Virtual Residency Day Eighteen; Seas, Software bugs and Birds

In the LA Times today http://tinyurl.com/l84rh, there is a dramatic account of the effects of pollution on sea mammals. There are heartbreaking accounts of dying turtles, sea lions and other beautiful creatures caused by human carelessness.

Today, I did the first telecomcast tests for next weeks concert events here to work out the bugs. There were remarkably few but it has given me ideas for how to make the directions to listen and participate more clear. They will be on the Events page asap. Dave Nelson, owner of the new TalkShoe.com company that will host us, was extremely helpful.

I have also been studying photos from Khoj to visualize the surroundings and compare them to Geumgang and Pescia. What I see are dramatic differences between the particular water problems. I am still trying to clarify my thoughts about what I'm looking at and wish I had more information. So far, the visuals I am generating are all schematic or performative.

At one point I took a break from the work and heard my cat make a suspicious squeak. Sue enuf, she had a terrfied bird in her mouth. It was the first time I had caught her before she had reduced one of her prey to a pathic pile of tiny claws and a few downy feathers. I managed to separate the two animals and shoe my cat out the door. The bird, a sparrow, was breathing heavily under my dining room table, in such shock that, as often happens with birds my cat has captured, I could gather it up in my hands with little resistance.

I set the bird on a high place outside, away from my cat, to catch what breathe it had left and called a friend who is a bird rescue expert. We discussed the options. I was afraid it had a broken wing. Finally, I decided to find a box to bring it to my friend and left it alone to get the box. As I did so, I was trying to imagine the logistics of getting my elderly dog in the car for the ride, circumventing my irritated cat and driving safely to my friend. When I returned with the box, I inadvertently let the screen door slam shut behind me. That startled the bird so badly that it flew to the nearest branch without any trouble. I was elated, as was my friend. It made my day.

When I am sunk in software, technical questions and research, it is easy to forget that this is why I do this work: for all the sea lions, birds and polar bears. And for a world where humans can live sustainably with them.

Virtual Residency Day Seventeen, Comparing Sites

I just downloaded the detail views from the Geumgang site in Korea. What I was looking at was a concrete banked ditch or stream- likely a stream, with a bridge over it, mudflats, street views of a small city and details of a mountain path. In the context of this project, Anke has referred to the mountain as the "singing mountain". We hope to record various sounds from the mountain: to let it "sing" for the concerts.

The path is lined with what seems like a young forest- trees with slender trunks and rock outcroppings that don't seem significantly geologically different than the rocks here in Maine, altho they probably are. I printed the images to study further. Without botanical knowledge, I have no way of knowing what the age or the species of the trees may be for certain, anymore whether I can know the horse chestnuts in Pescia and in India are the same species. Orginally, I had planned, had I been there in person, to arrange some of the loose rocks and paint arrangements of rocks, branches and trees. I would have painted them with the same blue paint being used in Pescia for the chestnut trees- "Numbered Trees", at Verdearte. There was more to it than that but it amounted to sky blue on the forest floor witha strategy for marking change.

Earlier, I had been on the phone with Rob Rosenthal, a sound documentarian, who has recorded the waterfronts and fishing routes around the islands. After getting off the phone, my dog and I walked down to the garden, where I ate black currants and considered the mudflats here at low tide, comparing them to the images I still had in my head from Korea. Of course there are different species and conditions, but they have generic similiarities.

In New Delhi there is also a "captive river" I hope to record but the city that surrounds it is probably far more sprawling that the one in Gonghu. will this mean the sounds will be significantly different and how will those sounds differ from the waterfront in Maine? What I expect is that there will be as many similiarities as differences. One problem I expect to see everywhere is a lack of value put upon the waters. But that probably will not show up on audio.

Virtual Residency Sixteen, Art Pollination

In Britain, 70% of plants that depend upon pollination by various insects have declined, reports Science News July 22, 2006. That appears to be caused by dwindling bees. In the North Atlantic, it also reported, unusually warm waters is driving unprecedented hurricane formation.
In the human world, there seems to be war at every turn.

How may we preserve balance? Pollinate the world with beauty, art? Is that blowing in the wind? Goya and Picasso showed the disasters of war. Humans are at war with each other and with nature. What does that look like?

In Pescia I imagine the "Numbered Trees" with vivid blue symbols on each Chestnut tree in the forest that make a cumulative whole. In New Delhi I envision the bright colored pails the women use to gather the water from the delivery trucks. In a wide swathe around the globe, I visualize the "circumpolar" distributions of species, all of which are now migrating North or South to escape global warming and the climate changes it is causing. I am told that the white spruce we love here cannot out migrate the pace of global warming. That leaves me with the image of falling trees... and perhaps amongst the trees, the fallen bodies of people and animals felled by the same insanity.

Virtual Residency Day Fifteen, Weather

Last night we had a thunderstorm that took out our electricity for a while. This is fairly frequent up here. The result was that I couldn't post yesterday as I normally do. It reminded me that this entire Virtual Residency experiment depends on electronics: to access each other and an audience, for me to do research and work out various delivery kinks. Mother Nature of course, is on her own course. So beyond the reminder of dependency on electronics, is the reminder of interdependence with nature. As Indigenous peoples world wide are seeing, global warming erodes much traditional wisdom about how to survive; when to plant and harvest, for example. Even conventional farmers in California, beset by the heat wave there, are learning how fragile those presumptions can be, as they complain of wine grapes shriveled into raisins.

