The Florin Street Band: “My Favourite Time of Year”
“The Florin Street Band” was put together by contemporary composer Leigh Haggerwood to record an original Christmas song he had written called “My Favourite Time of Year”.
His idea was to have the music video in a 19th century English setting with with period costumes, snow covered streets and rooftops lit by old fashioned lantern light.
He could not get the backing of any record companies to produce it as they did not think it would prove financially viable.
Leigh decided to go ahead and produce it himself and managed to get the help of 36 musicians including the English Chamber Choir.
British director Nick Bartleet helped to make the video a reality and as plans progressed, American cinematographer John Perez offered his services as Director of Photography.the extraordinary video was shot at Blists Hill Victorian Town at Ironbridge in Shropshire. Since their release in 2010, the song and video have received an unprecedented public response through social networking websites with many people describing it as a future classic.
Text Santa
Text Santa is a charity initiative that aims to raise money and awareness for nine charities over the festive season. The producers were keen to use “My Favourite Time of Year” as the theme music for the appeal, which Leigh agreed to. The Text Santa appeal was first broadcast by UK’s television network ITV in 2011.
As a gesture of good will, Leigh decided to donate all profits from UK downloads of the song in 2011, to the nine Text Santa Charities, along with the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust which was the location of his Victorian museum video, and a supporter of the Florin Street Band.
Florin Street Website: www.florinstreet.com
The charities supported are:
Carers UK
Crisis
Samaritans
wrvs
Help the Hospices
Yorkhill Children’s Foundation
Helping Hand Charity
Noah’s Ark Appeal
Great Ormond Street Hospital Childrens Charity
Plunderground: The Words of the Profits are Written on the Subway Walls
Artistic Lie Sense
Artists usually consider themseleves “outsiders” because they cannot reconcile their own view of reality with much that is being sold to the general public as the “acceptable norm.” Because of this willingness to “seek the truth”, they tend to see through Media Misinformation even when doing so is not in fashion.
Creating a Dialogue when None Exists
“Plunderground is a ongoing project in détournement and civil disobedience. Détournement, a now common practice continuingly being reinvented by activists and artists the world over, from the Situationaist International to adbusters. The Plunderground project has its inspirational roots both in the historical trend of this process and in the current wave of anti-capitalist campaigning, specifically the online campaign group 38 Degrees.
The project poses the question – to what extent can the citizen participate in the economo-politico process created by state capitulation to private finance? Reclaiming public space and generating a dialogue when none exists, is the perceived purpose of protest, but in what other ways can this be done?
An act of violence masterfully commands media attention through its condemnation by the mainstream, while action that fails to provide the sufficient raw material of gratuitous photo journalism produced by violence is ignored. How do we generate a sufficient debate around issues that matter and create the required perspective and social condition necessary for change when the ballot box or polling booth fail to do so?”
Lawful Criminal Damage
“The aim of the Plunderground intervention is direct and simple. Prevent the theft of UK taxpayers property, namely the evaded tax by corporate and government corruption via the use of lawful criminal damage.
Approximately 600 CBS Fire board adverts removed from the London Underground network, silk-screen printed on the reverse with mock Department of Work and Pensions anti benefit fraud ads naming and shaming corporate crooks.”
Section 5: Preventing a Greater Crime
“Section 5 of the Criminal Damage Act, Lawful excuse; proportional damage of property, with the honest belief that it is to prevent a greater crime, is not an offence in UK legislation.
Two Plunderground agents were arrested during the dissemination of the subverts.
Despite carrying and serving in advance, notices outlining exactly what, why and how was being done and that it resulted from an honest belief (bone fide) that property was under threat, they were charged for the offence of Criminal Damage.”
Not in the Public Interest
“The Crown concluded that it was not in the public interest to pursue the charge and that the Plunderground agents should not have been arrested.
They were dismissed with no further action and reimursed for the expenses.
