Delighted to connect with artist Monica Moreno aka SonikaMonica from Barcelona at her studio in the flamin’ artichoke in Featherton, New Zealand. She introduced me to the wonderful phrase “Donde hay pelo hay alegria” – Where there is hair there is joy, the theme of her upcoming exhibition at Roar gallery in Wellington, 29th October – 14 November 2009. Her sculptures and paintings exude the colorful exuberance of Alexander Girard and embody an untamed joy both reverent (exploring ideas of inner peace) and irreverent (Cinderella with hairy legs).

I had the pleasure of getting to know the dynamic Amra Tareen last month (over a weekend of women in tech hosted by Mary Hodder) and learn about the exciting development of AllVoices.com Currently she’s in Lahore, covering the Pakistan election and launching the site.

Walter Lippmann observed in 1922 in his book Public Opinion:

News and truth are not the same thing, and must be clearly distinguished. The function of news is to signalise an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality.

Providing multiple points of view by inviting mobile voice and text messages, images and videos from the field and weaving them with local and regional news stories, wire services and blog posts, Allvoices creates context around local events and begins to make a clearer picture of reality.

You can see the human dimension of local events with unedited, unmediated news from the street alongside that from multiple media outlets. Everyone can participate by contributing news, asking questions and discussing with others on the site.

This is a great example of a new kind of top-down bottom-up hybrid that Kevin Kelly describes in his recent article “The Bottom is Not Enough” and what can happen when, as Clay Shirky writes, Here Comes Everybody.

• Funky Forest, interactive ecosystem installation by Emily Gobeille and Theodore Watson
  Funky Forest’ is an interactive ecosystem where children create trees with their body and then divert the water flowing from the waterfall to the trees to keep them alive. The health of the trees contributes to the overall health of the forest and the typ
  (tags: interactive installation Art interface digital forest ecosystem education environment socialsoftware water)

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:

• A pull out “Map of the United States” by Kalman’s beautiful mother, Sara Berman, with instructions to: “Either put it on the wall or put it back in the book. If you put it back in the book, it may one day fall out when someone browses through the book and it will become a thing that falls out of the book.”



• An appendix filled with “things that fall out of books” and a fabulous collection of numbers in the wild. (Kalman would love the Numbers fonts by Hoefler & Frere-Jones.)
• Luscious liner page images of mosses of Long Island.
• An index that’s amusing on its own, featuring laughter, love (as a guarantee of sanity), finding self, forgetting, forgiveness, hairdos, dreams (bad, fragment of, good, malaise after bad, no answer to), and even happiness. One thing you won’t find in the index is “inner peace” (p. 245-6), a phrase that seems to trigger its opposite for Kalman. (What is that about?)

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.

• The Principles of Uncertainty book on Amazon
• The Principles of Uncertainty blog on NYT
• NYT’s video highlights of the celebration at the NYPL

Claire Nouvian sailing in Penobscot Bay for a session on “Oceans in Balance” at Pop!Tech, off the coast of Maine. (More photos from Pop!Tech 2007)

Claire Nouvian, a documentary filmmaker, thinks really deep thoughts about the ocean and its inhabitants. She’s especially concerned about how we relate to ecosystems that are far removed from our own. Even though oceans represent about 99% of the planet, they have only been looked at in detail since the 1950′s, and we’ve only sampled about 0.5% of the surface. The ocean remains the last frontier.

Nouvian’s journey began in 2001 at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, where she was blown away by an exhibition of “Mysteries of the Deep.” She couldn’t believe the beautiful creatures she was seeing were real and not some computer generated 3D aliens. She set out to tell the world this stuff exists, making a documentary and book.

Because the deep sea is remote both horizontally — you have to go over the continental shelf before you go down to the depths — and vertically, it is literally out of sight and out of mind. Alas, it is not out of harms way. Creatures we haven’t even discovered yet are under threat from deep sea mining, deep sea dumping, co2 sequestration, ocean acidification, methane & oil exploitation and bottom trawling.

Why should we care? Sure there are boundless medicinal and biotech discoveries to be made, but aesthetics alone are reason enough for Nouvian. And they are breathtaking. Tim Burton, HR Giger and George Lucas have nothing on nature. On the very first look through her magnificent book, The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss, I fell completely in love. As it turns out, the deep sea is where the creatures from our wildest dreams live.

But seduction always has a price… once you fall in love, you’ll want to protect them. And Nouvian argues there’s no just reason not to do so: deep sea trawling provides only 5% of the worldwide catch and only 300 or 400 ships engage in the $400 million per year industry. Nouvian argued that we are “destroying a unique, unassessed planetary heritage at unprecedented speed and scale in an irreversible manner for no reason but the increased profit of a handful of people.”

Nouvian recommends checking out SeaAroundUs.org, SaveTheHighSeas.org (the website of the Deep Sea Coalition), eating less fish and using seafood watch cards, and her new organization: the Bloom Association which aims to link people with the deep sea, rousing emotions through beauty.

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:

• CO2 is fundamentally changing the ocean’s chemistry, resulting in ocean acidification.
• Ocean warming directly impacts humans and marine life in multiple ways, including sea level rise, increased storm intensity, habitat shifts and receding coastlines.
• Climate change disrupts food supplies for marine organisms, from the base of the food chain to humans.

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

Pop!Cast from Marcia McNutt’s presentation at Pop!Tech 2006:

This week, I’m excited to participate in Pop!Tech (October 17-20 in Camden, Maine), exploring some of the many ways human beings impact — and are impacted by — the world and each other. The lineup looks phenomenal. The other exciting news is that you can participate wherever you are, as it’s being webcast live.

If I wasn’t headed to Maine just as the fall foliage nears the peak and/or was able to clone myself, I would be at:

• Bioneers (October 19-21) brings together visionary thinkers and doers exploring forefront of human creativity in scientific and social innovation. The conference takes place in San Rafael, CA, but they’re beaming simultaneous broadcasts in many locations this year.
• She’s Geeky (October 22-23), an (un)conference for women who self identify as geeky and engage in tech-focused disciplines to connect, exchange learning and discuss topics about women and technology.

Om Malik points out some other events this week I look forward to following online:

• Web 2.0 Summit (October 17-19, San Francisco)
• Mobile 2.0 (October 15, San Francisco): a day exploring the future of mobile.
• Niall Kennedy’s Widget Summit 2007 (October 15-16 UCSF Mission Bay): making sense of the widget economy.
• The business of API’s (October 15, San Francisco)

ROFLOL from Hanna Gersen’s “Sigh,” a hilarious mad-libbed urban feminist reframing of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.“