The practice has gained currency in the US over the last few years:  used in modified form by REBAR to create temporary green spaces in an effort to promote discussion of the use of public space, or adopted as a way to protest the construction of “box stores” by offering a sort of guerrilla communitarianism as an alternative to commercialism.  The British site refines these practices, giving visitors helpful guidance for starting projects, a sense of virtual camaraderie, and ideas for expanding guerrilla gardening into other do-it-yourself community projects such as harvesting plants for crafts and small businesses or creating topiary political theater.

At distancelab last week I saw Elena Corchero’s Handmade, a wearable camera for capturing the work you do with your hands. This is a simple, wearable solution to the problem of documenting manual tasks for a variety of new media, including DIY sites such as instructables for which the process of documenting a task can be as time-consuming as performing it in the first place. This tool - and others like it - could also help to bring value to products by telling rich stories about their makers and their making, associating new kinds of importance to the forgotten points of the supply chain.

Promoting a Culture of Peace for Children, a British Columbia-based educational resource center focused on community building and alternatives to violence, has created a project that encourages students to repurpose toys with war-related themes.  The program, Acts of Transformation:  From War Toys to Peace Art, asks children to donate toy guns, comics, action-figure accessories, and other items for use in collages and mashup artworks, incorporating the toys into images of trees, doves, and peace signs or using them to create visually chaotic pieces depicting the effects of violence.

Teachers and community activists in British Columbia hope to use the project as part of larger efforts to combat violence.  In the short term, schools that have participated in Acts of Transformation have used the activity as a way to launch discussions not only of violence in media and society but of aggressive attitudes children experience in their daily lives.  As longer range goals, planners wish to incorporate Acts of Transformation into the events surrounding the 2010 Winter Olympics as a tool to promote dialogue exploring the Olympic Truce, which in turn would help efforts to create an education center where children could explore the importance of games and sports in community building.

In an effort to raise public support for legislation limiting the use of disposable plastics, “eco-mariners” Marcus Erikson and Joel Paschal (working with ground support from Anna Cummins) fashioned a thirty-foot raft from 15,000 plastic bottles and an old Cessna fuselage.  Paschal and Erikson piloted the craft–christened Junk–from California to Hawaii.  Over the course of their thirteen-week journey, the pair traversed a region of the Pacific Ocean that holds, by weight, more plastic garbage than plankton–in some areas by a factor of 48 to 1.

Cummins, Erikson, and Paschal chronicled the surreal, Kon-Tiki-like, voyage, providing information about the logistics of the trip, the Sargasso Sea of trash the raft encountered, and the disturbing durability of the vessel.  As Junk made its way to Hawaii, the project received extensive media coverage.  The Algalita Marine Research Foundation, a major sponsor of the junk raft, hopes to maintain this public profile for the topic by supporting a Junk Ride in 2009, in which staff members will bicycle from Vancouver to Tijuana, sharing samples of the “mid-Pacific Plastic soup” with schools, nonprofit groups, and legislators.

Hyperexperience has been erratic as I’ve been visiting Inverness (Scotland) this past week. In just a few days I was fortunate to meet with the experts at the Highlands and Islands Enterprise and visitscotland.com and to attend the Open Studio at DistanceLAB. I’ll be posting about all of the issues and inventions that add to the region’s unique flavor - in the meantime here’s a video of our going away party on Friday at a little place called Hootananny.

The group views community-generated art as an integral component of both participatory society and individual healing.  Following the 1995 terrorist attack on the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, Tape Art created works for rescue workers and injured children.  The experience led the collaborative to explore the role of art in recovery in more depth, culminating in a five-year project honoring the firefighters and airline passengers who died during the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center.

While jetting to Inverness today I found an eco-label for airplanes in my Flybe in-flight magazine. The airline - proud of its fleet of new planes - publishes the environmental impact of its aircraft in terms of fuel, carbon dioxide, pollution and noise. Even without being widely disseminated these labels help to engender environmental literacy, which is the first step toward a cultural shift towards sustainability. And not just for consumers - as part of their report (pdf download) you can learn how to make your own eco-label if you own an airline, so that the ratings become useful to pressure airlines towards greater operating efficiency.

Golan Levin, working with Jonathan Feinberg and Cassidy Curtis, created the Alphabet Synthesis Machine as a tool for exploring the connection between form, perception, and communication. Users enter a “seed glyph,” which serves as a basis for the construction of the writing system. As the letters develop, visitors can change parameters to shape the tone and form of the alphabet. Finished alphabets are archived on the site and made available to their creators as TrueType fonts.

The project grew from the sense and wonder and possibility Levin felt when he first encountered written Hebrew as a young child.  “Since that time,” Levin explains, “I have been preoccupied by the possibility that abstract forms can connect us to a reality beyond language, and bridge the thin line between nonsense and the divine.” The tension between the alienness–sometimes randomness–of the machine’s fictional sigils and the sense that they must contain some deeper meaning allows users to examine both the way they find structure in what verges on visual static and the way in which writing systems evoke other cultures.  Straddling the lines between participatory art, imaginative toy, and philosophical tool, the Alphabet Synthesis Machine gives users the opportunity to explore issues being examined by artists and poets such as mIEKAL aND, Levin, and others.

As planners considered ways for community members and visitors to use the restored site, they explored options that emphasized mining’s key role in the region’s economy while highlighting the area’s natural beauty and the complexity of Vintondale’s history.  Most importantly, designers and historians sought to avoid an interpretation of the area’s past that showed the region merely as victim.  A “History Wetlands” allowed the AMD&ART team to realize this goal.  Covering roughly seven acres, the portion of the site lies over the old colliery itself.  The wetlands contain both a vibrant ecosystem and ruins of the past, representing the potential of communities to flourish after environmental and economic downturns:

Here, where black bony, or waste coal, once barely supported scrubby grasses and stunted trees, the new wetland environment is attracting a variety of birds and wildlife, as well as human visitors. It is also within in these wetlands that the past of the site is most tangible, as the footprints of the old colliery buildings rise from the wetlands as ghostly reminders in the landscape.

rent a car bulgariaNear the wetlands, park areas and bike trails create public spaces for community members, while installations explore both the town’s past and the ideas of renewal and regeneration.  The Clean Slate–designed as part of a student competition–marks the return of clean water to nearby Blacklick Creek.  A memorial to the miners who lived in the town stands near one of the portals leading into the abandoned mine.  Carved into polished black stone, the ghostly image was based on footage filmed in the town in 1938.

In addition to the wetlands, public areas, and works of art, Vintondale has incorporated an environmental education center into the site.  Housed in an old Hungarian Reformed Church, the center provides a home to water quality monitoring efforts and a library of works on ecological history.  As the project reached its final stages and the area became a park, the center has become meeting space for the borough planning commission, historic groups, and community agencies.