All weekend, Clem has been showing his installation The Guide in Central Park, and this afternoon I went along to see it with Zena, Malachy, Shauneen and four year old Frankie.

It’s a beautiful piece – a pile of gently breathing autumn leaves. It won the Celeste International Art Prize in Berlin in September and next year it will be in a show on aesthetics and sustainability, organised by the Goethe Institute, which will move between Berlin, Sao Paulo, Sydney, Cairo and St Petersburg.

Eines der Höhepunkte in dem Ausstellungsbetrieb in Rostock ist alljährlich die Kunstbörse der OstseeZeitung. Bereits zu 17. Mal wird in der Hochschule für Musik und Theater – HMT ab November eine Ausstellung von Künstlern konzipiert. In diesem Jahr war bereits am 17. November die Vernissage und nun sind in dem tollen Ambiente der HMT die Ausstellungstücke zu sehen. Am 5. Dezember 2009 ab 20.00 Uhr wird dann von einer Versteigerung der vorgenommen. Umrahmt wird die Veranstaltung durch Musikstudenten der HMT.

Dieses Jahr stellen folgende Künstler aus:

• Falko Behrendt,
• Harald Metzkes,
• Jana Vagt,
• Günter Rössler,
• Ute Gallmeister,
• Gertraud Wendlandt,
• Susanne Feldt,
• Joachim Lautenschläger,
• Silke Paustian,
• Andrea Schürgut,
• Biene Feld,
• Thomas Sander und
• Udo Richter.

Präsentiert werden  Farbradierung, Farblithografie, Malerei, Fotografie, Schmuck und Keramik, Skulptur und Installation. Der Erlös der Versteigerung wird wie in der Vergangenheit dem Rostocker Verein „Ferien für die Kinder von Tschernobyl“ zur Verfügung gestellt.

Die  Ausstellung ist sehenswert und der Abend der Versteigerung nach meiner Erfahrung ein Erlebnis, von Kunstinteressierten und dem who is who der Region .

Wenn Sie sich vorab ein „Bild“ von den Künstlern und der Ausstellung machen wollen, schauen Sie doch mal in die Extra-Beilage der OZ. Meine Favoriten sind die Zeichnung auf dem Titelblatt der OZ Beilage von Felix Büttner , Harald Metzkes und Günter Rössler….

After I installed Fedora 12 for a friend, he asked me what software he’d need for using it as a primarily home desktop user. I have some experience with home users who just need things to work, without the hassle of installing software whenever they want to open a file. Add to that the lack of broadband penetration, or even basic internet connectivity in India, it makes for an awful situation.

I already had many packages cached in my /var/cache/yum directory. We both had the same 32 bit install, so I figured it’d work. I first deleted his /var/cache/yum directory as root, then copied my directory which was around 15 GB to his hard disk. Then I wrote him a small script, which proved pretty useful to install all that he would ever want.

Here goes a slightly modified version of the script:

#!/bin/bash

# media_update.sh
# Post Install Update script
# To install many required packages that are missing from the default Fedora 12 installation
# Login as root to install the packages
# The -y flag is used to accept downloading and installing all dependencies

su -

# Update all currently installed software

yum update

# This group contains the GNU Compiler Collection and other utilities:

yum groupinstall 'Build Essentials' -y

# You might already have this if you installed Fedora 12 from a DVD.

yum groupinstall 'Office/Productivity' -y

# Add the RPMFusion repositories to your system

rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

# RPMFusion contains the VLC packages:

yum install vlc* -y

# .. and also the unrar package to extract data from rar archives:

yum install unrar -y

# To install Adobe's flash plugin:

rpm -ivh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm

rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux

yum install flash-plugin alsa-plugins-pulseaudio libcurl ndiswrapper -y

yum install yum-fastestmirror

# No longer needed in Fedora 12, it is in built!
# yum install yum-presto

yum groupinstall 'Sound and Video'

# XFCE is a lightweight desktop environment, recommended for older and low end computers.

yum groupinstall 'XFCE Desktop Environment'

