Right away I have been advocating that we fund 10 large scale carbon capture and storage projects that will utilize a range of coal types and power plant types and storage locations because it's imperative that we ...

We cannot properly usher in spring without checking in to see what hometown gal Natalie “Alabama” Chanin has cooking down in Florence, Alabama. We love that the former star of Project Alabama has returned to her old haunts to set up a ’sustainable’ design studio, manufacturing facilities, and a soon to open flagship store. Alabama Chanin’s home-brewed, limited-edition products for the individual and the home incorporate a mixture of new, organic and recycled materials crafted by artisans who live and work in the local community. Thanks to Chanin, “made-by-hand in the USA” is undergoing a true renaissance and her Slow Design creations have set a captivating tempo and high standard for eco-fashion collectibles.

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Installing solar panels on the roof of every new building in the world would go a long way towards solving our energy needs, but as we all know, solar panels are costly and often difficult to install. But what if the solar panel was an integral part of every building? What if solar cells could be painted on building products? Well, according to a team from Swansea University this type of technology will soon be coming to a hardware store near you.

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And you thought Fiji water was bad for the planet...

India is well-known for delicious food, and the kitchen is considered to be a sacred place in any Indian home. And now India has something else to be proud of: the world’s largest solar kitchen. The system has been installed as a collaboration between the Academy for a Better World and Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University, with technology from Solare-Brücke, Germany. With 84 receivers and cooking at 650 degrees, the system can produce up to 38,500 meals a day when the sun is at its peak!

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For Juice This! Hideous Beast aided fellow graduate student Kermit Gilbert in promoting his self-help DVD, Juicer. For this event, we set up a table for juicing various food products that were offered to the audience as samples.

The juicer and blender were run off power “generated” by two stationary bicycles. We also offered a number of Juice This! promotional materials including 8×10” glossy before and after photos, a poster, juice samples as well as the Juicer DVD.

Hideous Beast will be in Toronto during Double Bounce, presenting "Field Test" On March 20th.

Wafaa Bilal grabbed the attention of the media last year with his performance Domestic Tension. Bilal, born in Iraq and currently teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, installed his living quarter at Chicago's Flatfile Gallery. Viewers could peep in on him anonymously 24/7 over a live webcam, chat with him online 24/7 over a live webcam. But the twist was that the camera was affixed to a rifle-sized paintball gun-and online visitors could therefore fire the gun and shoot at the artist, or anything else in his room. 24/7. And according to Newsweek, viewers have shot the gun 40,000 times in the project's first two and a half weeks. The work brought to Chicago the conditions of bombardment felt by citizens of his homeland.

Domestic Tension. Photo Chicago Tribune

In his latest work Virtual Jihadi, Wafaa Bilal reconfigures the Al Qaeda-produced on-line propaganda video game The Night of Bush Capturing to introduce himself a character in the game, a suicide bomber based on an image of a traditional Arab warrior, and turn it into a rumination on the plight and behavior of civilians caught in a conflict zone.

Virtual Jihadi, image courtesy of the artist

Bilal's mod and installation is based on a 2003 video game called "Quest for Saddam" that involved players fighting stereotypical Iraqi foes and trying to kill the ex-Iraqi leader. The game in turn inspired an al-Qaida-produced spin-off called The Night of Bush Capturing where the U.S. president is the target. For his piece, Bilal hacked into the al-Qaida game and inserted himself as a suicide bomber who is sent on a mission to kill President Bush.

His work is like one of the missing piece of the puzzle, we get some pieces while watching TV news but the picture is not complete and the media often leaves very little space for dialog anyway. I'll past an extract of the statement from the artist as i think every single word of it is worth reading:

My underlying premise for this piece is that hate is being taught - it's not a natural emotion. And video games are one of the technologies being used to foster and teach hate. I am especially concerned by the ones created by the US military, which are intended to brainwash and influence young minds to become violent. Though Al Qaeda's game where Bush is hunted down and killed generated much international outrage, the U.S. Army's own free on-line game is equal to the Night of Bush Capturing in its propaganda motives. Since I belong to both nations fighting in this current war, and since I am an American, I have the ability and right to question my own government's use of these video games to teach violence and hatred.

Along with shedding light on the power of video games and their manipulative uses by both Al Qaeda and the U.S. military, I want to show how civilians in war zones find themselves switching allegiances as a means of self-preservation as the balance of power shifts. Their cities are turned into battlegrounds, and survival is often a matter of obeying the power that exists at any given time regardless of any ideology.

This dynamic is apparent in various conflicts around the world, and even in any American inner-city where the gang members have more control than police; and civilians recognize this and refuse to cooperate with the police even if they don't intrinsically support the gang members. In Afghanistan, Afghani civilians switch sides depending on who is in power. In Iraq people are constantly switching sides. Most Iraqis who support the insurgency do so not because of ideology, but because of their need for security.