As of now, electronics are still depend on weather. That, as with so much else, brings us back to the unpredictable "nature" of global warming.

Virtual Residency Day Fourteen, Linda Weintraub & Anke Mellin

The reason I'm doing this Virtual Residency is to see some changes on the ground that relate to global warming. I asked some ecological art colleagues to voice thier concerns:

"My experience has been that it is easier to engage people in abstract ruminations about global environmental conditions than to get them to touch the living and nonliving entities that surround them." -Linda Weintraub. Art Historian

I replied, "Thank you, Linda, a very useful point. Perhaps I need to emphasize more, that I am, as much as possible, working with people on the ground at each site to define what they perceive as their problems and what precisely I can contribute towards a better situation, art that enables preservation and restoration. Obviously there are always also ways we must work in situ, in more depth. I am hoping that Anke Mellin's last sentence, below, is precisely what may happen."

Anke Mellin, curator and artist wrote:
"imagine- all the so called Nature Artists refuse to travel like before (plane- long journeys by car etc). Only those who are living where the exhibition takes place are participating, others are invited to make a work which is based on a dialog between those who live in the region and the artist living far away. etc. etc."

Virtual Residency, Day Thirteen, a "Sense" of Environmental Justice?

Reuters reports that there are a lot of lawsuits on the way, mostly against the USA, over global warming http://tinyurl.com/on5an. The caveat is that they will be hard to prove.

I escaped the virtual world today. Instead, I spent the morning hauling rocks around in my garden and pulling "weeds"- invasive exotic pasture grasses and "wildflowers" from the midwestern prairies I had once innocently planted and are now well on thier way to also being invasive. In the garden, I ate the first raspberries, the first hints of fall to come, way too early in the season. When I was done working in the garden, I studied the far islands. The goal of my garden is to blend the view from the foreground of domesticated nature to the far distance, like a long legato arpeggio of visual effects. Boreal forests have muted ones. Parts of my garden are slightly too vivid to be 'authentic".

Back in my house, practiced Puccini arpeggios, trying to imagine matching my voice to the gulls here. The world we know is a composite of all our senses. The sense are an artists playground.

As far as I know, there is no barometer in the constellations of physcal sensory experiences we have that tell us the world is slightly "off" today, yet most of us intuit when there's something "wrong".

But if island nations are sinking as waters rise from global warming, they don't need any abstract intuitive barometers. They are losing land. We do know some people are directly to blame, as the chief of Exxon who deliberately funded misinformation. But can someone like that be held resposible? When elections aren't enuf. short of war, we rely on legal systems. It will be interesting to see how far these cases go. How far can you follow the trajectory of responsibility for the effects of global warming?

VIRTUAL RESIDENCY Day Twelve/A JULY 25: Concert Instructions

VIRTUAL CONCERTS and Interaction Instructions to Participate and Listen

TIMES:
9AM-12 Midnight ET AUGUST 8, 2006
9AM-12 Midnight ET AUGUST 12, 2006
date and time to be announced for September

COST: These Virtual Concerts are free, spontaneous and experimental events.

CONTRIBUTORS: will include pre-invited artists from India, Korea, Italy and the USA. Musicians and artists from around the world are being invited to contribute both pre-recorded found sound (local environmental sounds) and participate with call-ins using Talkshoe.com.

SOFTWARE: Click on: http://www.talkshoe.com/talkshoe/web/main.jsp to learn more about this software. TalkShoe needs to be downloaded with TalkShoe Live! You can also use skype but it can be less reliable and you do need some extra equipment to use skype. Go to: http://www.skype.com/ for details. In order to participate, talk, improvise with sound responsively or listen, you will need a user name and PIN. Sign up on the TalkShoe Home Page. All call-ins will be monitored by the host, Aviva Rahmani.

LISTENERS: The advantage of TalkShoe now is numbers of participants. Up to 500 pre-registered listeners can be audience members and up to 25 participants can contribute with call-in discussion and or improvisation in response to what is being broadcast. At this time, TalkShoe anticipates a launch date of August 7 for "streaming audio", which will allow a virtually unlimited number of others to listen along live on their PCs and Macs. This new launch will also allow listeners to send chat (text) comments to each other without calling in. VoIP-based service will be available in September which will allow the TalkShoe Live client to participate without having to use Skype and it will be totally free.

CALL IN: The Talkcast ID for this event will be 1210. Use your phone to call 1-724-444-7444 and follow the audio instructions. If you've received an email invitation, click the "Join the Talkcast" link in the email. On the resulting page, find the Talkcast ID, call 724-444-7444, and follow the audio instructions. To call TalkShoe with Skype, use a "SkypeOut" mode. This is free in the US and Canada but may cost about 2 cents per minute in much of the rest of the world.

CAVEATS: Please check the Skype website. Technical problems with skype may include DTMF (Dual Tone Multi-Frequency, referring to the touch tones you hear when dialing your phone.
Program details and participants will be announced on New Events pages on this website. The new pages will launch by the end of this week.

