Emily Davidow

Last weekend I stumbled on Helvetiki, this witty marriage of the ubiquitous hei-tiki of New Zealand and Helvetica of the world by Matthew Moriarty at Crawlspace gallery.

Links of the day:

• New ZeaLAND Day
• Robert Thurman and Danny Hillis on science, ethics and religion
• A short history of the Internet by Robin Chase
• Google Wave

Links and notes from XMediaLab in Auckland, a combination think-tank and creative workshop with a focus on the design, development and business of digital media ideas across multiple platforms.

Max paints like Tibetan Buddhist monks debate, animated with kinetic punctuations. He describes it as automatism, “one stroke bone” and “all mind and no mind”. Think very clearly of what you want do before you start, and then let go and free your mind while doing, “a little like making love.”

I’ve been seduced by a terroirist network known as New Zealand Artisan Honey, made up of passionate beekeepers producing honeys in small, quality batches from specific varietal sources among some of New Zealand’s most spectactular locations.

If you tried to visit this site earlier today, you would have found it blacked out with the message below. Delighted to return it before the day is out, due to success of the blackout campaign for raising awareness. Kudos to Bronwyn Holloway-Smith and the Creative Freedom Foundation for their swift and effective blackout campaign [...]

The Creature Crisis
In New Zealand we could discover and name a new species every day for a long time, with the right level of resources applied to the task. New Zealand ranks among Conservation International’s top-25 biodiversity hotspots – “the richest and most threatened reservoirs of plant and animal life on Earth”. About 80% of [...]

Street with a View
Reality intervention: Street With A View introduces fiction, both subtle and spectacular, into the doppelganger world of Google Street View. Then neighbors and passers-by noticed what was going on and got in on the action, devising their own unplanned scenarios.
(tags: art googlemaps maps artisticintervention technology mapping fiction streetwithaview)

transfercar – from a to [...]

Friendly Invaders
When Europeans began arriving in New Zealand, they brought with them alien plants — crops, garden plants and stowaway weeds. Today, 22,000 non-native plants grow in New Zealand. Most of them can survive only with the loving care of gardeners and farmers. But 2,069 have become naturalized: they have spread out across the islands [...]

On Monday, I visited the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington for a discussion on ‘first fictions’ with the writers of two of last year’s most highly praised debut novels here. Mary McCallum (The Blue ) and Susan Pearce (Acts of Love) explored the themes and process of creating their books with Kate Duignan, [...]

Hello from Down Under. I am proceeding as a global nomad for the time being.
Antipodes map by Daryl Cockburn.