catt's blog

Before the year was out I managed to finish an ongoing project: Two Cali Stories. I have been working towards a sort of multimedia portrait of my own participation online in the last ten years or so and I decided to go ahead and finish it out so as to have some sort of record and also as way of exploring the final product in the print on demand art process.

The makers and actual tinkerers of Algae tech are starting to understand the significance of Algae as a food source. In the Solazyme article below in Bizjournals I really like the part where they were faced with the actual product of their efforts: a liter of algae oil and they were impressed at how much it resembled olive oil. “We were running lipid profiles (on the algae) and observing that, ‘Wow this looks like olive oil”.

My first significant experience with blogging was on livejournal. At first I did it without even knowing what it was called. Regularly writing for an email listserve I was used to being able to directly converse with some pals, and on livejournal I was able to find a fairly significant group of people who were really into what we then called "Alternative Energy, Appropriate technology, and permaculture" and what we now all understand to be "sustainability".

Step 1: Open all your files. this is like starting the game.
Step 2: review your inventory, and try and keep it in reach. This includes references and sketchbooks.
Step 3: Monitor your stats. This means keeping track of your own weaknesses and taking advantage of your best strengths. this also means time.

Like a lot of people I didn't really understand twitter at first. My pal Danese would talk about it or use it , and I admit I was at a loss. In my mind it was another blogging service only extremely very limited in the 140 character count. Living in the shadow of two large ridges I dont really have cell phone service at home and most of my texting experience consisted of texting friends while they were in music rehearsals or in studio so I could avoid disturbing them.

Thanks to Ponoko Laser cutting service I won a free ticket to Maker Faire 2009! Ponoko has been operating exclusively out of New Zealand until very recently; they now have a stateside office in San Francisco where you can place orders for custom laser cutting done on a wide variety of materials. Maker Faire is the worlds largest DIY festival, in its fourth year now.

Sometimes ideas fall together quickly. several times the last week this one has made its way through my mind until all at once this morning I could see a whole system come to life.This last week or so I discovered the work of Homaro Cantu the food wizard who wants to feed the world.

The world game-wise I would like to portray and celebrate and create is sort of mapped out in my head. It is a world based on the etoys theory of soft fences: you start out in a children's playground that is very rudimentary, very activity oriented and with a very low fence. This is the sort of physical playground I remember as a child growing up: it was a set of bars and rings and a sandbox with a scrap of pavement marked out for hop scotch and a numbers square game.

It had a low fence that you could look over into the next playground.

Protovation is about being able to observe and detail the flaws in a system you yourself are in the process of creating. As an artist it means working in series, as a scientist it means taking a laboratory approach to breaking down a problem.