Virtual Residency Day Twelve; Indian Water

Ravi, Rohini and Hemant and I have been in a dialog over the top page image that will be used this week on my site to represent Khoj International. The issue was what did the drawing I made of traditional women drawing water from a well vs. the phtograph Hemant sent me, which I will use, of delivery of water in trucks to modern New Delhi evoke either for Indians or Westerners. When I master the next step in my software learning curve, I will insert the provocative drawing.

Meanwhile, the discussions in private emails have been fascinating. I wrote Ravi today:

What interests me are the mechanics of how indigenous and traditional peoples negotiate scarce resources and how to apply that knowledge to our modern world. Too often, as modern cultures scramble for competitive market edge, those techniques get lost. I’d like to explore this further about Indian water resources. The advantage of traditional means, is that it usually is sustainable, doesn’t create more carbon emissions. The caveat is that when you try to interface traditional and modern systems, that’s when you get into more intransigent human problems.

What Ravi had written that evoked that response was:

"tradition ... has many problems of equality and power relationships between women - men , class and caste......but we seem to think that a machine can change us, while actually we must change inside ourselves, and no machine can help, in fact often machines only serve the more powerful, such as large corporations...and the very rich.

"
Just back from a meeting which was on the banks of the mighty Ganges in the hill town of Rishikesh. Here the river just decends into the plains from the hills, and is a very mighty torrent. Especially now, with the snows melting and the monsoon in the upper reaches, it is like a roar of a torrential flow of water, which will finally meet the ocean 2500 km away in the Bay of Bengal. On its way it will feed millions of people, and also wreck havoc on those in its way. It is the lifeline of north India and mythologically its cultural sustenance. It is also the planet in action, as for millions of years water has circulated through condensation and the monsoon, into snow ice, glaciers and our lifeline of water, for irrigation and food.

yet many of us, especially the disadvantaged are unable to find water when we need it for drinking, bathing or irrigating. We also pollute what we have. Or are totally unaware of the fact that water is key to this planet's ecology, life and systems. This is man. Can see what he/she needs, but not aware of its vulnerability. So most people will not know that water comes from a river, or from the snow and ice, that it has done a massive journey to come to ones table in a glass. We only want to use it. It is not differnt from living as if we will never die, that life will go on forever. Caught in our own needs and in fulfilling them at the expense of anyone else's we seem to forget our larger truths.

While we are ecological beings, depandant on water - air, nature for our survival, we have lost our ecological connections, believing ourselves to be isolated and unconnected. In times when people drew water from the wells, water was still precious, not it just comes from a tap. maybe the loss of the well, and the loss of knowing that food grows in fields and not in supermarkets, shows that while we progress in technological terms, we are not necessarily more aware human beings. Water in trucks comes from our groundwater, like it did in our wells, only this time we can suck up more, much more.

I am not for tradionalism, for it has many problem, but our progress must be measured more in terms of terms like 'respect, awareness, consiousness, I think, and not in only terms of technology and its inherant politics.... cannot get the river out of my mind!" - Ravi Agarwal

Virtual Residency Day Eleven; Perceptions of Cause and Effect

It is sweltering everywhere in the world it seems, except here on my island. World events are as frightening as the climate is unstable. I spent part of the morning searching for a hymn to sing next weekend, at the request of our local minister, about bridging differences. I found one about kindness. Kindness seems a good start for peace. Bridging differences and kindness are always on my mind as I do this project. Both can address the same fears that result in dissension or resistance towards acting to prevent further global warming.

In an editorial in the NY Times, http://tinyurl.com/essql, Daniel Gilbert referenced research to the effect that we perceive events in our own lives as caused by the past, events in the lives of others cause what comes later; in effect, we are passive, the other is aggressive. Furthermore, we percieve injury to ourselves subjectively, as greater than injury we inflict. I would venture we extend this to anyone we respectively do or don't identify with. Therefore, kindness, the idea of seeing experience not thru our own eyes but the eyes of another, the basis of all social courtesies and diplomacy might be useful these days.

I have spent a beautiful day indoors trying to figure out how to do the software for the virtual concerts that will be part of this residency soon. I am not done but gaining. I still need to understand how to interface several systems simply, kindly.

It is past time to do something else besides sit at a computer, inhale data or talk on the phone. I will go visit my trees and consider circumpolar botanical species, like common junipers. One sense I cannot convey virtually is smell. But I can tell you that walking in my garden and down to the sea is a banquet of fragrances.

I can still hear the sounds of the king bullfrog mixed with birdsong in my mind from the day I was awake at 5AM here. Now I can also hear the sound of soft wind thru the birch leaves calling me into the garden. My animals and I shall go inhale and listen.

Virtual Residency Day Ten; Biodiversity, Water and Sounds

I took most of the day today as a day of rest after singing of peace in the morning in our local Union Church. When I came home, I walked in my garden with my remaining elderly dog and my cat, visiting the trees I had planted from the installation that came down last month at Exit Art in NYC. They now look as they they grew there since saplings.

I noticed the birds had eaten all the red currants before I had had a chance to eat more than a few last week. The black currants are still plentiful. There will be a bumper crop of wild raspberries.

