Category: research

The Politics of Public Playfulness (transcript) • A Playful Path

The Politics of Public Playfulness (transcript) • A Playful Path. We kind of get embarrassed to be seen being playful. We kind of get a feeling that it’s illegal to be playful. Because, you know, you’re playful, you go out some place and you’re being playful, and people look at you like that. You know: “What are you doing being… Read more →

Zhang Huan’s Poppy Fields

Chinese artist Zhang Huan’s paintings, entitled, “Poppy Fields” are intended to evoke the idea of liberated souls who have undergone the sky burial process that he discovered while traveling through Tibet.

Source: ARTINFO PUBLISHING VIDEO

Blogging here to keep for reference: “who are other artists who are working with images of poppies and what are they doing with them?”

Connected Worlds – Interactive ecosystem for @nysci by @design_io

Large project with NSF funding poetically explores ecosystems at large scale. Blogged here for reference to it’s hardware and software details. Sow/Reap may benefit from their example. Each environment in Connected Worlds runs on a separate machine with software developed with openFrameworks. There are a total of 8 Mac Pros running the whole experience. There is a total of 15 projectors… Read more →

Home-Brewed Heroin – The New Yorker

Found this article in the New Yorker magazine that puts a crazy twist in the path of any war on drugs, and which gives some nuance to any story about poppies: For as long as humans have been farmers, we have been drinkers. Wild yeast was the first microorganism that we domesticated, more than ten millennia ago. But archaeologists believe… Read more →

Interview: Sony Announces End of CCD Sensor Production – Allied Vision Technologies

We have been looking at a variety of industrial IR cameras as potential replacements for the Kinect 1.0 in Sow/Reap. The consumer technologies have become so unstable as to make them reliable only for short projects. Longer term projects, those with years long development times, or those that aspire to be enduring once complete, will need material resources that are… Read more →

How Afghanistan Vets Are Trying To Cultivate Peace Through Saffron : The Salt : NPR

National Public Radio shares a story of a newly formed company hoping to create a fair-trade export market for saffron in Afghanistan, as an alternative to poppies. It will be worthwhile keeping an eye on their efforts. Below is an excerpt from NPR’s blog: The idea for the fledgling company came about in March 2013, when Army veteran Kimberly Jung… Read more →

US watchdog questions billions spent on ending Afghan poppy production | Circa News

A recent news item on Circa follows up on the (in)effectiveness of spending to eradicate poppy agriculture in Aphganistan. Billions spent and growth has expanded. “In past years, surges in opium poppy cultivation have been met by a coordinated response from the U.S. government and coalition partners… The recent record-high level of poppy cultivation calls into question the long-term effectiveness… Read more →

The New Heroin Epidemic – The Atlantic

Special report from The Atlantic: More recently, heroin has taken root here after authorities cracked down on unscrupulous doctors who were overprescribing pain meds, sending addicts searching elsewhere for a similar high. In West Virginia, heroin-overdose deaths have tripled over the past five years, while prescription-painkiller deaths have dipped slightly. There were many contributing factors, not the least of which… Read more →