re:farm the city

20kg max luggage on the airport. I’ve brought 16kg. I assume that I’ll get some extra stuff with me. what I really didn’t want to fly back are books that I have at home. here are some of my books that I already miss ;(

waste from Tristram Stuart

cradle to cradle from William McDonough

biomimicry from Janine M. Benyus

and here are two of them that luckily I also have a pdf version. 1 kg each one

physical computing and make things talk both from tom igoe

this one I was on the reading process so I’ve brought him with me.

so if any of you have this books at home and you live near ny, bring them to eyebeam, let they live with us until 15 september and we will offer you one drink from our mentha-farm ;)

planning, build team, survive.

first let’s go to the survive in ny. here are the conditions today: Scattered Thunderstorms 31º max, 23º min, Humidity 52%, sunrise 05h00 sunset 20h00. 15h of sun exposure, the plants are happy :) what they are not probably happy with is reflected on my feet. coming from brooklyn by bike at 09h00, 12.1km, all day at eyebeam, freezing (24º inside AC blasting my head) get out 7h later, bike again to brooklyn and my feet arrive with suspicious black stripes.

planning,

this diagram has changed a lot in the last days. and it will change again sometime soon :D but I think that from it you can have an idea of what’s going on now and for the next season in terms of development.

team,

2 heavy heights join the team, jon santiago and andrew o’malley :) and we are still looking for 3 more. one programer, one researcher and one agricultural engineer so if you are around and willing to help send me a email newyork{at}refarmthecity{dot}org

just arrived and we had schedule a public presentation of refarm. it was during the open studios event that occurs in eyebeam every month. the public comes and speaks with the residents, fellows and interns. so we had to make an express farm mainly because we need to have something to talk about :) since talk and drinks are things that go well together the eyebeam farm is a mentha-bar. a farm for teas, mojitos and caipirinhas ;)  we built it mainly from stuff that we’ve found in the neighborhood. and what a nice neighbors we have here at eyebeam. we grab this box from one of the galleries in front of the street.

the guy told me that every week he cuts the boxes and put it out in the street to be collected by the recycling bus.

these are best-world-class-league woods used to mail art. from this you can have a small idea of the ecological impact of transporting stuff. it should worth the trip :) but before they go to recycling (whatever that is depending on the day and the city that you live) we are gonna extend this box life-cycle and make a nice box for our farm.

a classic. 39º of fever and here I go from barcelona to new york.

I arrived without a place to live during this 3 months. for now my friend zach lieberman let me stay some days at his house but it’s not easy to find something decent and cheap in this town..and let me say that both concepts cheap and decent here take another form :p if you know something email ASAP :D

I was very welcomed at eyebeam :) friendly people and amazing conditions for an artist develop his work. here are the laser cutters, under me the 3D printer and the large format printer. there is also a wood workshop and some electronic tools.

and a nice dutch bike :)

next stop was andes sprout society. I went by bus on a 4 hour trip. I arrived and all in the house were waiting for me to start dinner. uau, delicious!!.. it was just what I needed.. good food and great new friends.

andes is upstate new york. from there comes the water that the city drinks and washes herself. is one of those small places on earth where you can see the whole ecosystem in front of your eyes. there are millions of fire flies during the night (a sign of low air pollution) and me and jeni saw a bear. the whole food chain was there including us, humans.

this week is not over yet, tiago, maria, andreas and fransini are all in paris giving the refarm workshop @ mal au pixel festival. let’s wait from news and see some pictures of the first refarms in paris :)

let me put update with the latest news and the backstage moves or should I say the underground growth of the refarm project.

so where to start.. the wiki is getting fat. we have feed her with a lots of info but there is still work to do.. the watering system or the code for download.. speaking about code we have now a svn server:) tiago @ refarm lisbon is building all the structure of refarm server and architecting the data flow. is a huge work managing all data and connect the physical farms with the digital world:p

the refarmers are all also growing.  tiago has just started the refarm group in lisbon in altlab.org. we now have a fantastic group in buenos aires as you can see on by individual pages they have been working a lot:) always hard the farm work. the barcelona group has also been working quite a lot. the spring is here and the farms are almost ready. have a look on our flickr account, the bcn set.