# Moblin is an interface developed for netbooks and UMPCs

yum groupinstall 'Moblin Desktop Environment'

# Need to be installed from RPMFusion in order to play media files encoded using proprietary codecs.

yum install gstreamer* -y

# To install the open source version of Google's Chromium browser:
# Thanks a million to Spot!

echo "[chromium]
name = Chromium Test Packages
baseurl=http://spot.fedorapeople.org/chromium/F\$releasever/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0 " > /etc/yum.repos.d/chromium.repo

yum install chromium -y

You can find the full text of the script here. Many folks find yum’s cache very useful when deploying updates/packages to multiple machines, and it is among the reasons it is my favourite package management tool too.

(All Photos taken by Christopher Stribley at Bergdorf Goodman in NY, November 27, 2009.)

(All Photos taken by Christopher Stribley at Bergdorf Goodman in NY, November 27, 2009.)

(All Photos taken by Christopher Stribley at Bergdorf Goodman in NY, November 27, 2009.)

(All Photos taken by Christopher Stribley at Bergdorf Goodman in NY, November 27, 2009.)

I went to Belgium today. As I wrote in a post earlier my concept has been accepted for a landart exhibit next summer in Lochristi. The park is húge. Contains small castle, visitor centre, orangerie, woods, english flower park with water features and massive fountain. and behind the gates the park continues as a family park. Today we went to meet the organizers and the 34 other artists who have been selected. Cold day but a really nice one. The park is beautiful, they get 30.00 visitors, and the artproject will last for three months.

Will have to order materials now,  approx. 40 and 60 kg of wool to turn into felt.

Hi All Y’all,

Here are some photos of the show at HELD.

The art will be up for another week maybe, maybe less, so if you are in Portland and you do want to (but haven’t yet) see the work, the store is open 6 days a week, from 11 to 7. No mondays, you know, it’s Portland. The address again is 3033 NE Alberta.

Last night I had an event, and taught a few people how to make yarn from plastic bags. It was fun!

When you do go in to the store, you might get to talk to one of several good friends of mine who run the store. The belts are made from reclaimed discarded material. They are the strongest belts in the world, upcycled, amazing, and cute!

So, here are some pictures.

Best,

Katie Simpson Spain

STILLLEBEN:

Oil on canvas and wood

An installation at the Tunnel leading from CityLink to Esplanade that portray the different part of the body at different angle on to the installation mirror.

(All Photos taken by Christopher Stribley at Bergdorf Goodman in NY, November 27, 2009.)

In September 2008, the Starns took over the former Tallix Foundry in Beacon, New York (50 foot high ceilings by 320-foot long by 65 foot wide), and the construction of Big Bambú immediately started. As of November 15th, more than 2,000 bamboo poles have been assembled creating an extraordinary intricate mental and physical network system

This artwork, in the realm of architecture and performance, starts as a massive tower created from lashed together bamboo poles and brings into space representations of complexity and chaos. At its pinnacle, the continually evolving architecture being built from within (no outside scaffolding or support) will cantilever out as far as the bamboo poles network allows, and then will bridge down to the floor. At this point the first tower will be dismantled pole by pole and carried through the structure and down to create another monumental tower and then on again, walking down the 320 feet space, almost like a Slinky and then back again. Big Bambú will evolve through the continuous rebuilding and rethinking of the structure at all times.

The Starns are directing 8 to 15 rock climbers at a time, who are assembling the structure’s vernacular network in an ongoing action.Big Bambú is consistent with the idea of a self-healing organism; within this “fabric” of bamboo pole network, the artists expect that some poles will stress and fail, but that the structure (the bamboo poles are fibrous and flexible unlike wooden boards that crack and break apart) will maintain some integrity. The tower represents the concepts of self-organization, adaptation and the interconnectedness of all things.

Big Bambú is connotative of an autonomous, spontaneous, self-governing, disorganized network responding to itself to better navigate the environment. “It represents me- in that I am who I was, and, I am completely different than I was when I was a little boy.” Doug Starn writes.

