We had a very productive day over here on Pelissier Street. Chris Pandolfi joined Simon Rabynuik to form the Department of Unusual Certainties and began setting up shop in 410. Jodi Green’s knitting machine was in motion for most of the day, and Andrea Carvalho arranged a game of Badminton on Eric Cheung’s interior sod.
We’ve been doing this for the last week or so on a fairly irregular basis (mostly because I never seem to get into the school before noon). Pictured above is Danielle’s 9/11 video. This TV was originally installed (as legend has it) to screen advertising from Xerox, as they had offered free photocopying to the student population. Since then, the photocopier is out of toner and the TV itself hasn’t been turned on since the very beginning of the summer. Thinking it was a considerable waste to have it there and not showing anything (like student’s artwork for example), we had used this TV previously for playing Tetris.
Since then we’ve had a DVD player occasionally playing some of our own video works, but we’re certainly looking for more material to screen—let us know if you have anything!
Our Tetris Tournament / Wheatpaste Demo / Sticker-Making Party went amazingly well—we successfully hijacked that big TV in the Lebel hallway, the tournament was filled with high-stakes Tetris 2 action (you can see Susan and Craig battling it out above), we demoed our wheatpaste recipe (hot water + flour until its a smoothie-like consistency) and lots of people made stickers for our commemorative plaque. Thanks to everyone who came out and made this thing happen!
“Could it be that we are connected to all things in the universe and not the centre of it?”
Last night I saw two episodes of E2 Design on TVO. The shows are incredibly well-done, the cinematography style alone would have been enough to have me watch an hour worth of television on nearly any topic, but the fact that the show focuses on our current/historical energy crisis/solutions made it that much better. The website for the show offers downloads of each episode in podcast form, which is highly recommended. The introduction to the show, which you should immediately hear/see playing when you go to their website is inspiring and describes a mindset that I hope becomes more widespread—that we are continually making decisions that effect more people and more things than we could ever have imagined.
A quick entry from the always good Pasta & Vinegar highlights an instance of “revealing the invisible” in France where this large sign shows the real-time energy production of roof-top solar panels and the saved greenhouse gases. We need to be able to see, to understand, what it is we are doing by following the same consumption patterns we have for the last 25 years.
