F.L.A.G. Slideshow -- Welcome to the Farmlab Agbin Garden

Posted above is a silent quicktime slide show with images from F.L.A.G., the Farmlab Agbin Garden. The images appear at five-second intervals.

For more information about F.L.A.G., please click here.

Farmlab Public SalonF.L.A.G. Community GardenersFriday, September 5, 2008 @ NoonFree Admission

F.L.A.G.

About the Salon

Join the gardeners from F.L.A.G., the Farmlab Agbin Garden, for a discussion about the project.

Farmlab has created a temporary public garden at the Los Angeles State Historic Park as part of an ongoing effort to generate viable urban agricultural models independent of land ownership. This garden in "agbins" (short for agricultural bins) has been on site for a few months -- an opening celebration took place July 5, 2008. Volunteers create and tend to individual gardens. The garden is mobile and expandable, servicing those with no access to land.

Communal gardening is a social exercise with many possibilities. Through F.L.A.G. we are creating a social sculpture where everyone participating is part of the art piece. By this we mean that all the participants are active parts of an art "object" where the usual form is not an inert thing but a metabolic work; alive and changing.

F.L.A.G. is located on the former site of Not A Cornfield, a living sculpture by Lauren Bon which transformed a brown field into a green field during one agricultural cycle.

Farmlab Invites You: Come Weed The ThistleThursdsay, August 28, 2008 @7-10amBreakfast, Fresh Greens, Live Music

FARMLAB INVITES YOU

When: Thursday, August 28, 2008
Where: 1745 N. Spring, Los Angeles 90012
Time: 7:00 – 10:00 a.m.
Contact: info@farmlab.org/323.226.1158

• Come weed the invasive Russian thistle, more
commonly called tumbleweed.
• Wear a hat, good sturdy walking shoes, and sunscreen.
• Get your heart rate up, enjoy the view and discuss
our species' future.

In gratitude we will offer all rescue hour workers a good breakfast,
something cool to drink, live music by In Lak Echin in the
anabolic area and a bunch of freshly cut greens.

Thanks,
The Farmlab Team

Farmlab Public SalonFour Works on the Culture of Extraction:Newton & Helen Mayer HarrisonFriday, January 30, 2009 @ Noon

A vision for the Green Heart of Holland, Installation at Gouda

About the Salon
Considering the contemporary condition that they describe as the Culture of Extraction, the Harrisons present four of their projects: the Serpentine Lattice, the Endangered Meadows of Europe, Green Heart of Holland, and Greenhouse Britain.

About the Salon Participants
Among the leading pioneers of the eco-art movement, the collaborative team of Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison have worked for almost forty years with biologists, ecologists and urban planners to initiate collaborative dialogues to uncover ideas and solutions which support biodiversity and community development.

The Harrison's concept of art embraces a breathtaking range of disciplines. They are historians, diplomats, ecologists, investigators, emissaries and art activists. Their work involves proposing solutions and involves not only public discussion, but extensive mapping and documentation of these proposals in an art context.

Past projects have focused on watershed restoration, urban renewal, agriculture and forestry issues among others. The Harrisons visionary projects have often led to changes in governmental policy and have expanded dialogue around previously unexplored issues leading to practical implementations throughout the United States and Europe.

"Our work begins when we perceive an anomaly in the environment that is the result of opposing beliefs or contradictory metaphors. Moments when reality no longer appears seamless and the cost of belief has become outrageous offer the opportunity to create new spaces - first in the mind and thereafter in everyday life."

Further information about the Harrisons: http://www.theharrisonstudio.net

Salsa! Salsa!Revisiting Last Sunday's Love Apples Celebration

This past Sunday, August 18, Farmlab hosted Islands of LA and Fallen Fruit in their LOVE APPLES celebration. LOVE APPLES is an experiment in public space in the city of Los Angeles, imagining new ways in which such spaces could be utilized to make our communities more livable and engaged. It promotes community awareness, sharing, food safety, public resources, and organic gardening.

Community members brought fresh produce, and even fresher moves. Fallen Fruit and Islands of LA invited a professional salsa dancer to give free salsa lessons. The class had a chance to try out their moves while dancing to a nine piece salsa band based in Los Angeles.

Inside there were three different Salsa stations crowded with home-grown produce and folks sharing their favorite salsa recipes. Salsa's ranged from peach to mango to a super-spicy radish salsa.

It was a fantastic afternoon full of great food, great music, and wild dancing.

To learn more about Fallen Fruit and Islands of LA check out their web-sites below: www.fallenfruit.org and www.islandsofla.org

Photo courtesy Fallen Fruit

Farmlab Public SalonWayne WilsonFriday, August 8, 2008Free Admission

New Media and the Olympic Movement

About the Salon

Olympic Games are by several measures the world’s largest mega-events. The magnitude of the 2008 Beijing Games will be a function largely of the convergence of global sport and global media. The marriage of the Olympic Games and sports media is as old as the modern Olympic Movement itself. This symbiotic relationship has grown to a point where accredited media personnel will far outnumber athletes in Beijing.

The inherent characteristics of sport and the Olympic Movement’s longstanding interest in global self-promotion prompted the International Olympic Committee and related international sports organizations to be relatively early adopters of new media forms that emerged as widely-used information tools, in the 1990s. The Internet and related technologies have become integral to the ongoing development of international sport, but they also present a unique set of issues as international sports organizations wrestle with the best way to utilize the 'Net in concert with older media. At the same time, new media enable Olympic critics to reach unprecedented worldwide audiences in ways that by- pass traditional information gate keepers. Finally, the Internet gives sports entrepreneurs who in effect are in competition with the Olympic brand a potent means of promoting their own, competing sports products.

About the Salon Presenter

Wayne Wilson is the vice president for education services at the LA84 Foundation, where he directs the website, library, research projects and the foundation’s coaching education program. He has worked at three Olympic Games as a researcher for NBC Sports and is the co-editor of Doping in Elite Sport: The Politics of Drugs in the Olympic Movement (Human Kinetics).



Photos courtesy: LA84 Foundation/LPI

Farmlab Public SalonBrent BlairFriday August 15, 2008 @ NoonFree Admission

Liberation Arts Beyond the Binary

About the Salon

An embodied interactive dialog about liberation arts and community engagement, with an emphasis on public expressions of performative experiences. How can arts and activism address critical ruptures without re-rupturing everyone in the process? Brent Blair considers the exigencies of doing cultural field work in a post-colonial world and, having just returned from Rwanda, presents the technique of Museum of the Unspeakable, with new photos.


About the Salon Presenter

Brent Blair is an actor, director, voice instructor, and Theatre of the Oppressed practitioner who founded the Applied Theatre Arts (ATA) emphasis at the USC School of Theatre where he is a senior lecturer. As a founding member of the Community Based Learning Collaborative, he offers service learning course credit in all his classes. Students enrolled in Theatre for Youth, Theatre and Therapy, Theatre in Education and Theatre in the Community are required to team up with ECCLA schools, local grass roots activist organizations, clinics, hospitals and/or community-based organizations to address problems specific to these courses and those involved communities around USC. He has been training Cultural Field Workers across Los Angeles and around the world, most recently engaging in theatre for trauma recovery in Rwanda. His research is focused on Liberation Arts from a post colonial model, and his most recent project, The Complex, was part of the 2007-08 Visions and Voices grant called The Press which, in partnership with affected local community members, explored the rupture of the prison-industrial complex.

Image courtesy Brent Blair