and we are expanding our groups to other cities. we had some enthusiastic invitations!! one from new york and another from paris. ops!.. all these travels.. we need to make more farms to reduce our footprint but that’s easy for us :p

refarm @ ny

the idea started during a meal with sue lea. we where both hanging around those days in hangar. (a hot summer refreshed by those cherries from the yellow house back yard:) I was collecting pearls over 2 tones of etrash and she was making sex with it :p we draw what could be a tech-connection between the humans and their food. the new yorkers and nature. why not?  then came the invitation of andes sproud society. they are near ny have a lot of space, are on a sustainable path, do organic and want to share their house. has they say “Andes Sprouts Society (ASsociety) works towards the exchange of knowledge and labor of urban gardening and field farming, the sustainability of the land, the emergent media exploration, while engaging artists in eco-bio-media issues from an international perspective.” and we engage with them :) we’ll be connecting andes to new york citizens and develop open hardware tools for farmers.

connecting people to their food is one of the main ambition of refarm. this link to food provided by technology is one of our tools in refarm. we now have the boards on a beta version, the software on his early stages and a social network to develop. so we pursuit eyebeam :) we’ve applied to their summer 2010 residency program and we got it!! :) I’ll be in ny from 15jun until 15 september and in spring 2011 for 2 more months.

refarm @ paris

refarm is already in paris since our farmer fransini recently moved there :) and then came the invitation from mathieu to be part of mal au pixel 2010 - Festival des Cultures Open Source – édition #5 21-27 juin 2010. we will have a big team there for a big workshop and establish the paris group.

stay in touch, the next months will be funny :p

refarm the city will participate in a public discussion about sustainable food strategies. the focus will be on the use of new methods and technologies to understand the relations between modern reality of food production and both, natural and social environments, as well as providing alternative ideas. get online 20th of March, Saturday, from 16.00 till 18.00 CET into the Electro Smog Festival

this is the best of buenos aires. recently made ice-cream.. and you find them in every corner. they are small factories, small production, a small family business with a gigantic quality product. what a envy.. as soon as a land home I’ll make a ice-cream-strawberry-refarm :)

uau done, the last days have been busy.. but we are very happy with the results and with the collaboration of gobi :) this look of clean, big horizontal lines, the electronics location and the 30º angles of the wires are all gobi’s responsibility:p a great work here!!

but as every work-in-progress we faced some problems and best of all we faced some new problems:
-the watering system is complex with many moving parts.
-the connections of the bottles were hard to find a perfect solution. it can’t drop a single drop of water. but is a tremendous tool of data visualization. at a glance you can see how many 1L bottles of water your farm is consuming
-the water pumps demand to much water from the first bottle. we had to place a new one between the first and the second bottle.
-we have notice a watering difference between the first hole and the last one.. this farm has 4 meters long. we added more holes to the ending and made different sized holes but we should understand better what happens here.
-uploading the code to the boards stop to be problematic after we made a cables that shortcuts the radios sockets.
-data upload is working but is so juvenile:) we must work on the alert systems, the architecture of the data flow and the data visualization tool

this refarm is working but we assume that it will take a serious maintenance.
we hope that our recently born “refarmBA group” with the help of cceba can use this new tool has part of their medialab. you guys have a new toy in town :) we hope that you have fun and talk to everyone about it ehehhe

see you soon buenos aires and thanks again judith, all the cceba crew, agus clan, rocio, pablo, oscar, gabi, cyntia, galeria appetite, the ice cream makers:) and all the participants of the refarm workshops.

best to you all,
hernani

click on the image and let janine benyus led you the the best designer of the hole planet: nature.
nature designs with what is handy, with low energy involved, room temperature, normally inside/with water with no waste, no hazardous and totally biodegradable. and she does it to create the most amazing materials with qualities like strength or resistance that no human product ever archive. think about the spider lines or the shell of a scarab beetle. a lot to learn from nature and the book is there we just need to make science looking to the right answers.

on the other day someone asked me what is the best indoor lamp for vegetables. I said: a summer or winter veggie? have a look to the complexity of that question

here I am on the plane to buenos aires and here it goes my carbon credits… my ass is a square, I’m still with a cold, 39º of fever and 13h on the same seat doesn’t give any health:)

we will pass the next month working with Judith and her team. yep I’ve said we, tiago will come from lisbon next week;) we don’t have a final plan only some ideas, but one thing is for sure we will be refarming a lot hehehe first things first: Judith, where do you keep all the trash in your city?