For the purposes of the project the arrests and dismissed court action have presented the opportunity to galvanise its legal standing.
This process is not a one-off, nor is it unique to Plunderground and can be done by anyone.”
PLUNDERGROUND is an ongoing project and is an AGITARTWORKS production.
www.agitartworks.com
info@agitartworks.com
Britta Riley: A Garden in my Apartment
Britta Riley is an artist, exhibition designer, and social entrepreneur
who works with social media to create mass participation in solving
environmental problems.
Her artwork has been featured at MoMA NY,
the Whitney, the Venice Biennial, Ars Electronica, on the Discovery
Channel’s Planet Green, Good Morning America,NPR and hundreds of
other press venues.
In this video of her presentation at TEDtalks, she makes a very interesting point in contrasting what is proving to be the new enlightened way of shared world-community living, with the outdated and often damaging “bully boy takes all” mentality that seemed to have seeped into the essence of giant multinational corporate thinking, which has apparently lost sight of humanity in its haste to try to monopolise all things, at any cost.
“I like many of you am one of the two billion people on earth who live in cities, and there are days when I palpably feel that I rely on other people for pretty much everything in my life and some days that can even be a little scary.
SOS: (Open) Source Of Solutions
But what I’m here to talk to you about today is how that same inter-dependence is actually an extremely powerful social infrastructure that we can harness to help heal some of our deepest civic issues, if we apply open source colaboration.
A couple of years ago, I read an article by New York Times writer Michael Collins in which he argued that growing even some of our own food is one of the best things that we can do for the environment.
Now at the time that I was reading this it was in the middle of the winter, and I definitely did not have room for a lot of dirt in my New York City apartment, so I was basically willing to settle for just reading the next wired magazine and finding out how the experts were going to figure out how to solve all these problems for us in the future. But that was actually exactly the point that Michael Collins was making in this article, that its precisely when we hand over the responsibility for all of these things over specialists that we cause the kind of messes that we see with the food system.
NASA’s Food for Starships
So, I happen to know a little from my own work about how NASA has been using hydroponics to explore growing food in space and that you can actually get optimal nutritional yields by running a kind of high quality liquid soil over plants root sytems.
Now, to a vegetable plant, my apartment has got to be about as foreign as outer space but I can offer some natural light and year-round climate control.
Fast forward two years later.
We now have window farms which are vertical hydroponic platforms for food growing indoors, and the way it works is that there’s a pump at the bottom which periodically sends some of this liquid nutrient solution up to the top, which then trickles down through the plant’s root systems, which are suspended in clay pellets, so there’s no dirt involved.
A Creative Alternative to Corporate Intellectual Property
Light and temperature vary with each window’s microclimate, so a window farm requires a farmer, and she must decide what kind of crops she is going to grow in her window farm, and whether she is going to feed her food organically.
Back at the time that the window farm was no more than a technically complex idea that was going to require a lot of testing and I really wanted to be an open project because hydroponics is one of the fastest growing areas of patenting in the United States now, and could possibly become like Monsanto where we have a lot of corporate intellectual property in the way of people’s food.
Artist Britta Riley's practical demonstration of the power of shared creativity in her open-source Window Farming project
So, I decided that instead of creating a product, I was going to open this up to a whole bunch of co-developers. The first few systems that we created kinda worked. We were actually able to grow about a salad a week in a typical New York City apartment window and we were able to grow cherry tomatoes and cucumbers, all kinds of stuff.
But the first few systems were these leaky, loud, power guzzlers that Martha Steward would definitely never have approved. So, to bring on more co-developers, what we did was we created a social media site on which we published the designs, we explained how they worked and we even went so far as to point out everything that was wrong with these systems. And then we invited people all over the world to build them and experiment with us. So actually now with us on this website we have 18,000 people and we have window farms all over the world.