The heathers I planted this Spring to make up for some winter kill when the ground kept heaving and refreezing when it should not have done so, are filling out in the incessant and unseasonable rain and fog, a benefit of global warming I suppose. I deadheaded daylilies and made a mental note that they need to be divided soon unless I want a garden of nothing but daylilies.

I considered the percentages I heard Friday night of exotic species in local meadows, at least 46%, as I studied the delicate colors of the tiarellas in bloom. They make a rich foreground understory tapestry against the greys and browns of the far islands at low tide. Left to the devices of our Spruce Fir forest here, we might have 6-7 species in an understory. Thanks to "invasives" we have the biodiversity fo several hundred instead. On the other hand, we may have so many Spruce because of losing hardwoods to shipbuilders centuries ago. Penalosa diagrammed how our white spruce may be doomed because it cannot outpace the trajectory of global warming. Species migration is not fast enuf to compensate for cliamte chnage. I may think of them as weed species but I would be heartbroken to lose them. They so define the local character of this coastline.

I am still working out mechanics for this event. I was tired today because I was up until 5 AM this morning trying to finalize exactly what images to use on the web site top page for this residency. Khoj is in an urban center and the images I had planned to use, based on conversations with Navjot Altof last year, about working collaboratively with her in a small village, will not be appropriate: rural women in saris at a well with pots on thier heads. This choice I have made, to work virtually limits me as much as it opens new doors and windows. We will use the image of the portable water on trucks. Women do arrive and carry the water off but apparently not in saris and they carry bright plastic buckets on their heads rather than clay. I have also been finalizing a press release for the event, wrestling with my quasi-science-arttalk to make it into normal english. Many details remain and need to be put in place.

After my walk, I made several calls to the sound artists for the concerts. Alan Crichton of Kingdom Falls here in Maine asked a series of very good questions I cannot yet answer. How the general audience is going to hear the concerts as they unfold live if there are more than 500 people at any given time for example. Tomorrow I will try to nail that down with my webmaster.

I have been trying to learn the new software to do all this and it is exactly like learning a new language. The languages I learned young, French, Spanish, Hebrew, a tiny bit each of Russian, Italian, Portuguese, German and so on stick with me in direct proportion to how young I was when I first learned them. At seventeen, I spoke many languages, including exotic smatterings of Arabic and Urdoo because I went to an international school and it was normal. Languages come easily when you are young. Today I limp thru one or two besides English only if I brush up first.

I have nightmares of getting deep into the days of the concerts and all the new software language flying away like seagulls calling to the winds. It isn't the same as standing at a podium and just remembering to lift my soft palate and drop my larynx before I open my mouth to let air out and sing.

Virtual Residency Day Nine, Mosses in Italy, Water in India

Barbara Melli in Pescia, Italy, who has been numbering the chestnut trees of the forest there with a slurry of buttermilk, ultramarine blue pigment and some local mosses has wanted to know how long it may take for the mosses to grow. Her "Paint by Numbers" task is the work I had suggested for the Verdearte event. As part of this virtual residency, Barbara was willing to mark each tree, individualizing them, in an outward spiraling series away from some point of local human significance.

I asked Dr. Xavier Penalosa, a botanist that question about how fast the mosses would take last night at a talk he gave here on the island. The occasion of his talk was preparatory to a walk he led this morning. The walk served to introduce a new acquisition by the Land Trust here, to protect a serenely beautiful area called Whitmore Pond.

Xavier said that as there are many kinds of mosses, it would depend upon what was in the slurry. The average was several weeks but some might take a year. As I recall, when my mother used buttermilk to grow mosses on rocks in her garden, she would periodically spray them lightly with water to encourage them. I have a sneaking suspicion that even the "quickly" generating mosses may not be apparent for some time.

The audience responsive part of me feels defensive about this delay. The artist in me is delighted by the idea of the invisible processes we will watch to become visible. I do hope for Barbara's sake and that of her audience, that the mosses are the "right" ones and do not keep anyone waiting.

In India, from New Delhi, Hemant has sent me an image of a water canister truck, which regularly delivers water to residents. I am fascinated by this idea of water on the road. I know that bottled water often travels in trucks to places all over the world, indeed, flies and crosses bodies of water. If water flies, it is also leaving a contrail. This seems like feeding wild fish to caged salmon for aquaculture: that is, creating a new environmental problem to solve a problem of ecological appetite. Except the appetite for water is basic to survival. So what to do about this modern dilemma: to effectively address problems, we create new problems?

In many places in the world, ground water is being dangerously depleted by human use. Indeed, one reason for the tragedy of Katrina in the United States was the effect of "subsidence", lowering the sea level of land by extracting oil, gas... and water to a level that left the city vulnerable to the storm surge.

How will we solve this problem of fresh water? By draining the oceans in de-salinization? If we do that, can the polar bears walk to the seals they must eat?

Virtual Residency Day Eight, Sound Invitation

REQUEST FOR PARTICIPATION from musicians and other artists working with "found" environmental sounds"

In an effort to address global warming and political polarization, two international virtual concert events are planned for August 8 and 12. This is a spontaneous experiment as part of a Virtual Residency within my project, The Cities and Oceans of If. Progress is being journaled here on my blog: http://www.ghostnets.com/citiesandoceansofif/>, at my web site http://www.ghostnets.com,/ which will also be the site of the two concerts. Each concert will be at least 12 hours long.

