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Posted on 06.16.08 by Emily
Today you can see this photo I took of Robert Thurman standing in front of Mt. Kailash in the San Francisco Chronicle, accompanying a great interview with Robert by David Ian Miller, “Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman on Why the Dalai Lama Matters,” about his new book, Why the Dalai Lama Matters. In the picture, Robert stands near the Tarboche flagpole at the outset of our kora (circumambulation) around Mt Kailash. Buddhist, Hindu, Jain and Bön traditions all revere Mt Kailash as the axis mundi - the center of the world. From it flows 4 major rivers that feed Asia: the Indus, Brahmaputra, Sutlej and Karnali. Thousands of pilgrims arrive each May and June, but this year China has delayed the pilgrimage season and limited the number of participants, restricting all foreign visitors during the Olympic torch relay in that region. After four days trekking around the mountain and reaching an altitude of 18,600 ft, we arrived back here in time for the Saga Dawa festival, celebrating the birth and enlightenment of Sakyamuni Buddha.
On this occasion, the flag pole, wrapped in prayer flags, is raised by poles, ropes and trucks.
A perfectly upright flagpole signifies a good year for Tibet.
Musicians play throughout the festival. Thermoses of yak butter tea keep throats in singing and horn-blowing condition at dry high-altitudes on the Tibetan plateau.
Then, at the moment the flagpole is raised, thousands of windhorses (colorful squares of paper printed with prayers for happiness) fill the air and fly towards the peak.
Saga Dawa occurs each year on the 15th day of the fourth lunar month. This year, Tibetans will celebrate Saga Dawa on June 18, 2008 — may the pole stand upright and usher in a good year for Tibet! An excerpt from the SF Chronicle interview:
To learn more:
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Posted on 03.16.08 by Emily
What a delight to receive this picture from Waveplace showing the new owner of the OLPC laptop I donated last month. Here’s a movie of the kids’ first experiences with laptops. Looks like a beautiful group of students and teachers (and fresh green classrooms). Hope you have fun and enjoy learning with your new computers! Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this wonderful program.
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Posted on 03.12.08 by Emily
Just returned from a delightful talk with Jon Kabat-Zinn and Bokara Legendre at the Rubin Museum of Art (filmed for her series on LinkTV, so surely you can see it soon too). It was too dark in there to take notes, but he read a couple of poems I love, so I’m sharing them here with you. Kabat-Zinn, author of Wherever You Go, There You Are, Coming to Our Senses, Full Catastrophe Living, and Arriving at Your Own Door, opened the conversation with a gorgeous poem from which the title of his latest book came: Love After Love
The time will come and say, sit here. Eat. all your life, whom you ignored the photographs, the desperate notes, — Derek Wolcott The second poem Kabat-Zinn used was by a poet from whom the name of yours truly was inspired. (Thanks Mom and Dad): Me from Myself — to banish –
Had I Art – Impregnable my Fortress Unto All Heart – But since Myself — assault Me – And since We’re mutual Monarch — Emily Dickinson During the discussion, he defined meditation as “attention in service of self-understanding and liberation.” He also used “awarenessing” as a verb in places where you might expect to hear “thinking” instead. Both he and Bokara somehow started to blame technology for accelerating time, to which I respectfully disagree. Oddly enough, my brother gave me a book on just that topic this week, The Mayan Code, which asserts that time acceleration is a manifestation of the acceleration of consciousness. So perhaps it’s Jon Kabat-Zinn and Bokara who are responsible for this phenomenon through talks like these! Your thoughts (and awarenesses) welcome, of course.
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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?
Examples of these technologies:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.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: Mapping of development in Plano, TX for Trulia 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. 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!
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:
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.
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Posted on 01.31.08 by Emily
More compelling than Scrabulous, Unype is a There’s also a fun geography quiz game where you answer by flying to the correct place. Highly recommended for Miss Teen USA contestants, and such.
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Posted on 11.05.07 by Emily
![]() Kenro Izu, “Druk #131″, Taksang Monastery, Paro, Bhutan 2003 Kenro Izu: Bhutan, the Sacred Within 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 custom-built large format camera on display at Rubin Museum of Art, 2005. Photo by Emily DavidowIzu 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.
