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Interactivos? re:farm the city

re:farm sensors

re:farm the city is a low-tech urban / community garden project of sorts. The image above is a part of that low tech. This is a simple monitoring system developed using Arduino and Processing that will track humidity levels in six planters and alert the gardener if they get too low (essentially broadcasting that they are in need of watering).

The project is aimed at developing a series of tools that would enable city-dwellers to grow and monitor an urban garden using open-software and open-hardware and as much recycled materials as possible. It also focuses on new ways of visualizing and understanding relationships between plants situated in close or distanced proximity to one another.

I’ve been anxious to get into learning more Arduino for a while, but we haven’t seemed to have an appropriate project as of yet. Maybe there are some ways to include some technology that would aid in the educational element of our community garden…

[via  we make money not art ]

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Guto Lacaz’s Periscopio

Periscopio by Guto Lacaz

I was reading an old issue of Public (issue 32 – Urban Interventions) and came across a description of Guto Lacaz‘s Periscopio.

Installed for the 1994 Arte / Cidade in Sao Paulo, Periscopio was a nine storey high periscope built onto the facade of the Electric Company Building. People walking by on the street could see the exhibition on the top floor, while people in the gallery space could see the movement on the street.

I want to do a large-scale project in Windsor, now.

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Victory Gardens

Victory Gardens, a community art project that encourages people to grow their own food

Victory Gardens is a new project by Amy Franceschini. The project recalls the WWII victory gardens project that encouraged citizens to grow their own food as a tactic to keep them calm over the war and support their troops. Franceschini, the daughter of an organic farmer and an industrial farmer, takes the project back to where it began—in front of the city hall buidling in San Fransisco, where they planted a large garden and since introduced a pilot project to disseminate the skills and tools needed to do urban-scale gardening across 15 households throughout San Fransisco.

There’s also a write-up on the SF Victory Gardens 2007 project in the previously mentioned JoAP.

I know FedUp is working really hard in this city, and that Tom Lucier proposed planting a garden for the downtown mission, and that Scaledown once (maybe) suggested the old Greyhound station downtown is turned into some kind of market, and that there’s rumours of a symposium surrounding urban activism that may discuss some of these very things… so (since this is what BCL does) I have to suggest that we move forward with the planning for a large-scale urban/community gardening plan, something like turning 10% of the riverfront into a community garden (maybe on the slopes that lead up to University Ave). Anyone interested?

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