The fighting forces in the Iraq war and most wars do not represent the people of either of the warring nations. It's the fundamentalists - Islamic and evangelical -who fuel this violence, and force civilians to ally with them in order to survive.

So my character in the game will be like any Iraqi civilian on the ground, allying with the power which is dominant at the moment. At the beginning of the game the American soldiers are stronger than Al Qaeda, and I will ally with them, fighting Al Qaeda. But as the game progresses and Al Qaeda becomes more powerful, I will switch sides to fight on behalf of Al Qaeda. That is exactly what is happening in Iraq. The game will culminate with my revenge on the Bush administration for the destruction it has wrought on my country. I will be a suicide bomber who attacks Bush.

Virtual Jihadi, image courtesy of the artist

Bilal gave a talk last week at the Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute (the video is available online) and an exhibition of Virtual Jihadi opened the same night... to be closed the day after.

Wafaa Bilal's installation re-opened this week at The Sanctuary for Independent Media, 3361 Sixth Avenue in Troy. The piece was to be on display through April 4, 2008, as part of a month-long celebration of art, freedom and democracy at the Sanctuary.

Unfortunately, one day after the second opening the City of Troy closed the sanctuary due to "code volition."

Please visit the artist's website and show your support either by writing a letter to Shirley Jackson president of RPI (president at rpi dot edu). Or add your opinion in the chat room. Brian Holmes wrote a clear and well-balanced post about the situation a few days ago. I'd also like to mention an article in The Guardian which discusses the current lack of appetite for films about the war in Iraq.

When i first contacted Wafaa to get a brief email interview last week, i had no idea his work would be censored and his view would be silenced. I must add that his work came to my attention thanks to an email from members of the RPI arts department who are very supportive of Bilal's work. Now for your conversation:

What did your previous project Domestic Tension - Shot in Irak teach you? How did you use what you learned during the performance to develop Virtual Jihad?

Domestic Tension

WB: It reinforces my notion of the comfort zone versus the conflict zone. Because of image overexposure, we need to come up with smarter tactics and strategies in order to engage people. Otherwise we will continue to exist in the comfort zone while our collective power is taken away by institutions.

In Virtual Jihad, the main character looks like you and carries your name, why do you think it is so important to expose yourself so much personally?

WB: I wanted to place it in the context of reality, the need to reflect life in art. What better way to reflect what Iraqis are going through than a personal tragedy, casting myself as a suicide bomber after the killing of my brother. I represent so many Iraqis who find themselves vulnerable to a terrorist organization like Al Qaeda taking over their homeland. They either become violent because of the pressure or they are forced to join these organizations out of fear or they join because of their outrage at what the U.S. is doing to their homeland.

Why do you use video games as a medium for your interventions? What makes them more powerful or more adapted to the kind of discourse you are engaged in?

WB: Because video games have become the medium of our time, so many people use this popular medium to convey a message. With video games, people are engaged beyond art, their senses are engaged.

Showing your works must be challenging for art venues because all the media attention (and probably mis-understanding) they get. What is the experience you have with exhibition spaces?

WB: We are certainly experiencing the problem of an artist versus the establishment. We are using the power of the internet as an encounter. The internet levels the playing field. Video games are becoming more and more powerful because they bypass the censorship of institutions.

Your work has very controversial undertones. How much do you think this helps and/or impedes the audience to understand the message your work is carrying?

WB: Sometimes the project itself becomes the trigger for the dialog. I'm not necessarily interested in imposing ideas or having a project that is dogmatic. I want the conversation to be carried on outside the gallery walls. The purpose is not art itself but the conversation it triggers

Can you tell us something about your upcoming book? What will it be about?

WB: It is called "Shoot an Iraqi: Life, Art, Resistance under the Gun" to be released in Fall 2008 on City Lights Press. It is basically a dual narrative of my Domestic Tension paintball project last Summer and my life in Iraq and the U.S.

Thanks Wafaa!

However, Wafaa still has one project going on. Online! Run to Dog or Iraqi and cast your vote to decide which one -- a dog named "Buddy," or an Iraqi, himself -- will be waterboarded at an "undisclosed location" in upstate New York. Waterboarding is a form of torture which dates back to the Spanish Inquisition. The person is immobilized on their back with the head inclined downward,, and water is poured over the face and into the breathing passages. Through forced suffocation and inhalation of water, the subject experiences the process of drowning and is made to believe that death is imminent. The person would (usually) be "resuscitated" at the last moment

Dog or Iraqi

A doctor and a vet will be on hand to minimize the risk of death to the dog or the human being. At the time i spoke with Wafaa, the dog was the clear winner of the contest!

