Ever wondered whether certain “local” plants will be able to survive if this local climate does not remain hospitable to them?

As the effects of climate change begin to show up in our weather and the length and intensity of our seasons, there may well be casualties.  So what might it look like for humans to intervene?  Might we combine our fashion sensibilities with our traveling natures and share our services as coyotes?  What does it mean to facilitate their (em)migration to a new, more hospitable land and what might our tactics be?

That’s where you come in.

Join us in a wearable garden design party to develop wearable devices for at-risk-plant migration.   We’ll be creating objects to help a select number of plants hitch-hike their way north.

In order to participate you must bring:
•    A clothing item with a pocket or a “wearable pocket” ‘(interpret broadly)
•    A plastic bag
•    A disposable water bottle
•    A plastic container with a lid (coffee cup, yogurt container, etc.)
•    A stapler
•    A scissors
•    A roll of colored tape (duct, electrical, or masking tape)

RSVP:  info@platform2.info

When: Saturday, 10/8/11
 1 PM – 4:30 PM

Where: Arnold Arboretum, 125 Arborway, Jamaica Plain, MA

Part of Soil + Garden + Sky – a trilogy of projects about toxins, our backyard gardens, and our bodies

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Readings:

How can we predict how plant populations will shift as the climate changes?

Predicting the Impacts of Climate Change on the Distribution of Species

Why Trees Migrate So Fast

Canadian Forest Service Website

What do we know are conditions it takes for the sugar maple to grow?

General Information About Acer Saccharum

Stratification of Sugar Maples Seeds

The Woody Seed Manual’s entry on the maple family

What are some issues behind “assisted migration,” or the manual migration of plants by humans for various purposes, including saving them from increasingly harsh climates?

A Framework for Debate of Assisted Migration in an Era of Climate Change

Molecular Issues of Tree Migration Capacity Under Rapid Climate Change

Brownfields Bear Food: An urban forage through backyards, parks, and brownfields

When: Thursday, June 16, 2011, 6-8 pm
Who: with David Craft, forager, and cohosted by JP Green House
Where: meet at the JP Green House, 133 Bourne Street, Jamaica Plain, MA

Light dinner of foraged greens and homemade accompaniments provided

Let’s meet and walk with expert forager David Craft to discover the intersection of edible plants in the city and invisible toxins. We will walk to the site of two of the over 2600 reported brownfield sites in Boston. Brownfields are properties that have been contaminated by hazardous materials and may or may not have been cleaned up. Along the way we’ll learn about what we can eat and what we can’t, we’ll signpost these contaminated sites, and we’ll end with a dinner comprised of foraged salad greens.

RSVP:  info@platform2.info

Part of Soil + Garden + Sky – a trilogy of projects about toxins, our backyard gardens, and our bodies

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check out our album of pics on flickr

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Readings:

What is urban foraging?
* read David Craft‘s book, Urban Foraging:

What are brownfields?
* find them in Boston
* Boston’s Brownfields, Government Engineering

What is in our soil?
* Sources and Impacts of Contaminants in Soil, Cornell Waste Management Institute

What is the impact of these brownfields in our communities?
* Environmental Justice, Urban Revitalization, and Brownfields, National Environmental Justice Council (pdf download)

Can we remediate the toxins in our backyards?
* Urban Soils and Backyard Gardens: Potential Contaminants and Remediation Techniques, Canada’s Office of Urban Agriculture
* Cure Your Toxic Yard: Plants that Extract Lead and Other Buried Pollutants, Nicole Willner, PlanetGreen.com

My experiment took place on Thursday, March 3, in Chelsea, New York City. I asked someone on the street for directions to a flower shop; instead of following the suggested way, I decided to go in the opposite direction. It was the first time that I was in that area of Chelsea. Making an effort to ignore street signs, subway maps, and shop signs, I walked aimlessly and took pictures of walls. I chose to photograph wall surfaces because they represented the only visual breaks from an overwhelming amount of information from which I was trying to escape, in order to prevent myself from identifying where I was exactly. From this perspective, I felt how the city was aggressively working against my project.

Along the process, whenever I was in an intersection, I wrote down a word I would hear being spoken by the passers-by. The words were: “laughs,” “direction,” “need,” “forget,” “break,” and “world”. These words became part of the first and last lines of 3 short free-verse poems which I wrote during my walk. As I frequently write poetry, this activity helped me to focus on the unfamiliar urban space and on how it affected my imagination.

