Farmlab Public Salon
Roy A. Brown
Friday, March 5, 2010 @ Noon
Free Admission
Wes Jackson, President of The Land Institute (founded in 1976), will describe how, through a combination of genetics/plant breeding and ecology/evolutionary biology, we can save our agricultural soils and waters from erosion and chemical contamination.
Born in 1936 on a farm near Topeka, Kansas, Jackson attended Kansas Wesleyan (B.A Biology, 1958), and went on to study botany (M.A. University of Kansas, 1960) and genetics (Ph.D. North Carolina State University, 1967). He was a professor of biology at Kansas Wesleyan and later established the Environmental Studies program at California State University, Sacramento, where he became a tenured full professor. He resigned that position in 1976.
Dr. Jackson’s writings include both papers and books. His most recent work, The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge, co-edited with William Vitek, was released by University of Kentucky Press in 2008. Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place, also co-edited with William Vitek, was published in 1996. Becoming Native to This Place, 1994, sketches his vision for the resettlement of America's rural communities. Altars of Unhewn Stone appeared in 1987 and Meeting the Expectations of the Land, edited with Wendell Berry and Bruce Colman, was published in 1984. New Roots for Agriculture, 1980, outlines the basis for the agricultural research at The Land Institute.
The work of The Land Institute has been featured extensively in the popular media including The Atlantic Monthly, Audubon, National Geographic, Time Magazine, The MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, and National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." Life magazine named Wes Jackson as one of 18 individuals they predict will be among the 100 "important Americans of the 20th century." In the November 2005 issue, Smithsonian named him one of “35 Who Made a Difference” and in March, 2009 Wes was included in Rolling Stone’s “100 Agents of Change.”
Wes Jackson is a recipient of the Pew Conservation Scholars award (1990), a MacArthur Fellowship (1992), and Right Livelihood Award (Stockholm), known as “Alternative Nobel Prize” (2000). He has received four honorary doctorates and in 2007 received the University of Kansas Distinguished Service Award.
Further Information: The Land Institute
This salon will offer you a brief introduction to the technology and practices of Geocaching. We will share a few stories from our adventures while Geocaching and talk about how you can get started yourself. We will introduce you to Geocaching in a simple concise way and you will have the opportunity to go out and discover a Geocache for yourself at the event. Bring a GPS if you have one, but it’s ok if you don’t since we will a few available for use.
Buck McGibbony is a software engineer & computer technician residing with his wife Yuki in the Silverlake area of
Yuki Uehara-McGibbony is from
Parts per million: Phase transitions in awareness
This Salon highlights Marcos Lutyens' and Alessandro Marianantoni's ongoing project CO2morrow, a large scale installation on the facade of the Royal Academy, London, UK in the exhibit eARTh: Art of a changing world. The installation will travel to various National Trust properties in the UK through 2010. The project explores the relationship between public awareness, perception and atmospheric conditions, particularly CO2 levels, and its effects on social and cultural issues.
Marcos Lutyens is an intermedia artist who has exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale of Art and shows curated by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the image Festival in Italy and the the Royal Academy in the United Kingdom. He has often worked with the process of hypnosis to explore the unconscious and associated schema, and collaborated with Matt Mullican, Raimundas Malasauskas and other artists and curators. He recently performed at Artists Space, NYC, Kunstverein, Amsterdam and the Kadist Art Foundation, Paris and is involved with continuing explorations into the mind. He engaged in experiments with Dr. V. S. Ramachandran, Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition, at the University of California, San Diego to explore the brain's neural pathways in the synesthetic mind. His work with the mind, has lead him to develop events and exhibits that reflect research with specific social or ethnic groups such as the Muxhe, from the Zapotec culture in Southern Mexico.
Building on his investigations into consciousness and social dynamics, Lutyens has worked on large scale projects that involve interactivity, the environment and new technologies. Works include data tracking, feedback from vehicle traffic and pedestrian flows, pollution and air quality levels, brain wave monitoring and other objective factors that are generally invisible to the casual observer, and yet as important to us as the subjective processes of the inner mind.
Alessandro Marianantoni works on projects across different fields: culture, technology, environment and art with a multi-disciplinary approach.He produced several interactive art installations exhibited between Los Angeles and Italy, receiving public and private sponsorships. He earned a degree in Computer Science from the University of L'Aquila, with a thesis on perceptual interfaces at the USC Integrated Media System Center, afterwards he was a researcher at the UCLA REMAP center at the Theater, Film and TV Dept where, across different projects he was able to enrich his research in technology. While based in Los Angeles he often travels to Italy where, with public funding, he started MEDIARS, an Experimental Center focused on Cultural Heritage and Technology. As a program director at MEDIARS he runs the international summer program Art, Technology and Cultural Heritage in the Castle of Contigliano. Over the last 15 years he has designed and developed innovative projects involving music, healthcare and environment.
Further Information: www.co2morrow.net, www.mlutyens.com
Image courtesy Marcos Lutyens
There is no (a) solution, because there is no (a) problem
Or: Making a 300 Million Dollar Difference with Conceptual
Art in the Age of Disaster and other Repetitive Negativities