I'll leave you with this video interview of Wafaa commenting on the RPI censorship:

"El Ecoloco" is a character from Odisea Burbujas, an educational Tv Show from the 80's transmitted in Latinamerica. The cast were animals, a mad scientist and the "ecoloco": He loves noise and "smog".
Sustainability on acid:

By the way, the song composed by Esquivel, it is so good.

(RE) is an alternative RED campaign that aims to: raise awareness for AIDS in Africa, encourage conscious consumption, and provide a means of involvement for those unwilling or unable to buy (Product) Red products.

The original(PRODUCT) Red campaign implies that corporations, branding and consumption are a necessary and healthy part of involvement in a cause. This brand of cause marketing is not only manipulative, but damaging. It claims to erase any guilt from shopping by offering products that aim to be not only ethically neutral but activist in nature. The consumer need not question his own intent or that of the product because his desires are validated by the cause. 'This is for the greater good,' supplants doubts about the questionable origins or future life of an object.

While big galleries around celebrates RED PRODUCT big bucks culture; Phil Orr and Ryan Thompso from Champaign-Urbana, IL, works on (re). Their project is an articulation of 3 iniatives:
INSPI(RE)D: on brand-awareness and places emphasis on RE-use.
COVE(RE)D: focused on raising money and awareness rather than buying a new product. In this way, anyone can become involved by using objects that they already own and enjoy.
(RE)SALE: Have any red items lying around you're not sure what to do with? Donate them to (RE)Sale and they'll auction them off for the cause.

(RE) offers alternative strategies for participation in raising both funds and awareness for a cause. These initiatives are a small step in fighting a very large problem. The choices we make in spending our resources do shape the world we live in, but simply buying an item or advertising support for a cause will not solve an epidemic--it takes action. And it takes thinking more critically and consciously about how we consume.

Please visit the new website of BP, dedicated to explain their green efforts, the millions they invest in researching energy and the billions spend for extract petroleum.

Learn from simple explanations, how your green lifestyle is powered by an energy corporation, committed with make some sustainable profit out of you.

Whether your house is a "green" one or one of the other 99%, BP is there with petroleum products to make your life warmer and simpler.

Some images used by BP to spread the green love:

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In this video James Howard Kunstler picks apart urban development in the United States, getting a few laughs in the process. In talking about creating “places that people care about” this struck me:

“The public realm is the physical manifestation of the public good. And when you degrade the public realm you will automatically degrade the quality of your civic life and the character of all the enactments of your public life and communal life that take place there.”

He also refers to a good public space as an activated space like an “outdoor public room” where “people just go because it’s pleasurable to be there.”

So when public spaces are peppered with guerrilla advertising – legal or not – how does that make for a great room? How does advertising in public space contribute to the manifestation of the public good?

StreetFilms' Clarence Eckerson, Jr., shows how the alternate side dance can slow traffic.

On alternate side of the street parking days, many communities in Brooklyn have worked out a deal so car owners are allowed to double park without impunity so the streets can get their weekly brushing. (Okay, let’s not touch that argument today.) During the interim switchover when drivers are relocating their cars - usually lasting about 15 to 20 minutes - chicanes are temporarily created, which delightfully slow car speeds to more human levels.

What if every time that you flushed your toilet you could generate just a little bit of power? That is the idea behind the Benkatine Turbine by Leviathan Energy, which aims to get power from any pipe that water rushes through. So not only could you install this within a municipal system, but according to the company, you could get power from the water rushing down your gutter drains!

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From Art 21 Blog:

Dion’s work examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world.

You might know Dion because of the infamous “Neukom Vivarium”. So don't forget after checking our our upcoming exhibition Feedback, to cross the street and head over
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, where the fantastic installation of Mark Dion,"The Octagon Room" is showing.

Also, you can check details for his upcoming exhibition at Bartrams Gardens, in this beautiful site created to follow the journey on line.

Finally, his gorgeous Flicker is this one

This one comes to Streetsblog via the Sightline Institute's Daily Score, a blog covering environmental issues in the Pacific Northwest.

Why do traffic jams materialize for no apparent reason? In an effort to answer that question, here's a surprisingly simple experiment cooked up in Japan by the University of Nagoya's "Mathematical Society of Traffic Flow:" 

If you are the kind of transportation geek who finds this sort of thing fascinating then you'll also really love this web-based traffic simulator out of Germany. But "prepare to lose your afternoon," says Sightline's Brad Plumer:

A few years back I wasted hour after hour playing with the java settings, and watching "traffic" jams materialize and melt -- just like in real life.  My favorite quirk:  for one lane-narrowing scenario, I could make traffic flow along beautifully at 40 miles per hour, but seize up like glue at either 20 mph or 60 mph.  Another fave (and very relevant to congestion pricing debates) was letting traffic flow along smoothly at, say 1,400 "cars" per hour, and then increasing traffic volumes to 1,500 -- and watching the traffic jam crystallize within moments.