R&D-I-Y
What we’re doing is what NASA or large corporations would call R&D or Research and Development, but what we call it is R&D-I-Y, or Research and Develop It Yourself. So, for example, Jackson came along and suggested that we use air pumps, instead of water pumps. It took building a whole bunch of systems to get it right, but once we did we were able to cut our carbon footprint nearly in half. Tony in Chicago has been taking on growing experiments like lots of other window farmers, and he’s been able to actually get his strawberries to fruit for nine months of the year in low-light conditions by simply changing out the organic nutrients.
And window farmers in Finland have been customising their window farms for the dark days of the Finnish winters by outfitting them with LED growlights that they are now making open-source and part of the project. So window farms have been evolving through a rapid versioning process similar to software and with every open-source project the real benefit is the interplay between people customising the systems for their own particular concerns, and the universal concern.
Free to Anyone, Anywhere
So my core team and I are able to concentrate on the improvements that actually benefit everyone, and we’re able to look out for the needs of newcomers, so for DIYers we provide free, very well tested instructions so that anyone anywhere around the world can build one of these systems for free, and there’s a patent pending on these systems as well that’s held by the community and to fund the project, we create products that we then sell to schools and to individuals who don’t have time to build their own systems.
Now within our community, a certain culture has appeared. In our culture it is better to be a tester who supports someone else’s idea than it is to be just the idea guy. What we get out of this project is we get support for our own work as well as an experience of actually contributing to the environmental movement in a way other than just screwing in new lightbulbs. But I think that Eileen expresses best what we really get out of this which is the actual joy of collaboration. She expresses here what it is actually like to see someone halfway across the world having taken your idea, built upon it and then acknowledging you for contributing.
We Need to “Do” More Than “Consume”
If we really want to see the wide consumer behaviour change that we’re all talking about as environmentalists and food people, maybe we just need to ditch the term “consumer” and get behind the people who are doing stuff.
Open source projects tend to have a momentum of their own what we’re seeing is that R&DIY has moved beyond just window farms and LEDs into solar panels and aquaponic systems 7:20 and we’re building apon innovations of generations who went before us, and we’re looking ahead at generations who really need us to re-tool our lives now.
So we ask that you join us in rediscovering the value of citizens united and to declare that we are all still pioneers.”
For more information on window farming, see http://www.windowfarms.org/
Britta Riley’s own website: http:// brittariley.carbonmade.com
Nathalie Miebach: Art made of storms
A unique artist who makes silent weather patterns tangible in her work, and even turns the results into musical scores.
Artist Nathalie Miebach presets her Art made of Storms
Every artist has something unique to offer, but some art forms exceed the norms in an exceptional way. The work of Nathalie Miebach is anything but typical.
This instructor and maker of art holds two master’s degrees and has participated in dozens of solo and group exhibitions. Being a lover of art, science and music, Miebach found a way to take her vigorous passion and combine all three. In her latest series: “Sculptural Musical Scores” the result is baskets made of reed wood turned weather models with a musical twist.
Weather to be an Artist
Miebach makes use of a basket’s horizontal and vertical elements and carefully constructs 3-dimensional grids of weather data based on real-life weather patterns. Miebach has a long-time fascination with weather, and in her work the natural phenomenon we call storms are transformed into sculptures and musical compositions.
Miebach’s process always starts simple, with data collection using the Internet and supplies she accumulates at the hardware store. The result, however, is a mathematically complex mix of beads and colored bands. Although the tangled sculptures are complicated and sophisticated, every single detail represents something.
The Music of Nature
Components that may be indicated in Miebach’s sculptures include moon phases, air and water temperature, temperature ranges and tide levels. Each color, bead and band symbolizes a weather element that can also be read as a musical note. Using the weather data she collects, Miebach weaves together one of her intricate sculptures and then composes them into real musical scores.
“These pieces are not only devices that map meteorological conditions of a specific time and place, but are also functional musical scores to be played by musicians,” Miebach explains on her website.
