The art and science fair is this Saturday!

Art and sciene unite!

Saturday May 8, 12pm – 4pm

Harbourfront Centre
235 Queen’s Quay West, Toronto

Free, open to the public

“The Too Cool For School Art & Science Fair was invented to turn the spotlight on the unexpected feats of imagination and exploration that are happening all around us,” writes Sally McKay of her most recent brainchil on the home page of the project, www.artandsciencefair.ca.

The website was designed by me and the illustrations were drawn by Marc. We worked closely with Sally to come up with the name and identity graphics. I also designed some print posters that are available as  PDF downloads from the website.

What is an Art & Science Fair?

The event is structured like a typical science fair, with fifty projects and their creators assembled for one day to share their work and ideas with an audience and to compete for awards. The difference is that the projects are a mix of both art and science.

Additionally, the participants in the Too Cool for School Art & Science Fair are from all walks of life, amateurs and professionals, many sharing their pet projects with the public for the first time. Participants are selected from an open call for submissions on the basis of originality, depth of inquiry, creative innovation and the element of surprise.

Read more about the project and check out all of Marc’s awesome illustrations on the Too Cool for School website.

Ladilola earrings in black patent leather in a geometric, pointy shape.

Ladilola earrings in grape purple patent leather stamped with an alligator pattern cut to a geometric, teardrop shape.

Right now the shop looks a bit hodgepodge as a result of this experimenting. Soon a style will emerge and the shop will fill up.

Towards the end of my year in France (2008), my friend Nada who makes goregeous leather bags in Paris took me to a small warehouse in the Paris suburbs. In a corner I found a box of post-industry scraps of genuine crocodile leather and patent leather stamped with a croc pattern. I was on my way from France to India, and the leather travelled around with me for four months (yes, I know, crazy) until I was finally inspired in the cooler weather of Nepal to start designing and cutting. And that is how the eco luxury Crocodile Tears Earrings collection came to be.

Here are some of the items now in the shop:

Below are a few of the photos – you can see the rest in the Band Practice photo set on Flickr. Thanks to Band Practice for the photo op. :)

Knit log pillows by Chick sin Design.

I just love these knit bolster pillow covers by Hong Kong based Chic sin Design. Originally I found the items in their Etsy shop.

The pillows are in the shape and size of tree logs “chewed by beavers”, and the tree bark and other texture graphics are knitted into the textile in several colours, rather than printed on the surface.

In this image you can see the stockinette pattern of just several colours of yarn knitted to make the white birch texture of one of the logs.

“Special knitting machine”. Hm. Sounds like I have some googling to do about a very fun process, because this stuff looks amazing.

Have a look at this cosily realistic looking grizzly bear bean bag.

And how about the pillow of… folded Hong Kong dollar bills…? And the three foot tall calendar pin-up girl calendar pillow that is… a functional calendar for 2010?

And the… Wait. What is that? Is that a pillow knitted to look like a 12 inch bag of weed, complete with a purple-blue press seal and glare off the “plastic”?!

It IS a pillow knitted to look like a press seal sandwich bag of weed!! Click the photo to check out the product webpage .

The product description for this series is a treat:

Drugs give easy way outs in life. They cause reliefs by de-stressing, unrevealing your true hidden self so one could express without boundaries, and providing an escape route to problems in life. However, all these “seen-to-be” enjoyable moments are temporary illusive and addictive.  The stronger desire for drugs the more you travel between unreality and reality and eventually you will lose the control over drugs and drugs will start taking control over you.

There seems to be quite a bit of travel between “unreality and reality” in this unlikely combination of pillow themes, and Chic sin Design explains on their website:

…our products are classified into two line: “Chic line” and “Sin line”.

Chic Line: A line of products, which are most emphasized on the esthetics, simplicity and visually impression.

Sin Line: A line of product that launches with a message conveyed uniquely and intently.

Different themes are set up for different seasonal products around the year. All products and created with true emotions and expressions, usually on dissatisfactions to the society today. As views to aspects of life and society may be something very personal and ephemeral, you might find some of our products presented in an unpleasant style. However, we believe it is this uniqueness and sarcasm which make this line of products attractive to like-minded consumers.

A lovely display of the flexible and forgiving nature of English grammar and a dizzying array of dualistic ideas on the home decor front.