The Starns are currently developing a tentative exhibition project focusing on Big Bambú, with the Detroit Institute of Arts for the fall of 2010, and potential venues in Naples (Italy).

-

via Starn’s Studio

This is a series of posts about my experiences with Hydroponic systems – see the first post in this series here

DAY 4

Sunday, November 29, 2009

A gusty, day presented some issues of exposure, with the plants being tilted in the holes due to occasional gusts of wind. This issue is something to address immediately as when the unit is mounted on the other side of the balcony handrail, this issue of exposure maybe increased.

I temporarily rigged up a shield using melamine strips to alleviate the problem for now.

I have drawn some basic ideas of a kind of Perspex wind shield in Google Sketchup Pro (as shown here), also thinking that the main pipes would benefit from being also protected from below, which suggests to me a tray/box arrangement on two brackets of metal or wood that the pipes are secured into. This would facilitate nicer look than current, as all tubes, etc could be housed within or under box frame. The returning water pipe can thread through a 100mm gap in my balcony handrails. This will be the determining factor for unit height.

2:30pm – Installed the filter anyway, I figured it will serve its purpose for when I introduce some more plant varieties into the mix.

This is a series of posts about my experiences with Hydroponic systems – see the first post in this series here

DAY 3

Saturday, November 28, 2009

EC setting on 1.8 continued without incident.

Solution flow was steady

I purchased a $9.95 filter from a local irrigation shop which is no doubt why the flow had corrected itself. No blockages meant I didn’t get to install filter today as it was no real issue anymore.

Today was another hot one, but fortunately the plants appeared unaffected.

I noticed some tiny white roots protruding from the small containers used to house the plants. I saw this as a great sign of real progress. The larger of the lettuce were first to sprout, with smaller roots on some of the other plants. The roots tended to be more prominent on the larger of the plants as a rule of thumb.

This is a series of posts about my experiences with Hydroponic systems – see the first post in this series here

DAY 2

Friday  November, 27 2009

5am – I awoke early as I had much to do today, first check on the overnight progress of the system was very encouraging. No blockages, no issues with the operation of any components.

During the course of the day, we did experience more blockages which was mildly annoying, but knew this would be easily resolved.

Today was quite a hot day and I was encouraged to see the plants not showing any real adverse affects of the heat, the plants all seemed to be standing up proud – to me it suggested they were getting everything they needed.

8:20pm – Hydro-engine™ Mk 1 started to flash the lower left red light suggestin a reading of ‘HIGH TEMP’ which seemed odd given that it was very much night time. This persisted for around twenty minutes and then corrected itself, running smoothly throughout the night…

related posts:

Hydroponics 101 day 3

This is a Series of posts related to starting a new Hydroponic System.

[Posts filed in order - not on the specific day however due to time constraints]

DAY 1

Thursday November 26, 2009

Introduction

I am new to hydroponic growing. So colour me a newbie. I am however been lucky enough to be included in a real world testing of an exciting new product that I believe will change the face of hydroponics.

The Installation

I was fortunate to receive some very experienced assistance with the setup of my new hydroponic recirculatory system. My new system included a very special item currently in developement. This new hydroponic dosing unit from Solar Selection called the Hydro-engine™ Mk I.

11am – After a quick catchup and a cappuccino on the Julliette balcony, we arranged the parts and set about putting the system together.

As a very temporary measure, I used a triton router table as one ends support, the other end was solved by using a taller container to act as my reservoir. I had already setup a temporary workbench and had all the tools I could think of on the middle balcony, so we could hit the ground running (and save multiple trips to the garage to retrieve tools!).

We fashioned a mounting plate for the Hydro-engine™ Mk 1 and the A + B Fertiliser tubes, notching out an area to accommodate the hand rail return.

One of the pipes were already pre-drilled, so my mate set about hooking up the various tubes and spaghetti, drilling the necessary holes in the main pipes.