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Posted on 10.26.07 by Emily
![]() Mocha cream cake from Maira Kalman’s mother’s bakery on Johnson Avenue in Riverdale, NY (see p.246-247), served at a celebration for the release of The Principles of Uncertainty at the NYPL. Do you engage with pleasure, curiosity, fun and celebration (with time for naps) in the face of the tragedy of the day? Do you want to? This is the book for you. Maira Kalman’s delightful new release, The Principles of Uncertainty, turns out to be a heavy book. Mostly physically. Kalman says it’s because the book is extensively inked: “all the colors are in there.” Even if you’ve been following this year-long illustrated journal at the New York Times, the high-resolution images of her gouache paintings are undeniably gorgeous in print. (Even more so in person at the Julie Saul Gallery through November 24, 2007.) Aside from the inherent pleasures of the portable printed format, the book offers a few bonuses to those already familiar with the images:
Kalman celebrated the release of the book at the New York Public Library with a 37.5 minute conversation with Paul Holdengräber, followed with 3 songs composed by Nico Muhly, and cake instead of questions. Instead of questions from the audience, that is. All Maira’s works wrestle with the eternal existential dilemma: “We are here now, and we are not going to be here at a certain point, so what is that about?” and the natural corollary, “What would we do all day long, forever?” I don’t know what we’ll do forever, but I highly recommend checking out how Kalman observes the world, “making sense and then nonsense” out of it with grace, gratitude and joie de vivre, today.
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Posted on 10.17.07 by Emily
Enric Sala, Claire Nouvian and Marcia McNutt in Penobscot Bay, off the coast of Maine. (More photos from Pop!Tech 2007)On a Wednesday session preceding the Pop!Tech conference last week, a group of participants sailed from Camden, Maine through Penobscot Bay on the Appledore schooner with Marcia McNutt, Claire Nouvian, Enric Sala and Ted Ames. Ames, Nouvian and Sala talked about sustainable fishing and ways to encourage resilient ecosystems. Then McNutt spoke up. With dark sunglasses and a hooded black coat shielding her against the wind, the President and CEO of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute looked a bit like the grim reaper as she offered a vivid analogy to understand the impact of bottom trawling and tuna farming: “We clear-cut a forest to catch a deer. Then we feed the deer to tigers, and finally, we eat the tigers.” We’re not just taking the fish out of the ocean, but we’re also destroying the ability to regenerate habitat. Even if we stop trawling the ocean, it may not recover. While the imagery of empty oceans sunk in, she got down to business, explaining that in the long term, ocean acidification dwarfs any fishing issues and even global warming. Most of the discussions about climate change seem to be around our human habitat and atmosphere over land, but approximately 71% of the earth’s surface is covered by water. The rising amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in our atmosphere will profoundly affect everything from top to bottom, from microbes to whales in several ways:
Ocean acidification in particular is bad for all species. There will be losers and big losers. Species with calcium carbonate shells and skeletons, such as clams, sea urchins, corals and microscopic plants that make up the base of the ocean food chain, will Microbial life will dominate the ocean — they are the only species that evolve fast enough. intact ecosystems are more resilient to climactic change. McNutt recommends Reading Jared Diamond’s book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed to get an understanding of the big issues. She noted that humans seem to have a goldfish memory when it comes to the oceans, so learn all you can, teach your children well and vote for action around climate and pollution issues.
Technorati Tags: climate change, maine, ocean acidification, oceans, poptech2007, marcia mcnutt, sustainability
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Posted on 10.17.07 by Emily
![]() Ted Ames smiling and sailing on Penobscot Bay, off the coast from Camden, Maine. (Photo by Emily Davidow; more photos from Pop!Tech 2007) Sailing from Camden through Penobscot Bay on the Appledore schooner, Ted Ames, the only lobsterman to receive a MacArthur Genius Grant, shared insights on the waters he knows so well with a small group of Pop!tech participants. Ames pointed out that the waters we were sailing through had been fished hard and continuously for the past 300-400 years. He shared some big fish tales, showing pictures of a 92 year old halibut over 300 lbs caught in these waters. They used to be rich in cod, winter flounder, haddock, salmon, turbot, orange roughy and other species, supporting 3000-4000 fishermen between here and Canada. The stocks collapsed 12 years ago from here to Canada, and they haven’t come back. Ted knows that fishermen know a great deal about the areas they fish and set out to gather fisherman’s ecological knowledge and map it on a GIS system. They gathered ecological data from when fishing was good and pooled finescale data on spawning, habitat and fishing patterns to know what they are trying to rebuild and manage and to create a fishery recovery plan for the Eastern waters. We know now that cod only spawn on coastal shelves, and today most inner spawning grounds are barren. Turns out the lobster fishery also collapsed — back in the 1930’s. How has it turned into the $280 million lobster fishery it is today, yielding 60 million pounds of lobster a year with 14,000 fishermen, 7,000 of whom are owner operators? They have developed a management plan on 5 ecologically sound principles:
Lobster stew in Camden, Maine, across from the Appledore Schooner.Advice from Ames:
Technorati Tags: activism, climate change, fish, maine, poptech2007
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Posted on 05.20.07 by Emily
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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.)




One minute I’m checking messages in Facebook, the next I’m frolicking through olive orchards in Sardinia with
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Enric Sala, Claire Nouvian and Marcia McNutt in Penobscot Bay, off the coast of Maine. (
Lobster stew in Camden, Maine, across from the Appledore Schooner.