The icing on the cake for me is that Chic sin Design makes for “chicks in design” in the website domain, www.chicsindesign.com, and the contact page for Chic sin Design lists Charles and Keith. Charles and Keith of Hong Kong. Of course. I love this world that is getting crazier and more wonderful by the minute.

Another project of the idealistic and completely impractical variety.

Why are these types of projects so popular and receive so much attention? Maybe they are just very easy to digest, and certainly they hit a nerve.

Found on Coroflot http://www.coroflot.com/

SROPSU - Self Replicating Oceanic Plastic Salvage Unit

Here is a pataphysical approach to the  Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

SROPSU is a self replicating sea borne plastic dissembly/replication unit.  The abundant scrap plastic floating in the world’s oceans is taken into its maw with a conveyor belt.  The plastic is molecularly recombined to self replicate RepRap in the fabricator end of the unit.  When there are enough RepRaps to tackle the patch, they switch production modes and start creating useful things like furniture, housewares and footwear that wash ashore in tidy bundles to be collected by school children.

This image of a mushroom enabled garbage composter was inspired by a video podcast of Paul Stamets talking about his extensive research into the bioremediation capabilities of mycelium networks (aka mushrooms).

Here is link to a transcript of another great interview with Stamets about the remarkable nature of mushrooms.

The reasons for this were many.

Magda had a distinct feeling of being stuck.

We had figured out a way to coast through our life as freelance graphic designers/artists. We had developed a well-worn, carefully cultivated, comfortable rut of routine in Toronto. Our combination of skills and our solid network of business contacts and friends assured that we would be able to maintain a subsistence level artist existence in the city, although that year we were getting a bit more in debt every month. Although our apartment and such was comfortable, there was very little social wiggle room and the resulting torpor was upsetting to Magda. This is a very frustrating situation for someone who thrives in a rich environment characterized by rapid changes.

Our personal evolution was at a standstill. We needed to shake things up.

Stability is going to get increasingly harder to maintain.

While we were coasting in Toronto, irreversible climate change was confirmed. A significantly large coalition of scientists had agreed that by the end of this century the arctic ice cap would no longer be frozen in the winter. It is very difficult to imagine the implications of global climate change. The weather is a complex system that currently evades humanity’s best methods for understanding, modeling and predicting it. A few things were clear however; our current North American lifestyle and its relatively excessive levels of consumption were going to have to change radically.

Every aspect of city living will have to adapt to these new conditions in the next 50 years. Unlike previous generations where the threat of resource collapse was debatable and a response to the “potential” crisis could be postponed indefinitely into an unforeseeable and only potential future, our generation has to acknowledge that by the time we reach the positions of power and authority now occupied by those 10 – 15 years older than us, by the time we are expected to take the reins of civilization, we will be in the midst of an enormous climatological and consequently economic and social upheaval. The nature of this state of disruption has been compared unfavorably to the death throes of previous human civilizations.

We were not going to learn how to adapt to this new situation by coasting along in our comfortable lives. It seemed like a good time to initiate necessary change.

Hive mind activating.

By virtue of relatively new internet technologies, particularly the blog and the RSS feed, we have been learning about an incredible awareness of and movement towards sustainability in all aspects of global culture. Big business, scientists, NGO’s, i.e. numerous entities of all sizes, organizational complexity and political affiliation, representing an incomprehensibly large group of individuals are now working to realize something that resembles the utopian civilization seems to be embedded in the collective unconscious of the species. The critical mass of activity that is required to facilitate change at the required rate in order to shift this civilization’s principle models of organization, maintenance and development to allow for it to squeeze through a narrowing aperture of survival seems to be reaching a credible level.

In other words, the window of opportunity for the civilization of h. sapiens to make it into the next millennium appears to be closing. However there seems to be a vast number of humans working towards adapting this civilization so that it might actually fit through this window.

It is also important to understand that it is only the relevant, sustainable, cooperation based systems and technologies that appear to be fluid and adaptable enough to survive this transition. Top down capitalism, wealth driven democracy and fundamentalist exploitations of spirituality – any system that is based on exclusion and exhibits the traditional hierarchies of power and control will not fit through this window. They will simply lack the flexibility and speed to adapt at the required rate of change.

