Last Friday was the opening of United Bottle, a project by INSTANT ARCHITECTS, Dirk Hebel & Jörg Stollmann with Tobias Klauser at the Van Alen Institute. A very smart and interesting solution to the issue of waste.

Read about the project at the Van Alen’s site here.

More images after the jump below.

First things first: I got to bid AND win a first edition autographed book by the incredible journalist Seymour M. Hersh. Not only did I get to see him (speak briefly) and Harry Belafonte (!) among others, but I won his book My Lai 4 A Report on the Massacre and its Aftermath in a silent auction afterwards (an architect outbidding lawers? Who knew…).

Another image and the clips of Mr. Belafonte’s and Mr. Hersh’s speeches after the jump.

Now onto the explanation: I was invited by Mara to a gala night by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund in Chelsea Piers. The event, which was the organization’s benefit gala, had a fantastic dinner followed by the 2008 In Justice Awards Presentation in which Art Chong, Harry Belafonte and Seymour Hersh were given awards for their work related to activism and justice.

[flv:http://www.erratica.us/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/hersh.flv hersh.jpg 500 400]

[flv:http://www.erratica.us/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/belafonte.flv belafonte.jpg 640 480]

Here is a fantastic project by Tad Hirsch, a researcher and PhD candidate in the Smart Cities Group at MIT’s Media Lab.

Tripwire is a site-specific installation responding to the unique relationship between the Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport and downtown San Jose, CA. Custom-built sensors hidden inside coconuts are hung from trees at several public locations to monitor noise produced by overflying aircraft. Detection of excessive aircraft noise triggers automated telephone calls to the airport’s complaint line on behalf of the city’s residents and wildlife. Documentation of noise incidents is archived for later analysis.

See more on the project here.

via [guerrilla innovation]

“The laptop needs an order of magnitude less power than a typical laptop,” said Professor Bender. “That means you can power it by solar or human power.” Will we see in a few years a whole new class of bicycle-power apparatuses developed around the re-charging of these laptops in the developing countries were they’ll be deployed? You bet.

Read the BBC news here.

I just came across a very interesting visual anti-pollution campaign by the World Wildlife Fund in China, where the balloon represents the amount of CO2 produced by a car in an average day.

Via [core77] > [neatorama]

Check out the interviews, conducted by Amy Goodman for Democracy Now, with “our country’s leading dissidents” Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn.

Thursday, April 12th
6:00PM

ARC Building, Lower Level
Digital Arts Lecture Hall, Room E-2

Local community, environmental, arts, and civic orgs are organizing a rally and human installation in Lower Manhattan as part of the Step It Up 2007 National Day of Climate Action on Saturday, April 14. The event is called the Sea of People, and it combines the dynamics of a mass rally with the expressive power of an interactive artistic installation.

Following a noon rally at Battery Park (in front of Castle Clinton), thousands of participants, dressed in blue, will stretch north in two columns along the projected eastern and western 10 foot waterlines that may one day redefine lower Manhattan under the ten-foot sea level rise scenario. Both lines will extend approximately one mile north from the Battery–roughly to the World Trade Center site on the west side and Hanover Square on the east. Organizers estimate that a line of this length will call for at least 5,000 participants. www.seaofpeople.org