Yesterday I participated in Earth Hour by going to a special event held at the SAT (Société des Arts Technologiques) in Montreal. The event was plainly boring, except for this board where visitors could leave Post-it notes in relation to earth, light and darkness. I took it as an opportunity to do a little bit of marketing…
Check out Informapping, a very nice effort to look at the news globally and sort out the huge amount of information that’s offered to us. Informapping is the project of Francois Patry, Art Director at the Lemieux Bédard ad agency.
Vancouver just made chickens legal in the city, according to an article published in the Globe and Mail today. This will allow urban residents to keep a coop in their backyard, just like in other north American cities such as Portland, Ore. and Seattle. But this is not good news to certain experts who say keeping chickens at home is actually unhealthy. The SPCA says it fears that residents might be seduced into buying chickens without actually knowing how to take care of them, and the British Columbia Poultry Association warns that this might actually raise the risk of spreading diseases such as the avian flu.
I’d be curious to know more about this and what having chickens in your backyard really implies.
Last week I was in Toronto to do some interviews for a project I’m doing on urban agriculture, and my interviewees referred me to a new innovative project called Artscape Wychwood Barns. I had a bit of time so I decided to go check it out.
The project is located in a residential district not very far from the downtown area, in the St. Clair and Christie neighbourhood. These former streetcar repair barns, which had been vacant and decrepit for decades, were retrofitted by the organization Artscape and turned into a community centre. The space opened last November and now hosts offices for arts, environmental and community organizations, housing for artists and a state-of-the-art greenhouse operated by The Stop Community Food Centre.
I met with greenhouse coordinator Lord Abbey and with garden and education worker Kristen Howe. Kristen gave me a tour of the greenhouse and I made a little Soundslides animation with the interview I did with her and the pictures I took.
Please forgive me for the poor sound quality (especially when the ventilation starts toward the end,) I hope to be able to buy a decent digital recorder soon.
Stay tuned as I’ll be posting more material that I collected during my trip, including an interview with the curators of the exhibition Carrot City.
RiP: A Remix Manifesto is a new documentary by Brett Gaylor that explores the issues of copyright in pop culture. The film investigates “the complexities of intellectual property in the digital era” by following mash-up artist Girl Talk and other personalities such as Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig.
Gaylor has also been experimenting with the open source movement with his own movie by launching OpenSourceCinema.org, a website where anyone can remix his footage. The website, which seeks to improve online collaboration, will continue to be used for other projects after the film is released. Gaylor also invites the public to help create the soundtrack of the film by creating music using Creative Commons licensed samples at http://ccmixter.org/rip.
RiP: A Remix Manifesto will be screened in Canadian theatres starting March 6.
Creative class champion Richard Florida had a column in the Globe and Mail yesterday in which he discusses Obama’s bailout plan. Florida says it’s time to forget about infrastructure when putting together bailout packages because the new economy will be based on something else: creativity. Scientists, engineers and artists are the new driving force of our economy and are worth investing in more than highways.
The creative economy already includes roughly 30 per cent of Canada’s work force and about a third in the U.S. It accounts for more than half of all wages and salaries paid in each country. So, if the stimulus were allocated proportionately, between $250-billion and $375-billion should have gone to the U.S. creative economy; in Canada, the figure would be $12-billion to $20-billion.
Florida makes a parallel with the New Deal, which at the time focused on infrastructure and assembly line products instead of the aging agricultural system. It’s time for us to make the transition to the new economy.
