Emily Davidow
what’s happening in the garden today
Posted on 04.23.08 by Emily

Flickrshow will soon appear here!

The tulips are now in full bloom, and the allium bulbs are getting ready to flower. The peony grows noticeably every day. The Northern Mockingbirds that were still feathering their nest over the weekend didn’t sing yesterday, and today the nest was empty. Was it the wisteria leaves and buds unfurling into the nest that disturbed them? My paparazzi habits? GMOs? Something else? The purple kale looks so luscious, I may just have to cut and steam it tomorrow, and use the flowers in a salad.

Filed under: animals and ask emily and flowers and gardening and happiness

Comments: 1 Comment


links for 2008-04-16: Tastes of Freedom
Posted on 04.16.08 by Emily
umbra says my garden is safe
Mmm… Basil growing in my NYC rooftop garden, certified safe by Umbra. Who knew Seeds of Change (my organic seed source) was owned by M&M/Mars? Anna did.

Filed under: food and gardening and happiness and links and technology and webstuff


First Day of Spring: Iris Reticulata Harmony and Tibet
Posted on 03.20.08 by Emily

photo by Emily Davidow, Iris Reticulata, March 20, 2008
Iris Reticulata “Harmony” is the first bloom in the garden this year, blossoming on this first day of Spring, 2008 (with wind gusting to 36mph). Photo by Emily Davidow

In Greek mythology, Iris is a goddess who unites sky and sea as a rainbow and unites heaven and earth as a messenger of the Olympian gods. In Tibet, Iris Reticulata is the most glorious flower growing wild on the plateau. At over 14,000 ft above sea level, Iris wastes no energy shooting up stems. Instead, it spreads out its violet and gold treasures as soon as it emerges through the ground.

But Tibet has not seen much “Harmony” in almost sixty years of Chinese occupation. In the words of The Dalai Lama, “genuine harmony must come from the heart, it cannot come from the barrel of a gun.” With six million Tibetans and 1.3 billion Chinese, it’s easy to feel hopeless about the Tibetan plight. But the Tibetan right to automony is a winning cause, and with the whole world watching, Tibet and friends outnumber China 5 to 1.

If you’d like to count with Tibet and the whole world, sign the petition to Chinese President Hu Jintao, requesting restraint and respect for human rights and to open meaningful dialogue with the Dalai Lama. In the words of Mohandas Gandhi, another wise leader through nonviolence,”Whatever you do may seem insignificant to you, but it is most important that you do it.” Or in other words… better to be an Iris than a Cassandra.

Filed under: activism and better world and gardening and interconnected and mythology


links for 2008-02-10
Posted on 02.10.08 by Emily

Filed under: activism and animals and art and better world and consumerism and creativity and culture and design and emily approved and environment and flowers and food and gardening and links and nyc and senses and sustainability and technology


NextCity: The Art of the Possible
Posted on 02.09.08 by Emily

NextCity: The Art of the Possible took place last night at the New Museum of Contemporary Art as part of the New Silent series sponsored by Rhizome, which looks at the ways digital technologies have fundamentally altered our lives and experiences of urban space.

Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Speedbird, Urban Computing and its Discontents, and the upcoming The City is Here for You to Use, moderated an excellent panel discussion that included Christian Nold (who we loved at Pop!Tech), Eric Rodenbeck of Stamen Design, and J. Meejin Yoon of MY Studio and Howeler + Yoon Architecture. Here are the notes I took during the talk:

Adam Greenfield’s imagining metropolitan form and experience in the age of ambient informatics. What does it look like after the PC? He’s teaching a course at NYU’s ITP called Urban Computing with Kevin Slavin of Area/Code. They take as an assumption that in the near future, that which will primarily condition choice is not the physical, but a data overlay. What are the qualities of this data-gathering layer?

  • embedded in enviornment
  • wireless
  • imperceptible, small/buried, recedea from consiciousness
  • post-GUI
  • multiple (tens to hundreds)
  • relational
  • locative (can locate themselves in space and time)
  • situated (specific to places or conditions)

Examples of these technologies:

  • GPS and ‘GPS’ - you need to be in sight-lines of 3 satellites for GPS to work. That’s hard to achieve in urban canyons, but ‘GPS’ is an urban substitute that can triangulate location through wifi or mobile phone networks.
  • RFID - radio frequency tags like those used in easy pass, transit passes, credit cards, the new U.S. passports
  • NFC - Near Field Communication, a short-range wireless communication technology that lets you pay for things with your mobile phone.
    Wifi, Wimax, Wibro bathing cities in open networks
  • we do love our nike+ipod. run baby run!MEMS - Micro ElectroMechanical Systems like the accelerometers in the iPhone and Nike + iPod.