The concerts are part of a larger virtual installation which will include visuals, using my blog and special Events pages on the website. The page for the scheduled program of performances and credits will be updated periodically.

There are three participating agencies: Geumgang Nature Art Biennale, South Korea 2006, the Khoj International Workshop in New Delhi, India and the Verdearte event in Pescia, Italy.

I am asking found sound artists from around the world inc those who can improvise in response, to participate with either mp3 recordings (which would be scheduled into the program) or real time call-in improv. The found sound that interests me most, is of people interacting with natural resources, as the fishing fleet up here, with minimal modification. I will be using some combination of skype, TalkShoe & wimpy for the acoustics. Instructions will be posted on this blog and linked from the Events pages.

There are three critical reasons I am doing this from here on my island, virtually:

1. As an ecological artist I can no longer bear the idea of spewing jet fuel over the earth and her waters in order to create interventions to remediate environmental damage

2. I want to create a system, an experimental model, that ties many physical locations together to address the urgent international crisis we all perceive

3. This past year has been an exercize in learning my physiological limits as I’ve traveled extensively. My health, the barometer of my relationship to the earth, has told me in no uncertain terms to find alternative ways to work

Despite ambitious goals, as part of the statement, I want to keep this as simple and direct as possible.

I welcome all & any input, suggestions & recommendations. An e-press release is forthcoming.

Virtual Residency Day Seven, David Rothenberg and Species Extinctions

I have begun to contact sound artists to participate in the concerts planned on this web site for August 8 and 12. David Rothenberg writes that he can send the sound of his improvising with Russian Beluga whales.

The Guardian reports http://tinyurl.com/ldvfl that in fifty years, as much as 37% of all animal species will go extinct thanks to human encroachment on habitat (all those McMansions and Walmarts) and global warming.

If we can play with the whales, might we learn to value them enuf to allow them to live?

Virtual Residency Day Six, Country vs City in India

I ran into an interesting problem today. I have been designing the part of my web site that will be used for this project and the top page includes four images. One image from each of the four sites I'm concentrating on. But I had no photographic images for the Delhi site.

After some thought, I decided to rely on conversations I had had with Navjot Altof. She is the wonderful Indian artist who first invited me to come participate at Khoj. She had had an installation in the Groundworks show we were both part of last year, in the Regina Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University. That installation showed her working with rural village women at their wells.

So I drew a sketch of what I imagined the women at the wells might look like for the web page and asked my friends there to correct the image. But then Rohini Devasher gently reminded me that the workshop was in the modern city of Delhi, not out in the "very rural outskirts of Rajasthan, Haryana or Punjab". So I realized I had to clarify why I made that choice and justify it.


After some more thought, I wrote my friends there that, "I am interested in the Indigenous relationships to resources because they are often regional benchmark predictors of both trouble and solutions, " which is exactly true.

Ravi Agarwal wrote back:

"I think that the dilemma is that while we depend, we do not realize that we do. So we are destroying what we cannot see…. Most people in Delhi for example have not even seen the river, or know that everytime they waste water it is something collected over centuries underground. We only seem to consume. This is most true in a city like Delhi. Here the image is more of women queuing up outside a water tanker or a municipal tap to fill water, for all wells are now owned by private bottling companies! …Maybe somewhere, we must recover our basic connections. That is what I think. Our ecological connections. From being consumers to back to being human beings who are fragile and vulnerable and will revert to nature one day, but seem to behave as if this is not so. "

So I have the first gift, from the first little problem of this residency now: a riddle to solve about this particular relationship between the country and the city, the invisible river there, life and death.

Does this also mean one reason we have global warming is a denial of our fragility and inevitable death?

Virtual Cities and Oceans of If Residency, Day Five: Sounds of Home on the Island

It is overcast and about 70 farenheit on my island today. I know the whole world is burning up elsewhere, literally and figuratively but here there is the sound of a crow and the wind thru the trees. They say it may rain this afternoon. I am very tired but I am imagining the sounds that I might capture from this site.

The gulls come first in the daytime. Sometimes there is the put put sound of lobster boat motors passing by my wharf along the east side. This the rougher coast of the island because it is exposed to the open Atlantic. East side fishermen say with disdain that the West side is "tamer".

On the boats there would be more gulls and the constant lapping of the waves. The sound of traps being hauled up: a sort of scraping alongside the side of the boat, the half hollow thunk as the traps are set down to pull out the catch and then the louder more hollow metal on metal exclamation of a trap thrown onto the stack on board or the splash when they are loaded back down into the waters.

Perhaps there would be an occasional grunt from the sternmen, esp if someone has a twinge of back hurt. Conversation is mostly the cadence of male voices with the almost downeast twang and up down pitching characteristic of islanders. If there's a woman helping the pitches would be higher. It would all be punctuated by laughter at some clever quip from time to time. There would be some calling back & forth between the crew and the captain: gossip about who is with whom or got drunk last night and maybe a cry when someone sights a whale or a big shark. Seals are usually too ubiquitous to mention much, except the occasional curse at them for stealing lobsters from the fishermen. Of course, there would not be comments of regret that in fact, the other way of looking at it is that we are stealing THIER food. You might hear a seal bark from time to time.