“My work focuses on the intersection of art and science and the visual articulation of scientific observations. Using the methodologies and processes of both disciplines, I translate scientific data related to astronomy, ecology and meteorology woven sculptures. My method of translation is principally that of weaving – in particular basket weaving – as it provides me with a simple yet highly effective grid through which to interpret data in three-dimensional space.
By staying true to the numbers, these woven pieces tread an uneasy divide between functioning both as sculptures in space as well as instruments that could be used in the actual environment from which the data originates.”
Weaving Numbers into Sculptures
“My method of translation is principally that of weaving – in particular basket weaving – as it provides me with a simple yet highly effective grid through which to interpret data in three-dimensional space. By staying true to the numbers, these woven pieces tread an uneasy divide between functioning both as sculptures in space as well as instruments that could be used in the actual environment from which the data originates.
Central to this work is my desire to explore the role visual aesthetics play in the translation and understanding of science information. By utilizing artistic processes and everyday materials, I am questioning and expanding boundaries through which science data has been traditionally visually translated (ex: graphs, diagrams), while at the same time provoking expectations of what kind of visual vocabulary is considered to be in the domain of ‘science’ or ‘art’.”
The video is from the TEDtalksDirector YouTube channel, posted on the 21 Oct 2011.
For more information about this artist and to view samples of her work, visit nathaliemiebach.com.
Read MoreCreativity versus climate change
What if creativity and smart marketing could be combined to help inspire people to lead a greener life? James Alexander shows how it could be done.
“I’m a naive Sagittarian optimist and I see a world of people helping one another to achieve their potential in a beautiful environment.
Others see a world to market to. And they are good at selling to it.
Take cars. They sell the seductive promise of a lifestyle. They sell on speed. They sell through oozing sexy sounds. They sell freedom. In short, they sell desire, and we cannot resist.
But in a resource constrained world, they are contributing to a problem of alarming magnitude.
Today, right now we are presiding over the first mass extinction of ants on this planet for 65 million years. And yet whilst almost all of us understand this, the truth is that in the developed world, very few of us have materially changed the way that we live.
And why might this be? In communcations terms, activists lobby, but their message does not appeal to many. Scientists, well they know the data, but their analysis and the prognosis tend to scare and paralyse rather than mobilise.
Politicians, business leaders and even celebrities often preach, and none of us like being told what to do. And as for us, we are all just too busy leading very complicated, complex lives and just juggling often competing priorities.
But perhaps great creativity can help us find a path through. Great creativity is astonishingly, absurdly, rationally, irrationally powerful.
Great creativity can spread tolerance, spread freedom, can shine a spotlight on social deprivation. Great creativity is the men maker that puts slogans on our t-shirts and phrases on our lips.
What if great creativity could be used to help inspire people to lead a more sustainable life? To turn it from a chore to a pleasure. To move it from being something we feel we ought to do to something that we want to do.
To make leading a greener life a little more cool, a little more desireable.
One such initiative that’s doing its bit to help on this is Green Thing, a community, a not-for profit created by Tedster Andy Hobsbawm and Pentagram partner Naresh Ramchandani Two wonderful people and creative marketeers that I’m lucky enough to work with.
Green thing aims to use creativity to inspire people to lead a greener life.
Remember the car? Here’s a little scrap of Creative Antidote: (shows video – “The Day Gusty Decided to Walk”)
Green Thing provides an Inspiration Feed: Stories, music, film, poetry and things both created and also curated, to help make people smile, think, want, act to make a difference.
Like these gloves I’m wearing. Lost single gloves, found around the world, sent in to Green Thing, lovingly mended and restored, and then marketed as something altogether more wonderful (glove love)
Or this t-shirt, found in the back of a cupboard, saved, and given a new lease of life.
Or this rather delicious light switch that we spied in Japan.
The science is done, the moral imperative is obvious. Creativity can play its part to make a difference. So this is a call, a plea to the wonderfully talented Ted Community – let’s get creative, and let’s do it soon.”
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Presented to TEDtalks on 29 Oct 2011
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