Farmlab Public Salon
Roy A. Brown
Friday, March 5, 2010 @ Noon
Free Admission



Vet to Vet:
Gladly Teach, Gladly Learn

The mission of Vet to Vet is to serve all veterans, their concerns, and emotional, spiritual, educational, vocational, transitional, real and present needs. We are veterans from every branch of service. We are combat vets and peacetime vets. We come from different backgrounds of every kind. Many of us have experienced the heat of battle and the consequences that often follow. Adjustment for us has not always been easy. That is why we have come together in partnership and cooperation with VA medical centers to offer peer support and education to our fellow veterans.

Vet to Vet is a peer support program that utilizes recovering veterans in a peer capacity to help other veterans. The program is a recovery-based model that involves veterans as both consumers and providers of mental health services. Vet to Vet provides a way for recovering veterans to be able to talk to others who have been through the same or simular experiences. It strives to educate veterans through direct interaction. Vet to Vet also involves consumers and families in orienting the mental health system towards recovery and develops paid positions for veteran(s) within the facility/network to work with mental health leadership in developing peer to peer.

Starting in 2003 with Roy Brown (Director) and Stacey Maruska (VA Liaison), Vet to Vet Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System has grown to be one of the premier Vet to Vet programs in the U.S. It also serves as the national training site for coordinators from across the country.

Further Information: vet2vetca.org

 



 

Metabolic Studio Public Salon
Wes Jackson
Friday, February 26, 2010, Noon
Free Admission



We Can Now Solve the World's Oldest Environmental Problem

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

 



 

Farmlab Public Salon
Buck McGibbony & Yuki Uehara-McGibbony
Friday, February 19, 2010 @ Noon
Free Admission


Geocaching – An Adventure Network

Geocaching is a high-tech treasure hunting game played throughout the world by adventure seekers equipped with GPS devices. The basic idea is to locate hidden containers, called geocaches, outdoors and then share your experiences online. Geocaching is enjoyed by people from all age groups, with a strong sense of community and support for the environment.

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 Los Angeles. Buck is currently owner of WiseWerks, a small software development and consulting company. When not tweaking computer programs or running around L.A. fixing printers and hard drives Buck enjoys flying, hiking and traveling.


Yuki Uehara-McGibbony is from Japan and came to Los Angeles in ‘93 to study theatrical lighting. After working for stage productions as a freelancer for over 10 years, she decided to settle down in a cubicle. Now she happily works for a Japanese company as bilingual secretary. Yuki enjoys Geocaching while on vacation and here in Los Angeles.

 



 

Farmlab Public Salon
Marcos Lutyens & Alessandro Marianantoni
Friday, February 12, 2010 @ Noon
Free Admission


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

 



 

Special Thursday Evening Salon
Mel Chin
Thursday, February 11, 2010, 7.00-9.00pm
Free


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

Click for more information