At night it is the bullfrog. There may be others but apparently there is one king bullfrog with a distinctive, stentorian voice. If I could talk frog, I would like to know what he is saying: this land is my land. I control this world. A comforting fantasy. Well, no, for the time being, it is no fantasy. In the bullfrogs pond, as long as my cat can't get him, he does indeed own and control his corner of the universe. I am just jealous because I can't imagine an equivalent presumption.

Virtual Residency Day Four of the Virtual Cities and Oceans of If Project: HOPE

Cynthia Pannucci from ASCI.org, the organization that brings artists and scientists together, has given her organizational support to this Virtual Residency linking four countries, India, Korea, Italy and Vinalhaven Island (I refuse to say we are part of the United States, no matter what it says on paper).

I am a person who is determined to dream and act on my dreams. But I am actually quite fragile and stumble very easily. When I hear, as I did in Grist today that Orca Whales have more mercury than Polar Bears, I weep. When I read that all the tragedies of Katrina were human error, sloppiness, laziness, I despair as I did today reading excerpts from, "Breach of Faith", by Jed Horne. As I put this event together, I am so grateful for those who are contributing time and effort with the faith that this is another drop in an ocean of Hope.

One of the reasons I am doing this project to address global warming is a comment made at the opening of The Drop show I was in at Exit Art this Spring. The comment was that the reason people are not making the changes we must to avert global warming, is that they are paralyzed by fear. I want this project to communicate that those changes may actually be exciting, even fun. It is all a state of mind.

So when any of us rises above our own fearful selfishness, myself included and reaches out to make something wonderful and meaningful happen, no matter how modest, my heart is full and sings.

Thank you, Cynthia Pannucci, from ASCI.org. I urge you all to vsit this wonderful site and see the wonderful work being done there.

Virtual Residency Day Three, Defying Bombs, Addressing Global Warming

Today is the third day of writing on my blog about the global virtual residency I have undertaken, linking Geumgang, Korea, Pescia Italy and Khoj International in India with my tiny island in the Gulf of Maine.

As part of this work, Ravi Agarwal from India, has written me about the privatization of water there and mercury pollution into rivers from garbage incineration for electrical energy- the same issues we are beginning to face in Maine with the world wide consumption of Poland Springs water and the mercury that comes from inadequately regulated coal burning factories in the midwest. That precipitates into and pollutes Maine fishing grounds and waterways. He has also written me about perceptible rainfall changes probably caused by global warming. On this island, as a sole source aquifer, we also depend entirely upon rainfall for freshwater and have also seen dramatic changes in those patterns apparently caused by global warming.

In Pescia, Italy, Bibi Melli, who initiated inviting me to be part of Verdearte, has begun painting numbers on each chestnut tree there with the slurry of pure ultramarine blue pigment and buttermilk I recommended. She reports that it smells wonderful and glows against the green of the forest. I wrote her back that the slurry, which would be friendly to moss growth, is unpredictable in how fast mosses may respond. Meanwhile it is a modest, delicate and lovely way to honor each tree. We are thanking them for the bounty and beauty they bring locally and the albido effect they contribute that resists global warming.

Two days ago, the first of these journal posts for the residency, after the Mumbai and middle east bombings I asked, how shall we name this project? I know now that it is an act of defiance and resistance against the world's insanity. It is an affirmation of what must be paid attention to and the fragile act of making beauty out of that resistance.

Virtual Residency Day Two, World Resources Changes

As I begin work on the virtual residency between India, Italy, Korea and the isalnd of Vinalhaven, Maine (which is pleased to think it is not really part of the United States), I have been comparing tables of world resources. The tables I have been studying date from 2000. I have been on the phone today trying to get the updated information to compare the rate at which change is occurring in the regions I'm studying for this project. These statistics are compiled in part by the United Nations. At the time of publication, The Foreword referred to the dawn of a new century and our opportunity to repair earth systems we have damaged. Very nice language for the urgency of that request.

In some recent announcements of this project I wrote that my ideas for this work are based, "in disturbance theory. That work investigates the degree of systemic resilience before an ecology collapses into an alternate stable state. Most scientists now believe such a collapse may be precipitated by global warming within our lifetimes. "


In 2000, large parts of South Korea had already experienced "extreme" soils degradation within the agroecosystems it supports. This would, of course affect the watershed there, as freshwater requires soil and vegetation to conserve supplies. I don't yet know as much as I want to about Pescia, except that it appears to be in a river valley, but I do know dams and water are serious issues in India and this island depends upon a sole source aquifer. So all four sites have in common water issues. At least three out ot the four will be evry vulnerable to the effects of global warming in thier water supplies.

On this island, we are already experiencing salt water intrusion into our coastal wells that will increase with sea level rising and eventually threaten our entire water supply. India is already experiencing some desertification, as with many other parts of the world. The loss of soil in Korea will certainly not get better without direct address.

There are people and organizations representing push back movements world wide but the pace of degradation of resources and the impact of global warming appears to be far out stripping that heroism. So I shall wait to see what I learn.

The goal of this project is to experiment with some radical alternatives to my work process that might be more sustainable: radical and imaginative restraint.

Virtual Residency Day One, Naming. How Shall We Name This?

