muybridge and the chrono-squad

Currently reading "River of Shadows - Eadweard Muybridge and the technological wild west" which is quite mindblowing, even if it weren't entirely relevant to my research. Rebecca Solnit has quicly usurped everyone else as my favourite author of all time. big call, happily made. Her most recent book A field guide to getting lost (ouch - so good) and wanderlust - a history of walking have both recently altered my fundamental view on nature, landscape, self, mapping... this book charts the beginning of cinema at a time when technology was going haywire and everything was changing so fast that new diseases primarily to do with technological overload were being diagnosed by victorian doctors. Solnit is a historian with a very individual touch and she is fearless in how she draws threads together - beautiful stuff - brave books, the lot of them.

Agnes Denes, "Wheatfield - A Confrontation", Battery Park Landfill, NY, 1982

looked at and found this week: Not A Cornfield project, a transformation of a 32 acre industrial brownfield in the historic center of Los Angeles into a cornfield for one agricultural cycle. Reminiscent of the very wonderful work of Agnes Denes and her monumental and seminal land art stuff (see above). Cristian Marc Schmidt's adaptive landscapes are a really nice take on visualising data sets (average temp. of chicago over 20 years) in very simple forms. And hurrah for this comprehensive algorithmic botany site which includes a full online version of the algorithmic beauty of plants and a very delicious web document, complete with animations; Visual models of morphogenisis. slurp.

the first mass produced rooftop groundcover by Toyota Roofgarden (the O.G. site is in japanese only currently) - a golf-green system with inadvertant passive insulation consequences, Richard Sweeny, a ridiculously young UK paper artist who is making me swoon. And lastly Lara Greene's ape, which should be just a collectively operated puppet but just isnt.