We now can see tremendous amount of information about cities, patterns of use and visualize them in new ways. Information can be made available locally in a way that it can be acted upon. For example, receiving an alert that says, “Hey! You’re about to enter a high crime/bad air quality area”. The result is a city that responds to the behavior of the people in it in real time.

Christian Nold is interested in embodiment and how we are embodied in the city. He recently had an experiment going through customs where he had to have his fingers scanned, but they were too sweaty for the machine to work from his running to catch a flight. We are encountering all kinds of new systems for dealing with our bodies.

Biomapping Device With a promotional image for a lie detector apparatus up on the screen, Nold explained that many of these systems are about control. Our bodies are giving up data to institutions we don’t have control over, and we can’t get the data back. In a lie detector, your words are not trusted; the body’s data is the truth. In Christian Nold’s projects, subjects use a device that is similar in that it uses galvanic skin response (pictured left), but the people control their own data. First the body’s data is measured. Then, by looking at the tracks, the subjects talk about what they were experiencing that caused physical arousal.

When you go from the individual to the aggregate, you start to see some wonderful patterns, which Nold delightfully termed “communal arousal surfaces.” Each city is different.

In Stockport, people were hardly aware that they had a river running through town, since it was covered by a bridge and shopping area that dominates the town. The map also showed that the social heart of the city was still in the old market area.

San Francisco Emotion Map - Christian Nold

The San Francisco Emotion Map (see above) featured a lot of people’s memories being embedded in a particular place. Another interesting highlight is murals. People care about and enjoy them, but they don’t show up on any other maps or tourist guides.

His projects are shifting away from art to local town planning and community activism. A recent project included handing out decibel meters to a community concerned with noise from an airport. The government measured acceptable levels of noise, but their information was based on one or two sensors placed on the road intermittently. The situation looks totally different when you base it on real data.

 Images sensory Homunculus Showing a sensory homunculus (see right), a model of what a man’s body would look like if each part grew in proportion to the area of the brain concerned with its sensory perception, Christian asks us to start thinking in terms of sensory commons rather than public space. Public space no longer exists as interactions become more mediated than ever. How much control do we have? How much agency do we have? (Right now, more than people know.)

Eric Rodenbeck struggled at first to get the display connected and working with his Macbook Pro. This gave Adam an opportunity to point out that these ubiquitous technologies are sold as “seamless” and “perfect.” In the real world, technology breaks constantly, always and reliably. Plan on it. And push back when you see promises of perfection.

cartilinear image

Once connected, Eric began explaining that mapping and data visualization is a medium with a wide expressive potential used for all kinds of things, including deception. He used as an example a map of red and blue states in the 2004 U.S. elections. It looks binary and grim with a blue “Baja Canada” and the rest red, showing little hope for a “United” States. But then we look by county, on a color spectrum from Democratic Blue to Republican Red and see that really we’re quite reddish-purple. And when you adjust it to show each county proportional to the population, as in the cartogram above, we see it’s even more mixed and widely democratic.

Roedenbeck’s interested in the idea that data visualization and mapping is the intersection of analysis and spectacle. Spectacle in this case meaning assertive, robust, active, specctacular and exciting. As a medium, data visualization is live, vast and deep. Stamen creates frames and structures that let you drive through data.

Cabspotting - Timelapse - Lines-Sf4Hr

Cabspotting.org captures GPS data from Yellow Cab taxis in San Francisco. When looking at the paths, we see their flows defining the streets or arteries of a system that can only be described as a heart. (Pictured above, but watch the time lapse movie for full effect.)

Other projects discussed:

Stamen Design | Big Ideas Worth Pursuing

Mapping of development in Plano, TX for Trulia

Stamen Design | Crimespotting

Crimespotting in Oakland, California illustrates how these are not politically neutral. How public should public information be?

Eric recommends Modest Maps, a free display library for designers and developers who want to use interactive maps in their own projects.

J. Meejin Yoon asks “How do you physicalize ideas?” She’s interested in play - working with our own rules and restrictions. In architecture, the term “play” refers to the gap between two materials.

Defensible Dress by Meejin Yoon

The defensible dress project was inspired by her experience with commuting in Seoul. Sensors detect someone approaching the wearer and trigger quills made from Flexinol wire to define the wearer’s personal space.

Other projects discussed:

White Noise White Light, an interactive light and sound field created for the 2004 Athens Olympics.

