Designed at MIT, this robotic fish can swim to detect environmental pollutants in the water and inspect oil and gas pipelines.
Check Natalie Jeremijenko for interesting environmental monitoring projects that cross art and science, and imagine how good this could be for charting the flow of pollution in the Detroit River.
[via Inhabitat]
I like public art that does something. I like thinking about architectural works as art and about the potential for viewing city layouts as art and so, I like art that exists as something more than art.
Marcus Vergette‘s Time and Tide Bell is an early-warning system of sorts for the rising tide that will inevitably be the outcome of climate change. The work involves a newly invented bell form, which allows multiple tones to be struck in one structure, so as the tide rises, the bell’s clapper is moved to strike the bell. As the tide rises, the bell will ring more often, but will also become further submerged.
Watching the video above is kind of strange—it shows the first strike of the bell in the water. As people clap and as the bell rings again, it’s strange to think that there is art like this to be made. This bell appears to be the first of other bells that can be installed in other communities, and in some capacity, created with consultation with that community about the inscription on and tone of the bell.
Of course, I’ve now begun to wonder what a public work that would demarcate something very distinct to now, or very distinct to the place we’re heading that could be installed in Windsor. If there was something you could leave for someone to see well into a post-apocalyptic future, what would it be? I think I’d want to say, “I’m sorry.”
Make your bike floatable through this DIY solution, courtesy of Li Wieguo from Wuhan of Hubei Province, China. The bike is modified to be equipped with eight water buckets acting as pontoons and an adjustable vane wheels as driving power.
Who needs the Skylink?
[via Inhabitat]
Yesterday was the second day of our Making Things Happen (For a Week Straight) show—where we worked in the gallery and travelled to Vincent Massey secondary school to start working with some physics students on another large-scale project we’re planning. We also worked a bit more on the hanging baskets and planned for Thursday’s event.
In order to highlight the possible future-effects of rising sea levels in Bristol, England, the Watermarks Project was initiated by Chris Bodle, a landscape architect. Notes and lines demarcating the rising water will be projected on buildings and infrastructure throughout the city.
This project is a great example of annotating the city, relaying information to the public that would be otherwise unknown or unrealized.
[via Rhizome]
This concept may not be overly fitting for Windsor’s current financial hardship in terms of unit costs, but rainwater harvesting units could prove to be very cost-effective in the long-run.
Research has and is being done at the University of Guelph to produce a successful rainwater harvesting system. The system was designed by two engineering graduate students in collaboration with a local supplier of rainwater harvesting technology.
According to University of Guelph, the harvesting process goes like this: “Rainwater that lands on the home’s fiberglass roof will be collected in roof gutters and downspouts and diverted to a filtration device before it is carried to a 6,500 litre underground cistern. The stored water will be pressurized and piped into the home to supply water to three toilets, the washing machine, and the dishwasher. The collected rainwater will also supply water to an underground irrigation system. This would account for over 50% of water consumption in a typical home.”
I was unable to find photos of the U of Guelph version of this project, but did find some diagrams which visually explain the process quite well.
Saw these two installations, made me wonder about the potentials for filtering water hydroponically, in place of using something like a Brita filter. The first project is Local Riverby Mathieu Lehanneur. The installation consists of a refrigerated aquarium that include live fish and vegetables working together to clean the water and provide nutrients for one another.
The second installation, DrinkPeeDrinkPeeDrinkPee, by Britta Riley and Rebecca Bray creates a demonstration of a closed-loop system where viewers are encouraged to sit on the toilet facing the water fountain, thereby closing the loop of tubes that form the installation. The tubes carry urine from the toilet, filtering it through two aquariums and a “biomechanical reaction mechanism” and a plant that is fertilized by the reaction’s byproduct. There is also a DIY kit to carry out the process at home that was available at the Eyebeam Feedback show back in March.
I think these two projects are interesting in that they tackle a roughly similar idea with two very different types of execution. Lehanneur’s design is very clean and less science-diagram-ish than Riley and Bray’s installation, but I wonder if something like DrinkPeeDrinkPeeDrinkPee is more along the lines of what we might like to show (the aesthetic of naturally filtering water as a science-type project), rather than a demonstration of our collective design skills.
[NOTCOT at GLOW: Usman Haque's Primal Source from Jean Aw on Vimeo.]
As part of GLOW in Santa Monica, Usman Haque’s Primal Source was a huge interactive light/projection installation on the beach. Rear-projecting onto a water-screen, the installation responded to sound from the crowd with microphones being placed along the crowd’s edge on the beach. The event went on for 12 hours throughout the night. The software was built withProcessing and PD (an open-source cousin of Max/MSP/Jitter).
Contact