New York City. March 3, 2011. Late afternoon.
A carnation laughs sarcastically
I turn my head to look at it
It’s scandalous
A red carnation laughs to tears
Why is nobody waiting for me round the corner?
Bakeries close down; starving cooks gulp brioches
I step in the puddles which reflect the winter sky
I look back, but I can’t see what’s left behind
A carnation laughs sarcastically
Everybody thinks it’s odd
But keeps going
In the opposite direction
*
You need not read now, it’s confidential
It’s all between us
A moonbeam danced its way into my room and stayed with me
I jump over it every morning and I feed it with rage when it begins to fade
It is a magic recipe
The moonbeam is frightened, because it hears salty laughter
The magic recipe
Is to utter the words
You begin to forget
*
Words break like egg shells
The sun hid from this part of the world,
Throwing with eggs to a bare wall
Words stumble upon dying rays
And melt in a mix of languages
My native tongue, almost forgotten
But its words are the least fragile
Smiles on top of silences on top of words
It takes only a question mark
To destabilize a world
- Sonia Coman

For this project, I decided to document the experience of being disoriented at a large club that I’ve never been to before. It was at “No Tomorrow,” a dubstep night at Machine Nightclub. I went by myself, without knowing anyone, and simply wandered around. Even though it was a confined space, it was nevertheless disorienting to not know anyone and therefore, not know where to go next. I felt like a spectator and an intruder, whether watching strangers play pool, taking cell phone pictures of dancers, or simply exploring the space. I became increasingly lonely, which was to be expected, but also, increasingly anxious. I wondered whether people were noticing me and also, whether they were judging me for not having friends. We are so often without friends, but this usually happens in familiar places–the university campus and our neighborhoods. To be without friends and completely self-contained, in a place meant to facilitate interaction, I felt my anxiety become almost overwhelming and the act of leaving the confines of the club–of calling a taxi and going home–was all that I wanted after barely an hour. Here, in this image, I have stitched together some of my pictures to hopefully reproduce the feeling of disorientation as well as to mimic the smeared quality of late-night memories.

I got lost with my friend Julia Rooney. We took bikes, paper, and writing instruments, and boarded the first public bus that came our way (the 1). Once on the bus, we blindfolded ourselves, set our pens to paper, and began to draw the path we felt. The bus moved in a straight line for most of the trip. I felt that I understood the trajectory along which my body was moving, but I lost track of where I was along that trajectory, and then eventually lost track of where the path was taking us.

We stayed on the bus until the last stop. We had originally planned to use our hand-drawn maps to find our way home, but decided that we would most enjoy our last moments of being lost by roaming freely before finding ourselves in South Boston and biking back to Cambridge from there. The attached PDF is the map that I drew while on the bus, documenting the moments in which I most lost track of where I was in space.

On Saturday March 5th 2011, Sara Stern and I made “movement drawings” of a 45-minute, blindfolded bus ride from Harvard Square to Roxbury. I used a roll of tracing paper and marker; she, a drawing pad and pen. Blindfolds on, we started our lines at 4:03: we drew the movement of the bus – turning, progressing straight, stopping, turning – until the driver told us it was the last stop. At 4:45, we got out, took our blindfolds off and got on the bikes we had brought. Without looking at our movement maps, we headed down the street, following the “felt movement” of our ride – generally straight. At 5:45, we arrived back in Cambridge.
I have not yet seen Sara’s drawing, and I first looked at mine while unrolling it on the scanning bed. We took no photographs, nor video footage: the trip is only recorded by our respective drawings of “felt terrain.” Our trip home, in turn, was guided only by the motions we had drawn.

WONDERLAND (I’ve always wondered what was there, at the end of the Blue Line)

1) I am walking through a construction site at Wonderland and it is obvious to me that I don’t know where I am going. I feel as if my body language is shouting to everyone around me I DON’T KNOW WHERE I AM GOING so I put up my fur-lined hood and walk as if I have a destination.

2) There is a big fence with a NO TRESPASSING sign between me and the busy road and the sidewalk is covered in sand leftover from snow and the sun is in my eyes and I am the only pedestrian.

3) I am following a woman with bangs which curl like a letter “c.” We are walking down a street lined with storefronts with Spanish names. I follow her until she goes inside a busy bakery filled with cakes and pastries.

4) I am now in a residential neighborhood. I see many signs which read SLOW, CHILDREN but I am the only one on the street. I see another sign for GARFIELD ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. I recall that in 5th and 6th grade I also attended a Garfield Elementary School.

5) Just beyond the school I hear the sound of the T passing by so I walk until I can see the tracks. Then I walk down several streets which dead end at the rails as I search for the T station. Eventually I find pedestrian access to Revere Beach station, but instead of entering I take a little detour to stand on the beach. I pick up a piece of shell and put it in my pocket.

Getting Lost? from Bijoyini Chatterjee on Vimeo.

We got lost without meaning to. We were on our way to the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston), looking forward to seeing some experimental short films. And google maps told us to take I-90 instead of I-93.
We did not have iPhones, nor smart phones nor a GPS. Just a piece of paper glaring at me, telling me to take an exit that did not exist.
The emotions I remember – confusion, frustration, disbelief that it took us one hour to go 7 miles. And perplexity that we missed the screenings that we had so been looking forward to!

The sense of feeling disoriented and uncomfortable was not, in itself, a loss. We are aware of where we were; always in Boston, a familiar city even if the immediate space were unfamiliar. What was a great loss was the consequences of the lost time — not being able to enter the theater late to see the films.

When we live our routine lives, we can project into the immediate future based on what we have experienced in the immediate past (We are hungry, we will eat dinner. It is 11pm. We will be going to bed shortly). Getting lost creates a break in our ability to anticipate and control our immediate future, the space around us and time. (What street should we take? How long is it going to take to re-orient ourselves? Have we been to this intersection before)? I do think that this discontinuity in our little life story is really the biggest impact of losing ourselves in the uber-connected age.