The most amazing thing about this collective action is that many of these groups are acting without a common strategy, without a centralized leadership, they are each moving towards their own specific goals, knowing of course that they are not alone in their intentions but not knowing of the massive scale to which this collective action has grown.

Communication technology in its application as a tool for education and cooperation is fundamental to this movement. Movement is too small a word to convey the significance of this phenomenon. In times of optimism it feels much more like the nascent comprehension of the next stage of human civilization.

These ideas are not ours but we have now understood them for ourselves and are attempting to apply them directly to our life.

Lightening the load on us and, ideally, the planet.

One sure way to find ourselves in a rich environment characterized by rapid changes was to adopt a mode of existence that was fundamentally nimble and could be carried with us through these changes. In other words, traveling.

Traveling can teach us a number of things:

• By adopting a semi nomadic lifestyle we would be forced to deal with issues that could easily be avoided by a sedentary one – you become much more aware of all the baggage you cart around, as well as being much more appreciative of any opportunities to eat, sleep and shit.
• Cooperation, submitting to the good will of other people, becomes a regular fact of life. We are ejected from the cocoons we tend to build for ourselves in times of abundance and security.
• Also by removing ourselves from a known and secure environment we are attempting to train ourselves to be able to deal with the unexpected, to recognize opportunities that will enable us to thrive in uncertain conditions and to take those opportunities without hesitation.

Travel costs money.

Magda and I are rich in skills, experience, eye-hand coordination and time. Recognizing this, we thought that perhaps with the aid of technology (laptops, the internet, international electronic banking) we could travel and work and learn. Since 2005 we have designed websites, logos and murals, sold photographs, jewellery and art, had art shows, wrote articles and comics – the list goes on, and all from the road.

One interesting effect of the decision to go nomad is that our “subsistence level” artist incomes based on these activities would not allow us to travel in more expensive (i.e. first world) countries. Fortunately, the internet seems to have reached institutional status in most developing countries around the world. It’s remarkably easy to find the patience needed to deal with dodgy connections during deadlines in the tropical heat when a little money earned from clients back home goes such a long way in the host country. Events such as not-infrequent power outages are also easier to handle in a host culture that generally moves along at a slower, calmer pace, where richness is derived from a life lived moment by moment.

In the time that we have been traveling in Central America and South East Asia it would seem that the current conditions of living in a developing country mimics the conditions which the “developed” world will have to face in the coming century. The first world understanding of wealth centered around the accumulation of money and material security is going to be useless to us as humans as we attempt to deal with the implications of rebuilding a civilization based on the politics of scarcity.

This condition of scarcity is already a fact of existence to billions of humans in the "developing" world. The technology that is currently being deployed in these parts, where people are dealing with a situation that already resembles the resource deprived future into which we are all headed, is the technology that most clearly points the way towards the evolved civilization to which Magda and I are irresistibly drawn.

Networking = Sharing + Learning

Magda and I are both convinced that language is the primary tool for the advancement of the species. Human imagination and inventiveness, the ability to anticipate the future is based on the facility one has to manipulate language as thought (and subsequently speech, writing, music). The ability to communicate these ideas is also based on one’s language facility. The idea of language refers not only to traditional, cultural/geographically varying modes of speech and writing, but also to the ability to communicate visually. I can only speak one language! Traveling is to be a means of learning first hand the languages of others or, more accurately, how other people think.

Some other things to understand…

Our current course of action is as much of an experiment as it is a strategy. We are not sure exactly where we are going, and that is part of the exercise.
It is our intention to free ourselves from our previous mode of existence shaped by a mostly sedentary life in a North American city so that we might be able to explore the numerous possibilities for a sustainable existence that are offered by the natural and technological world.

It is also very important to understand that we are not motivated by despair, rather by the thrill of participating/contributing to systemic change. We love many aspects of our current civilization (big city life included) probably much more than the average contemplative individual. And we are very interested in preserving the really valuable elements of our culture, especially our evolving capacity for communication.

We are both idealists with strong imaginations, so why not attempt to live a dream?

See many more photos on the Happy Sleepy Flickr collection .

Marc Ngui’s art and projects can be found on the Bumblenut Pictures website.

Magda Wojtyra’s art and design portfolio is located on the RNA Studio website.