GM and Hummer have officially decided to discontinue the Hummer H2 after years of lagging sales and a good deal of negative publicity that the car has brought to GM.

While the car remains popular, the Hummer brand in general, and the H2 specifically, have been on a continual sales slide for the last five years or so. The vehicle, as the most inefficient SUV on the road, has become less appealing since gas prices have more than tripled in the last ten years.

GM has also bemoaned that its "iconic" vehicle has such a negative stigma with a large and growing portion of the population while the world's largest company, Toyota, has the Prius as its iconic vehicle.

The question is, what vehicle will replace the H2 as GM's icon in the next 10 years? The bad news is that GM is going to keep selling the car in its current incarnation until 2011 at least, possibly hanging around until 2014. But development on updated H2s, and the planned diesel version, have both been canceled. Hummer will keep making cars, but will concentrate on the smaller H3, and the even smaller upcoming biofueled HX.

HummerGuy.net points out that there have been no set time lines and it's possible that GM could still change its mind on this one. And while that is certainly true, I just don't see room for the H2 in the consumer market place any longer. Let's hope that this focus on efficiency and consumer demand for greener-looking companies will have real effects on vehicle efficiency in the next 10 years.

Via HummerGuy.net

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is now officially open as of last week, after nearly thirty years of planning. The facility is not only a storage space for seeds from all over the world, it’s a gorgeous structure to boot, built in the permafrost of a mountain on Spitsbergen Island in the Arctic Island Svalbard, that is part of Norway. The Global Seed Vault has been designed to store duplicates of seeds from seed collections from around the globe and from nearly every variety of food crop on the planet, such as wheat, rice or maize. So in the event of global catastrophe, we’ll be agriculturally prepared!

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It seems like the word "breakthrough" gets tossed around a lot. But we try to save it for the real deal. Well...here's the real deal.

LEDs are fantastic. But for a long time, they've been fantastic more because of what we think they can do than what they actually do. We've been pretty sure that LEDs can produce warm, white light at efficiencies far beyond even the much-touted compact fluorescent bulbs. But we've yet to actually see that.

Years ago, scientists were already producing LEDs that were far more efficient than fluorescents. The problem was, they only did it at very specific wavelengths. So the light was either pure red, or pure orange, or pure blue. And while it'd be nice to have an efficiently lit workspace...I'd prefer it if everything in my life wasn't purple.

So in the last ten years, scientists have switched their goals from producing efficient LEDs to producing "natural light" LEDs. Unfortunately, whenever they did this, they had to make significant efficiency sacrifices. Well, here's the breakthrough -- those days are no more.

Using a nano-crystaline coating, scientists at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey have created an LED that produces attractive white light while wasting next-to-no electricity . For every watt of light produced, about 300 lumens are visible to the human eye. Fluorescents produce about 80 lumens per watt, and other white LEDs are closer to 60. 300 lumens per watt is two times more visible light per watt of radiation than I've ever heard of for any light source, and they've done it with natural-looking light.

Honestly, the results are so spectacular that I must admit a bit of skepticism. If anyone can cast some light on how efficiencies like this could be possible, I'd love to hear from you in the comments.

The nano-crystalline coating bends the wavelengths exiting the light into a broad spectrum. The key is that the process is nearly 100% efficient, and the LEDs themselves, (which are blue) are extremely efficient as well.

Of course, any scientist will tell you that making something happen in a laboratory and putting it on a shelf at Wal-Mart are two very different things. The nano-crystalline coating is very expensive and difficult to produce, and, so far, there aren't a lot of ideas as to how to mass produce these things. But the question is no longer "if"....the question is now "when" and that's a breakthrough that I can celebrate.

Via New Scientist

This could end up being quite a hit to the bio-diesel industry. Scientists at the Wood's Hole Oceanographic institute tested the bio-diesel mixes flowing from pumps all over the nation and found that they were not what they said they were.

Only 10% of pumps actually delivered the mixtures advertised. Most biodiesel pumps advertise B20, a blend of 20% biodiesel, 80% regular diesel. This mix allows a wider range of trucks to use the fuel, and stretches the supply of biodiesel.

Unfortunately, in the fuels tested, the actual amount of biodiesel in the fuel ranged widely from 10% to almost 75%. And while the 10% is discouraging, because the environmental gains are decreased, the 75% is what's really scary. Cars and trucks that haven't been converted to run on higher concentrations of biodiesel can be damaged by concentrations that high.

This damage, and concerns from the trucking industry, are actually why the study was done in the first place. Now here's the real bad news. This lax regulation by the biodiesel industry is threatening its largest contracts, including a gigantic deal with the Department of Defense.

Looks like the honeymoon is over...it's time for some real regulations on the biodiesel industry.

Via WBCSD