we have a wiki and we are proud of it :)

www.refarmthecity.org/wiki

this december I’ve been with dani quilez (bcn) and tiago (lx) preparing this precious tool. is still on her beginnings so see it as a draft.

is yours also! use it and contribute with your ideas, thoughts or criticism :)

sharing has always made us smarter

bufff living on the edge. the clock is always tick tack and the boards came on my last day in portugal:) but I still had time to assemble 2 boards with tiago in lisbon hehehe

the job is perfect and clean although they forgot to print the silkscreen layers.. this boards came from the other side of the planet swimming trough sharks and skipping santa-claus-snail-mail-traffic. we asked seeedstudio.com to make them. it cost us 89$ plus 33$ shipping to portugal. 122$/ by 10 boards “on vacation” and 10 “on the sofa” gives a 6.1$ each board. nice price since it was a very ultra-low-small production.

here it goes the local-sustainable-environmentally-friendly-talk of the refarm speach :( and wait until you see the list of countries where the components are made.. there falls the local talk also..

but on the “safety” side of the materials used on this boards there is only one component that we still didn’t find a Rohs compliance version and that is the LDR (Photo Light Dependent Resistor) everything else is “green”

well green is what they call it but is more a greenish-brownzing.. the RoHS directive, stablished by the european union, calls for the near elimination of 6 chemical substances used in most electronics and electronic equipment: Lead(Pb), Mercury (Hg), Cadmium (Cd), Hexavalent chromium (Cr⁶⁺), Polybrominated biphenyls (PBB) and Polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE). despise all the components that we are using in this project are at least “RoHS compliant” we still have a scarecrow that would damage the environment and ourselves if not correctly disposal upon is end of life. and you know how are the objects, they don’t last forever but some of their raw material do. take mercury for example: it crosses all the food chain and rests on the top. by the way is you , your neurons, your cells, your friends, your mother and her grandson.. there is something in the word ecosystem..

today me and dani quilez are in fablab-bcn hosted in IACC with susanna tesconi, our friend from interactivos09. we made an “agreement”: they let us use the lazer cut and we exchange their kindness with a refarm presentation and mini workshop. we are here making the boxes for the seeds and for the eletronics. we use cardboard that we found this evening in the middle of the street on our way to IACC :)

next 10 december, we will be here in donostia. the day starts with david juarez and then I’ll give a small lecture about refarm. after we feed ourselves we’ll go built farms all together :)

in the middle time we’ll travel to portugal spending there the kristmas. we’ll expect to have the boards delivered from china!! how sustainable.. and assemble them in altlablx.org. if you are near come and give us a hand :p

great november I should say.. we’ve been in cáceres making farms with wheels, we had a food-meeting in cacis.cat. feed our bodies and draw great plans together around the table on open-air :) news soon I promise.  in between I’ve been fighting with eagle (the software that I use to draw the electronic boards) and the boards are almost ready for factory. since we are in a hurry and we don’t have a lot of cash we’ll produce only 20 each. there are 3 boards now: refarm on vacations, refam on the sofa and refarm lights on. we’ll postpone to january 2 boards: refarm on the wall and refarm on mini vacations. all to fit in buenos aires schedule. buenos aires?? yep, buenos aires.. we were invited by the artist judith villamayor to collaborate on her project articultores.net. me and tiago we’ll be in argentina from 29jan > 10mar. if you are near you know, be our guest and come refarming with us. talking about who is near who and friends that you miss around you, we never thought that we would have the chance to visit so soon our friends, santiago, belén and nahuel :)

cu soon hehehe

someone cut the ropes of our hanging farms :( some plants didn’t survive.. FUCK! GRRRR!! one year tanking care of this farms and some asshole send them to the ground.. buff say no more.. what a day today at hangar.. and top of the pops the day finished with the cops entering in our farm and taking notice of our ID.. luckily we’re here making farms or should I say bombs? rest in peace arnica montana and the giant angola’s garlic… in your place we now have a brand new red car ;(

is time to play CSI lol

if this is a blog about process the bills must be exposed. I’ve been lazy with this… the bills are not huge but I have.. how to say.. billdiversity :) 300 types of bills in 300 kinds of paper and there are things that are priceless.. the time and dedication of 19 people until now. but I’ve got all the data, every screw, every metro ticket, all the hours that every person is connected with this project.

here you have the timesheet of refarm, next week the accountable bills  and who pay them. you just need to ask and I give you the password. transparent but not anonymous ;)