Pump connected, sensors connected and electronics all assembled, the system was up and running and fertiliser solution dosing with 1 pipe complete before lunch. We enjoyed some ofmy wife  Janine’s gourmet sandwich magic before setting off to Bunnings to purchase some plants.

For this initial install we selected the basics – chives, a variety of lettuce and a few herbs (oregano, thyme and basil)

We also dropped into the local hydroponics store for research, pricing some pipes and looking for fittings to extend the length of the fertiliser tubes. I enquired as to whether there was some sort of dosing device available to automate hydroponics system in the marketplace, to which a staff member replied, ‘…yeah, but its complicated and is around $3000 – $3500!…’

I found it quite odd (and remarked to that effect later on) that I would expect a dedicated shop would be preaching the inherent benefits of the technology, not discouraging enquiries! There seemed to be a general overtone that hydroponics is difficult and fiddly, mixing chemicals and painful monitoring EC levels. This made me feel quite special that I was getting the opportunity to trial the Hydro-engine™ Mk 1.

2:00 pm – We had returned from our outing to start preparing the plants. I watched this process closely as the plant were separated the soil from the root system of the plants. Additional soil was intentionally left some soil on the plants he explained ‘… as to provide some buffer between going from direct soil to a hydroponic setup. To wash and remove all the material could jeopardise the plants transition to a recirculatory hydroponic system…’

This was expected to produce some clogging issues as the solution flow would dislodge this material depositing into the system, but only as a temporary issue was considered better for the plants.

The Hydro-engine™ went about its business, initially giving us a high reading for most of the afternoon. I was assured this was not a problem and we achieved a ‘correct’ reading at about 7pm that same night. We were experiencing some flow issues as anticipated. We needed to clear the line by blowing air down the tubes which fixed the problem.

The system was allowed to run uninterrupted through the night and did not present any issues. This was all very interesting and new to me – I started to get a real sense of how valuable the Hydro-engine™ Mk 1 unit was, and how it automated the system. It really was no fuss, although I couldn’t help but check the progress intermittently, mostly through curiosity then necessity….

related posts;

Hydroponics 101 day 2

Hydroponics 101 day 3

Hydroponics 101 day 4

Bye-bye Agnes Scott College….

Curator Lisa Alembik is a saint for taking down my installation without  me…..

Next, it returns home to Seattle for a little urban installation at Ohge Ltd. Gallery here in Seattle, which I believe opens on January 23rd…..and I just realized I’ll need to make more ropes, oh my!  Watch out for a crochet party coming soon!!

More images from the fun in Atlanta here

contrast by form and materiality

Enough said about the 2010 Factory Crossbars (grumble, grumble) but the vehicle is great and even though the bars have some limitations, Thule and Yakima have a couple Great Luggage Box options that will fit and Clear The Hatch!

Thule 611 Boxter – 85″ Long X 35″ Wide X 16″ Tall

We’ve had many customers show up at our doorstep with their new 2010 Subaru Outback and their OLD luggage box (usually around 90″ long) that does not clear the hatch/spoiler. ie: customer below that had a old Packasport 90 they wanted to use – and could not.

Yahooooooooo!  Look at that hatch clear!  And the Thule Boxter Fits up to a 195cm Ski.  Now you can use your old classics instead of mounting them over the fireplace in the living room….

Pictured above on a 2010 Subaru Outback is the Yakima SkyBox Pro 16s – also a great fit, and available in 2 different finishes.

Yakima Skybox Pro 16s Silver -   81″ Long X 36″ Wide X 15″ Tall

Yakima SkyBox Pro 16s Titanium -  “                “                     “

For more expert fit tips on your vehicle give us a call 1-888-399-7225 or Email Us – Rack Attack Does This EVERYDAY ALL DAY LONG!  Thanks!

The light installation and just overall look of the new Undercover flagship store in Kanazawa is simply amazing!

Beautiful packaging for Lubatti, a line of luxury skincare products.

Here’s a sneak peek at what I captured last night when I visited the windows at Bergdorf Goodman. Check back for *much* more!