Global warming is the over-arching symptom of human dysfunction in relation to natural resources. The Global Event Project seeks to address that by eschewing the use of jet flight yet bringing disparate international groups together.

This morning, when I let my dog out, I became instantly drunk on the fragrance of the flowers and grasses here after a thunderstorm last night. The far islands in the mist were the earth tones of a Rembrandt. That is the experinece that drives me to solutions.

When I give talks, I often show the Bahai temple in Haifa, as an ideal model of one approach to integrating human inhabitation and the natural world. The gardens of the temple descend to the sea in a series of multi-colored, intricate steps and tiers of exquisite design. It took decades to create. The Bahai faith is founded entirely on principles of beauty and peace. Haifa is a beautiful city that has just been bombed. Surely there is dysfunction in that action.

For Verdearte in Pescia, Italy, I have proposed that we paint a number on each horse chestnut tree. The nuts of the trees are the source of a local flour that is the primary industry of the region. The paint would be pure ultramarine blue pigment and buttermilk, a medium used in the renaissance, a slurry that could grow mosses and biodegrade over time. It is a modest way to name each tree, a thanking and recognition for the bounty each tree provides. There is no electricity in this valley village. There is only quiet beauty and old buildings. Surely we can value each tree that grows. If we don't the loss of albido effect will cook us.

At the Khoj Workshop in India, near the Sai Baba temple, there are also horse chestnut trees. That may mean that whatever aspect of global warming affects Pescia, may also affect New Delhi.

In India there are many chestnut trees and many dams to create electricity. Water is a problem there. So they are controlling the waters to fuel the popultation, which will grow and use the trees to build the houses with cars that will have carbon emissions, like us, here in the states.

I want to hear the sounds of the conversations of the women drawing water at the wells. Hemant has written me that they are setting up sound and camera equipment there now for this virtual residency. In Mumbai, India, they are counting the dead commuters from the bombs there. Pooja Sood writes me that no one they know was hurt in Mumbai. In the mdist of crisis, human nature stills trives for ebauty and meaning.

In Korea, they are not concerned about their Northern Neighbor who has dropped bombs into the Indian Ocean. Anke Mellin sent me a picture of a steaming kettle of water in the marketplace in Gongju, Korea. I can clearly hear the sound of the steam rising in the air.

Somewhere in the world, bombs are still rising and falling. Old men are killing young men, women and children. This will settle the population problem before waves of melted glaciers wash over the densely populated coastlines of the world or global warming desertifies Africa.

Here in Maine, an invasive species has settled on the ocean bottom, brought in by cruise ships from away. It could destroy the shellfish industry. Perhaps soon there will be fewer lobsters in the world. Japan imports a lot of our lobsters, esp for state dinners. What happens when our modes of consumption and travel become so disruptive to our ecologies?

Here in my office in Maine, I am asking sound artists to collect the sounds of people interacting with natural resopurces. I have announced the request on greenmuseum.org, in San Francisco, California. It will wondrously go out to all the world via cyberspace. I am learning new technologies and communicating with people thousands of miles away to see how we can make something beautiful and peaceful, a virtual hanging garden across the seas and continents to speak to all this dysfunction.

How can any of us bear it all, let alone the victims of wars and storms all over the world now? In the bathymetry of my soul, I am sad to have this conversation between desire and desire. How can humans desire destruction in this lovely world as much as we desire beauty? Is an act of destruction like jet fuel on the waters- a quick path to a fantasy of power with a very heavy price? My heart sheds tears.

How do I name this project I have undertaken?

This I know, my tears and cries won't solve any of it. Comedians do a better job of conveying the pathos of these horrors than I can.

When I let my dog in this afternoon, her coat was hot from the sun. The fragrances are more muted.

NEW PROJECT; International Virtual Event on Global Warming in an Insane World

In an effort to address global warming and political polarization, I will be organizing a virtual event for late August. It will tie together several issues at international real world sites. I am in the early stages of planning it as part of,"The Cities and Oceans of If" project, for this web site. It will culminate in a 1-2 day on site concert late August.

Participating agencies so far include, curator Anke Mellin, of Germany and the 2006 Geumgang Nature Art Biennale 2006, Gongju, South-Korea, the Khoj International Workshop in New Delhi, India and Verdearte in Pescia, Italy. These are fabulous people/venues with whom-which I had the opportunity to participate this Summer. I decided I couldn't go anywhere. Instead, I am going to do something in cyberspace. The event will be a combination of pre-scanned/recorded/loaded and real time visual and acoustic elements.

This was all thought out before North Korea sent missiles into the Indian Ocean and bombs killed commuters in Mumbai.

I will regularly write about the evolving ideas, thinking about and plans for this event on this blog. There will be a separate page on my web site for the visual elements. The acoustic element will include the found sounds of people interacting with natural resources.

For several months I have been aware that I travel too much. Too much means too much jet fuel spewed over the earth and her waters and too much physical exhaustion for me to be as effective as I'd like or to live a sane life.... all with the goal of ecological triage. That is an oxymoron. One goal cancels the other goal.

So I'm not physically going anywhere this Summer, except into town to pick up my mail and get my groceries from time to time. It is exciting and stimulating to have the chance to work in remote locations, as I have had the opportunity to do, but it is also problemmatic. Can we connect all these local sites with a broad overview? Don't we need to be midnful of the global context that makes it so difficult to do that?

