My name is Deb Todd Wheeler, and I am an artist living and working in the Boston area. I would like to introduce my most recent project, Live Experiments in human Energy Exchange, which was an installation of kinetic experiments fueled entirely by bicycle power, installed Oct-Dec,2006 at the Green Street Gallery in Jamaica Plain, MA.

Central to the installation was a modified bicycle, which was hooked up to a generator and various rigs, gears and pulleys. By pedaling the bike, the rider (a gallery volunteer) activated the installation, generating light, wind, sound, and motion to fuel a series of kinetic studies on the fraught relationships between nature and technology. In one piece the bike powered a DC generator that in turn powered fluorescent lights embedded in hacked ant farms, in which worker-ant tunnels were dug beneath looming silhouettes of 1964 World’s Fair pavillions. In another work, the same bike turned gears that transfer energy to wind power by turning a windmill-like form with sails made of recycled plastic grocery bags.

many people have asked me what art and science have in common? I am more interested in what they don’t have in common I think. Of course there are shared subjects (climate change, the Arctic, glaciers, etc.) and shared investment in a process of inquiry, research, and analysis. But even each of those things can be broken down and found to share only the most gross of efforts. But that seems less useful than contemplating where their differences lie, or more aptly, how they might come together to create a greater whole? I am interested in focusing on the role of research that both artists and scientists share an active engagement with.

That friend is the Arctic, or so it seem to residents of the Arctic. The third point of focus for this project, this forum on the radiating effects of climate change, is the Arctic. The arctic is the very cold canary that tell us what is happening with our climate before we feel it in more temperate zones. The changes, as we have heard here from Larry Merculieff, are more drastic and hit home not just to the large community of people who live above the imaginary line that describes the arctic Circle, but also the the rest of the world’s land and people. Changes include the much reported: spring thaws are earlier. Fall freeze-ups are later. Sea ice is shrinking. Unfamiliar species of plants and animals are appearing. Intense storms are more frequent.

I gave five talks about my exhibit up at the ICA in Boston last night–8 minutes five times in a row.  After the blinding headache that ensued no doubt from the effects of my own droning repetition, I started thinking about the most significant part of what I was saying about the project.  Basically the images I was talking about, as you see here, take DEMs from glaciologists studying the dynamic response of the mass balance of glaciers around the world to environmental factors and I render them in a 3D program with temperature, light, cloud, snow covers that are relatively accurate to the sites (the picture you see here is the edge of the Austfonna glacier in the northernmost tip of Norway, an area known to be a common jumping off point for early north pole expeditions).  I then insert these tableaux of vaudevillian performers (here Mike Waters, the project manager for the ICA building construction supervises Naomi Greenfield, a local balloon artist, making an umiak, a common boat form in the arctic, out of pin balloons).

Published on 4 Dec 2006 by Energy Bulletin.
Archived on 4 Dec 2006.
by Dmitry Orlovv

Robert Steele posted this to his [Open Source Inteligence] site where he wrote:

2006-12-05 Scary Comparisons of Soviet and US Collapses

The 29-page slide with briefing notes at the link dated today, is quite sensible and quite scary. It is sufficiently credible to have earned a complete reprinting in the [Energy Bulletin].

In our view, we have two years to make a public intelligence case for electing a transpartisan team able to address the ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers in a responsible manner. If we fail to do so, we anticipate severe destruction in major urban areas, and a balkanization of rural areas. St.

Largest science Teachers Organization Rejects Gore Video … Why?

By: John F. Borowski
t r u t h o u t | Guest Columnist

Tuesday 28 November 2006

Would the world’s largest science teacher’s organization ignore climate change education? (Why did the NSTA say no to free “An Inconvenient Truth” DVDs?)

The National science Teachers Association (NSTA) has spurned 50,000 free DVDs of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and is squandering a golden opportunity to educate tens of millions of youth in the United States! Why? This 55,000-member organization of teachers and scientists could use Al Gore’s film to orchestrate the single most influential educational goal in human history: the awareness and subsequent solving of climate change. There is no denying the escalating list of climate change evidence: from the potential extinction of polar bears and retreating glacial environments to the increase of global temperatures in unison with increased carbon dioxide levels.