by the Queens Council on the Arts with public funding from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs

 

 

The Great Wikimarathon is a one-day event that unites art lovers around the world in an attempt to collectively fill in the gaps of contemporary art knowledge found on wikipedia. The WikiMarathon is is a recurrent and uncentralized, happening everytime a weekend lands on the 26th of a month, since marathons are 26 miles long. Participants gather locally, at house parties and coffee shops in their neighborhood, to brainstorm and create content on contemporary and new media artists and programs. These small local groups then gather online in an open chat to streamline productivity and help each other edit their Wikipedia posts.

With the creation of BoozBot, Eyebeam Fellows David Jimison and Jeff Crouse have now added the bartending robot to that list of creative roles for automatons. The birth of BoozBot opens a fresh chapter at the intersection of technology, human interaction, and the science of personality. BoozBot converses with the wit and wisdom of your favorite corner barkeep, pouring drinks, monitoring sobriety, and engaging patrons one-on-one.

Openframeworks is a c++ library designed to assist the creative process by providing a simple and intuitive framework for experimentation.

The library is designed to work as a general purpose glue, and wraps together several commonly used libraries under a tidy interface: openGL for graphics, rtAudio for audio input and output, freeType for fonts, freeImage for image input and output, quicktime for video playing and sequence grabbing.

The code is written to be both cross platform and cross compiler. The API is designed to be minimal and easy to grasp. There are very few classes, and inside of those classes, there are very few functions. The code has been implemented so that within the classes there are minimal cross-referening, making it quite easy to rip out and reuse, if you need, or to extend.

Simply put, openFrameworks is a tool that makes it much easier to make things via code.

OpenFrameworks is actively developed by Zach Lieberman and Theodore Watson along with help from the OF community.

check out what people have made with OF:

made with openFrameworks from openFrameworks on Vimeo

 

Bare CFL bulbs give off harsh light. Soften it with the Bright Idea Shade.

The Bright Idea Shade is a project of the Eyebeam OpenLab, by Sustainability Action Group members Michael Mandiberg and Steve Lambert, with Simon Jolly, Peter Duyan, and Oscar Torres. We are converting all of our silver tipped incandescent bulbs into CFL bulbs (as they burn out.) The problem is a bare CFL bulb gives off very harsh light. So we set about designing a lampshade for the bulbs. We started with the Universal Polygon Lampshade and made it fit a CFL bulb, built it out of heat resistant photo diffuser material (found a diffuser material that could be laser cut, and built a laser cutter template.)

• DIY kit available in Eyebeam bookstore
• Instructable
• Video
• Facebook Page

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Instructions on how to talk to anyone, written by hand. Based on an earlier project. Simple instructions, easy to follow.

The Power Cart is a mobile unit that delivers alternative power to people in the streets.
In most parts of the world, the street is a place where social interactions abound, commerce rules, and street vendors around the globe bring to local populations the things they need right at their door steps. Knife sharpening in India, refills of gas in Africa, fake Gucci bags in Paris and chair massages in New York, the Power Cart takes an old idea from yesterday’s streets and adapts it to serve the needs of today’s urban dwellers. Need a charge on your cell phone? Your laptop is about to die and you really need to check that email? Or maybe there is no power around you at all? Where ever you might be in the world, hail the Power Cart for a quick fix.

Real Costs (TheRealCosts.com) is a Firefox plug-in that inserts emissions data into travel related e-commerce websites. The first version adds CO2 emissions information to airfare websites such as Orbitz.com, Delta.com, etc, and to car direction websites such as Mapquest.com. Think of it like the nutritional information labeling on the back of food... except for emissions.
The objective of the Real Costs is to increase awareness of the environmental impact of certain day to day choices in the life of the Internet user. By presenting this environmental impact information in the place where decisions are being made, it will hopefully create an impact on the viewer, encourage a sense of individual agency, and provide a set of alternatives and immediate actions.
Experience the project by installing the Real Costs plug-in into your Firefox application. Currently, this plug-in pulls each flight/driving information from the page, calculates and reinserts the CO2 produced. It is configured to work on the websites of the major worldwide air carriers, and several car direction websites. A list of these sties and scientific documentation is available on the Wiki (http://therealcosts.com/wiki).

Due in good part to industrial agricultural practices, which rely on monocultures, chemical fertilizers and genetic modification to reap a predictable product, over 70% of our crop biodiversity was lostin the 20th century. Genetic erosion puts our food supply at risk from epidemics and infestations, which a more multifarious mix would guard against. To keep them from extinction, plants must be grown. During Sow-in, the general public, along with community gardening groups, will make seedling pots out of recycled materials and sow seeds of food plants on Slow Food's most endangered foods list and the Ark of Taste.
Together, we will distribute 100's of seed pots to community gardeners across New York City for transplant, care, harvest, and seed saving. Our focus plants are Chapalote Corn, Chiltepin Pepper, Native American Sunflower and Seminole Pumpkin, Beaverdam Pepper, Fish Pepper, Algonquian Squash, Boston Marrow Squash, Amish Paste Tomato, German Pink Tomato, Orange Oxheart Tomato, and Moon & Stars Watermelon.