Bombs, bombs, bombs everywhere creating carnage, misery and further polarization. When we are so rattled by these threats to personal survival, how to address what remains for many, the still abstract idea of global warming, even if global warming will imminently affect far more of us personally than terrorism? It is very much like being a victim of any abuse: the struggle for day to day survival, eventually makes bigger problems seem remote.

But Horse chestnuts grow in Pescia as well as New Delhi and are both impacted by and are a resource for human life. India has water issues, as does my little island. In Korea, artists have gathered from all over the world to work on environmental projects, even as North Korea launches missiles that will contribute to global warming. It is all one mosaic to decipher, one more set of tea leaves to make sense out of.

Anke Mellin writes, "Imagine- all the so called Nature Artists refuse to travel like before (plane- long journeys by car etc). Only those who are living where the exhibition takes place are participating, others are invited to make a work which is based on a dialog between those who live in the region and the artist living far away. etc. etc. "

Lies and Carbon Truths

Sebastian Mallaby of the Washinghton Post, writes that all the tech fantasies about solving global warming are just that if we rely on engineering alone. What is needed is carbon taxing: http://tinyurl.com/g4mgv and other measures that provide incentives. As teh Untited States is the largest source of emissions in the world, without that we cannot win this war against ourselves and the whole planet. Mallaby asserts that to believe otherwise or promote anything less, is to lie about our cicrcumstances, somemthing this American administration has long since proved it is a master at- lies that destroy worlds, that is.

Walmart & Al Gore

In passing, CNN's ribbon yesterday announced that Al Gore was going to provide environmental guidance to Walmart. There was no further story about that but it is a story I'd like to hear.

Meanwhile, the CBS Sunday morning show covered a study of blogs this AM. It concluded that successful blogs are funny and sarcastic. If that's the case, the title of this blog should net me a lot of success.

CNN gives me hope. It has been runnung a special on global warming. After allowing the administration spokesperson to tell the audience that , "we have time on our side", it referred back to the people of an island nation that is drowning, the starving polar bears and Inuits who are forced to leave their homes and said, in effect, "I don't think so."

Indeed. And that didn't require any sarcasm at all.

Global Warming Fires Lit?

Apparently, Texas is embracing wind power, a good thing?
http://tinyurl.com/pww88
There are still many unanswered questions about wind power, including the bird and bat kill but I'm happy to see news of more movement on the issues.

Personally, I am considering some very serious life style changes with professional implications as my own address to global warming. I will write about that in more detail within the next few days. It is something I have been thinking about for two years but the pieces have come together in the past month.

A hint: being an ecological artist and jetting around the world, spewing jet fuel in my tracks to do good, is an oxymoron. I think I have a solution, however.

Oil and Bioremediation in the Age of Global Warming

I don't normally find a good word to say about Shell Oil or any other oil company. But I was intrigued by an article about the use of a rose farm to create bioremediation for oil refineries by Shell Oil in the Netherlands http://tinyurl.com/ejtoj to reduce carbon emissions.

In Maine, we now have a thriving wind farm industry but the evidence of bat kills as well as birds continues to be disturbing despite new designs and placements. I am betting on wave energy because the Bay of Fundy has the strongest tides in the world. That is also being more intensively explored now. Meanwhile global warming continues and requires immediate solutions.

I find the application of bioremediation intriguing and promising as an intermediatory solution until we can achieve full independence from fossil fuels. Besides this recent application to global warming issues, bioremediation has been used successfully for mercury & metals reclamation, as gold. Mercury, for example, is a major concern here in Maine, at the end of the Midwest tail pipe from coal factories and the jetstream.

I think bioremediation is an inadequately explored option. I know it also has problems, as the consumption of plant materials, as seeds, by birds & other fauna but I suspect even those problems might be overcome with original thinking. Using a farm to reduce emissions at the refinery level is a new & valuable idea for me.

At this point I am anxious to identify and acknowledge any avenue of promise. There have been a lot of recent media discussions here in this country about polarization between parties, whether politically, in the world arena or between stakeholders. I think there are many reasons for that but I do think at this point it is in the way of finding solutions to the problems we face. As one study pointed out, when our emotions are aroused, we (as a species) fail to accurately take in information. Without information, we are doomed.

Recently, for example, I was speaking to a rancher from Arizona, concerned with the fires in Sidona. He described how he is trying to use grazing techniques (similar to traditional means in Wales) as an alternative to controlled burning to create open space/biodiversity. However, he says he is in conflict with Earth First folks there who are (by his version) unwilling to even look at scientific papers that document the value of rotational grazing and will eventually drive ranchers out of business entirely.

In "Animals in Translation", Temple Grandin writes, we are not yet going to be a species that eschews meat. So the question is how to kill humanely until & if something changes. I would rather address the suffering of animals now and find answers to loss of biodiversity than wait until the whole world goes vegetarian while we lose open space. Whatever the “final truth” on these controversial points, it seems obvious to me that it is a lose lose situation when people are unwilling to see value in different approaches.

I am personally learning a great deal these days about humility, modest goals and the value of taking responsibility for self-righteousness & perfectionism. I know there are times when there can be no compromise but I suspect they are fewer and further apart than I once believed.