week 3: Jan. 30- Feb. 5 #1

I like food.  I like making things.  I like to cook so I went to a class on food culture(s) at the Common Ground Food Co-op in Urbana.
The guy giving the presentation worked at Blue Moon Farms and was cute as a bug's ear. He was really into it.  Sour dough, porridge, and kombucha were all explained and demo'ed.  To finish up the demo for porridge, he cooked the fermented grains.  When it was done, he said we could all have samples to taste.  Just as I started to get ready to get up he grabbed his mixing spoon and stirred the pot, then put the spoon to his mouth to taste it.  Then, it went back into the pot.  I instantly visualized of one of my favorite film scenes.  Check out the last five seconds of this clip for the mental picture:

fake-eating porridge

In my mind I  threw my hands up in the air and groaned as the spoon hit his mouth, and I imagined the rest of the people in the room to be doing it too.  He started to spoon the porridge into tiny Dixie cups and slowly everyone came up and took one.  I took one too but did not eat it.  He looked pretty healthy, but it is 2013 you know...

showing us our SCOBY for kombucha........earthy............

and 

           here is a short TED video, thanks to a chat with Bill Berger about Kombucha.      

(7 minutes)

 

and then  

of course I thought about Eben Bayer: 

(9 minutes)

Then of course, I looked around for art:

An Art Exhibit Underneath London Made of Entirely of Fungus

Then of course, I just started looking:

 I have seen these things in antique stores

(This is lens fungus.  no kidding.  i never knew about it before.  Just proves you
don't know everything.
It's so....Pink.)

and then of course, Columbian sculptor Doris Salcedo 

                                                                         

Funny!  I just saw this in the sculpture show in the 
Link:

http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Kombucha-Tea

week 2: Jan. 23-29

CAS Brown Bag Lecture: "Disrupting Patriarchy: An Examination of the Role of E-Technologies in Rural Kenya"

The time and location made it easy to pop into this presentation.  I don’t know a thing about Kenya, but I do know quite a bit about Patriarchy.  E-technology I know enough to start a blog.  

Brenda Sanya (doctoral student in Global studies in Education) presented her thesis, showed 3 youtube videos that were actually commercials (one a pseudo ‘documentary’) for different corporations (focus on M-Pesa) in Kenya.  Example of one:




 

these ‘commercials’ blew my mind.  The implications!  That crazy/mixedup/infectious western culture!

The speaker’s thesis was that e-technology was allowing women to progress in status and rights (voting, economy) because they were –necessarily- becoming more literate (in order to use the hardware).  Actually I think she had a bit more than that.  I suggested in the discussion period after her presentation that the empowerment of women might actually be more from the corporation (M-Pesa) who saw that the disembodiment of women through virtual commerce actually created a new profit market, and that an unintentional benefit (to women) was gains in women’s rights.  I was very excited by new ideas and parallels to my life as I left and headed back to school to demo proper contact sheets.

"The Iceman Cometh: Forgotten Pioneers of British Arctic Exploration

 

of course I went for the pictures.  i long for remote places, devoid of people, and the arctic fits the bill. the lecture was interesting enough, but again, the images not very satisying.  when it was over, i spied this book in a case with these trout drawings.  i love drawings of trout.  not photos of trout; drawings.  i would imagine you can see why.





I used to like maps quite a bit too.  not so much anymore, i think it has something to do with technology but I cannot be more specific than that.  


I have never been in the rare book room.  it was not what I expected







Shoe Stories and Dance (Spurlock Museum)

enough said:

week 1: Jan. 16-22

Possible External Triggers of Star Formation in the Orion -A Giant Molecular Cloud 

various species, freely mixing

I like pictures, and thought I would like to see pictures of stars.  Oftentimes i can understand things if I can see a picture, even better if I am the one making the picture.  The pictures used were charts that did not capture my attention, so I switched my attention to listening.  The subject was outside of my knowledge base and quite impenetrable for me so I spent the time listening and watching the interpersonal dynamics in the room, as if astronomers were a different species. This was more fun. They look like us and even dress like us, but the hairstyles were noticeably different.  
I noticed that even though they are a different species, they have many of the same 'issues' with each other that we picture-makers do.

Middle East Story Time

listening to stories of squirrels

I like stories.  I like telling them and listening to them and thought I would see if they are different in the middle east.  i forgot that the 'story' of stories being told was actually being told in Urbana, and I am quite familiar with that format.  I did pick up some big time warm and fuzzy watching the kids in the room and frankly, watching the parents watch the kids.  it turns out that even though many in the room did not know each other, they all had liking kids in common.