LowRezHiFi, a sidewalk and lobby installation in Washington D.C. with an interactive sound field and transparent field of pixels that displays information and registers movement as you pass by it.

Adam kicked off the discussion following the presentations by pointing out how this is becoming a politically charged issue. Recently, NYC council members drafted legislation requiring anyone who has a detector that measures chemical, biological or radioactive agents to get a license from the police department. This would stifle collection of environmental info vital to common good. The challenge is how to get community gathered data to be taken seriously?

Lots of great questions were asked. If you have answers, get in touch!

  • How to get community gathered data to be taken seriously?
  • Who owns your GPS trace and photo?
  • Are we prepared for openness?
  • What is the shape of society after these technologies are embedded?
  • How can you get lost?
  • If you can’t get lost, how can you ever find yourself?
  • What happens if you don’t have access? [Real life example: toilets along Highway 1 in Western Finland are unlocked by sending an SMS message to the number given by the Road Administration.]

In Brixton, Christian Nold’s helping develop Abundance, an urban agriculture project to create a resilient community and social cohesion in the face of climate change and other challenges.

Adam Greenfield spoke of reading The Great Good Place, a book about the informal and social third place after home and work, in Starbucks, the chain inspired by it. Everyone in the place was mediated, either plugged into headphones and a music device or staring into a laptop computer. He used to joke of the need for a chain of cafes called Faraday’s, after the Faraday cage, an enclosure painted to block all electrical signals. It’s not a joke anymore. How do you find a way off the network?

The current attitude towards these technologies is “isn’t it a shame that the rich have access and the poor don’t.” Pretty soon, the measure of grandeur and privilege will be to not have to expose yourself to these networks.

Eric explains how Fundrace.org made public information on people’s political donations along with their addresses easily available, causing neighbors to break out into fights. As problematic as any one data source may be, once you start mapping relations between multiple sources, things start to get troubling. For example, mash Fundrace up with capacitors that measure your treads as you walk and can distinguish individuals, and you can imagine doors may for some people and others won’t know they exist.

Where is the line on what’s acceptable? In South Korea and Japan, we see more acceptance and fewer articulated fears (but few good explanations). One pilot in the U.S. asked kids to wear nametags with RFID. PTA called an urgent meeting and physically removed it from the schools. These are not neutral technologies but “technosocial assemblages” that can’t be decoupled.

And what happens if it all goes away? Adam thinks about Marshall McLuhan’s idea from Understanding Media: Every technological invention or extension is also an amputation. The degree we get used to it is precisely the degree to which we lose our native capabilities.

We have some agency and some responsibility:

  • Fight to create lostness.
  • Design interventions that return serendipity to people.
  • Raise media literacy and awareness of what’s at risk.
  • Communicate to elected officials.

N.B. The next event in the series takes place in March, and it looks like a fantastic panel of artists working with biotechnology curated by the fabulous Régine Debatty.

Comments: 2 Comments


GhostGarden and More GPS Games
Posted on 01.29.08 by Emily

Ghost Garden

The surreal romance of aristocratic expat Lucy and castaway Jack enchanted me as I strolled through Sydney’s Royal Botanical Gardens in early January, following their love story on a handheld HP GPS device preloaded with Anita Fontaine’s spooky sweet Ghost Garden, part of the 2008 Sydney Festival. As I traveled through the gardens, certain locations would trigger animated scenes that revealed the story, set in the 1800s. I could feel the past, present and future all melting into one, and I got excited imagining the day when it be easy to create my own site-specific adventures for people to discover as they’re traveling through a space.

Garmin Colorado400T
That day turned out to be less than a month away! Wherigo is a flexible gaming platform that Garmin is embedding in their new Colorado 400t Handheld GPS unit (Pictured at right. Thanks, Brady!) Wherigo Builder allows anyone to build alternate reality games, tour guides, local reviews, real estate marketing apps, scavenger hunts, pub crawls or Victorian love stories that are site-specific by mapping out zones, creating a story and then sharing it online. (Alternately, you could write it directly in Lua, a programming language whose name means “moon” in Portuguese and is also what World of Warcrafters use to build on top of their platform.) If you have a PocketPC Device, you can download the Wherigo Player and start playing.

Anything similar for the iPhone’s fauxGPS maps or soon to be true GPS?

For now, you can enjoy my Emily Approved Sydney recommendations in Google Maps and in Google Earth.

