re:farm the city

I began contributing to the Re:Farm Project at the Visualizar 2011 event at Medialab-Prado in Madrid in June, where I assisted in the development of the OSE: Open Source Eating Android Application with Hernani Dias, Tian Li, Diego Paonessa and the rest of the group. Thanks to Massimo Avvisati’s suggestion to use PhoneGap, an open source tool for creating phone applications, we used PhoneGap with Open Street Maps to develop a kind of spatial social network that would allow people in Madrid (at first) to search, connect, exchange and possibly dine with people and urban farmers that have a surplus of organic home-grown food. OSE would allow for individuals to avoid the commercial grocery store and the range of expenses/ambiguities influencing how food is priced when shelved: shipping, taxation, scarcity, crop fluctuation, etc., as well as ensuring that each individual can barter themselves face to face and locally for home grown, healthy, fresh, pesticide-free, urban-farm grown foods.
After my work with OSE, in July, I worked to helped on the ReFarm Urban Community Farm Project in Tarragona, Spain. I learned a bit about DIY open source irrigation, specific techniques for sustainable farming with re-appropriated materials.
Following Tarragona, I worked to help with the EcoLab Project at Summer Lab at Laboral Centro De Arte in Gijon, Spain, in August 2011.
Most recently, I worked with Hernani Dias in an artist residency at Laboral Centro De Arte in Gijon in November 2011 to develop three Refarm Kids custom hardware microcontroller boards using the AVR Tiny, as well as revise the existing ReFarm MiniVacations microcontroller board.