Stuart Wood, Florian Ortkrass and Hannes Koc: The MOMA Rain Room
What if we could control the weather? The thought has more than crossed the minds of Stuart Wood, Florian Ortkrass and Hannes Koch, the three founders of the London-based art studio Random International. In their latest installation, Rain Room, now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the artists have created an indoor downpour that detects passers-through and actually adjusts, to keep them dry.
Biochar – a key technology for the planet by Hans-Peter Schmidt
The current imbalance in the world’s carbon and nitrogen cycle is not just the main cause of climate change, but also a direct threat to ecosystems through eutrophication, desertification and a decline in biodiversity. Re-balancing through regularly recycling organic material with its carbon, nitrogen and phosphor content is needed. Biochar has the potential to play a key role, as it not only converts the carbon found in a wide range of biomasses into a stable form, but also binds volatile nutrients from biomass residues, thereby recycling them for agricultural use. Though still “early days” for biochar, the prospects for its use are good, whether in crop or livestock farming or in industry. Link: ithaka-journal.net
Michèle Noach: Nø-âch’s Ârc-tìc
Biography. From 2009 Michèle was artist-in-residence at The Eden Project in a 3-year collaboration, studying with horticulturist Ian Martin the adaptive behaviour of Arctic poppies. This was the subject of The Arctic Poppy Chronicles, her 2012 show at Eden and the book, Poppyflakes. This show travels to the University of Oxford Botanic Garden in spring 2013. In 2008, also in Cornwall, she exhibited her lenticular installation The Glasshouse Men in the greenhouses of The Lost Gardens of Heligan, celebrating the lives of the gardeners who were lost in WW1. Her current projects are Cloudberries, involving hunting fjordal cloud systems in Norway for a lenticular series about silence, and Compound an advertising campaign directed at wealthy insects. Michèle Noach trained in print-making in the late ’80s and has worked as an artist since then, specialising in lenticulars (optical 3D images). Her first solo exhibition was Night Trick Acid at the Almeida Theatre in 1993. She was artist-in-residence at Liberty’s of London in 1994. Her 2005 show Nø-âch’s Ârc-tìc at the Curwen Gallery reflected her expedition to Svalbard with Cape Farewell (science & art-based environmental organisation), when she sailed as far North as it is possible to do, on a 1909 Dutch schooner. In the same year her series of lenticular ‘measuring devices’, The Arctic Feel-O-Graphs was shown at The Natural History Museum in London. A second Arctic voyage to Greenland in 2008 on a research vessel also left its polar mark: she is now archiving, with comparative lenticulars, the retreating glaciers of the Far North. This last ongoing series Through The Ice, Darkly, the product of physically tracking glaciers in and below the Arctic Circle, has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, at Parsons in New York, and will next be shown in Beijing at The Central Academy of Fine Arts. The project was part-funded by the Royal Norwegian Embassy. Site web: http://www.michelenoach.com/index.php