Filed under: art and consumerism and creativity and culture and design and emily approved and gardening and love and senses and technology and travel and video and webstuff


Kenro Izu: Bhutan: The Sacred Within
Posted on 11.05.07 by Emily
Kenro Izu Taktsang Monastery
Kenro Izu, “Druk #131″, Taksang Monastery, Paro, Bhutan 2003

Kenro Izu: Bhutan, the Sacred Within
November 2, 2007–February 18, 2008
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th Street, New York, NY 10011

What a treat to hear Kenro Izu talk with Owen Flanagan at the Rubin Museum of Art in conjunction with the opening of his exhibition of photographs, “Bhutan: The Sacred Within.” Kenro Izu’s been exploring and photographing sacred sites both natural and manmade for decades. To look at his landscapes of sacred places around the world is to enter them; you can almost smell and taste the air inside the image. In “The Sacred Within,” he turns his lens to the essential element that makes a place sacred: the people that revere it and hold it in their hearts.

Out of all the places he has photographed, Bhutan has especially captivated him, drawing him back six times over six years. Izu writes in the introduction to his accompanying book, Bhutan, “Traveling many years, I have not yet seen a place as peaceful as Bhutan, or a place affecting such a peacefulness within myself. If there is a place indeed named Utopia, this place may come the closest to it.”

Bhutan, known as the “Land of the Thunder Dragon,” is a small independent country of 700,000 people nestled in the Himalayan mountains between China, Tibet and India. What struck him on his first visit was how unique it was among Himalayan lands with its abundance of lush green trees and glacier fed rivers. He was moved by how the high altitude air was unusually moist and dense. And he was struck by how rich the people seemed, which he noted might sound odd considering the average GNP per capita is under US $1000, but he never saw anyone begging for money. Instead, people appeared well fed and well dressed, even happy.


Kenro Izu's Camera
Kenro Izu’s custom-built large format camera on display at Rubin Museum of Art, 2005. Photo by Emily Davidow

Izu travels with a custom-built large-format camera with a 14″ x 20″ negative that captures the density of the air and the quality of light. His large format platinum palladium prints appear illuminated from within, offering a depth that transcends two dimensions. That also makes them an ideal medium for portraits. Why did it take Izu such a long time to shift from the sacred places to the people that make them so? “I am shy of people. Can’t point the camera at them.”

Spontanaeity is another challenge with his turn-of-the-last-century technology. Every picture has to be staged, “like a diorama of a scene.” He described the process of making an image that looks like a candid of two schoolboys walking and looking back at him (Druk #537, Bumthang, Bhutan 2007). He had seen them walking to school near Tamshing Lhakhang in the morning and envisioned the shot, but they were in a rush to get to school, so he set up to meet them after school and take the photograph.

(more…)

Filed under: art and better world and books and creativity and culture and design and emily approved and flowers and gardening and happiness and interconnected and love and nyc and observations and people and photography


golden purslane
Posted on 09.02.07 by Emily


golden purslane, originally uploaded by this is emily.

In Natural History, Pliny the Elder encouraged wearing purslane as an amulet that could expel all evil, but today most people in the US consider purslane a weed. Nevia No of Yuno’s Farm turned me on to it as a salad green last year, and I got hooked on its lemony succulence. Purslane has the most omega-3 fatty acids of any leafy green, and it also features lots of vitamin C, some Bs, carotenoids, calcium, magnesium, potassium and iron.

Tossed with blueberries and hazelnuts, olive oil and lemon juice, it makes a perfect summer salad. (Thanks, Cookshop.)

Purslane grows easily from seed (from Seeds of Change) in a container on a sunny NYC rooftop.

 

Other recipes I’d like to try soon:

Filed under: emily approved and food and gardening and happiness and nyc and passions

Comments: 1 Comment


links for 2007-05-29: bees, bees, bees
Posted on 05.29.07 by Emily

bee on sweet potato vine

Filed under: animals and environment and flowers and gardening and interconnected and links and news and science and sustainability and technology and video


The Gardener (Thyme is Short)
Posted on 04.01.07 by Emily

The Gardener (Thyme is Short) by Rabindranath Tagore 46

April is here, the thyme is short, and Google Book Search is awesome! I am loving the ability to download full PDFs of books in the public domain (like The Gardener collection of poems by Rabindranath Tagore), navigate around the sections, search and see results highlighted within the text and purchase various editions.

I’ve also been enjoying Amazon’s “search inside” to find information and exactly the passage I want, but their site doesn’t allow me to link directly to that page or highlight the passages within the book.

The ability to access from anywhere (online), search and annotate is so compelling I would pay a premium to get access to a full digital networked version when I buy a current printed book. For some books, I’d prefer just the digital version, but for books I want to read in transit or cook with in the kitchen, paper’s still preferable.

(more…)

Filed under: books and gardening and poetry and technology and webstuff


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