Luminous Green Desert

These workshops are organised by Marko Peljhan.

The UCIRA Luminous Green Desert Research Open Space gathering will start on 13 February 2009 at the UC Riverside Palm Desert Research Center and will be focussed on the issues surrounding the Desert Sustainable Gardens Initiative. The gathering in the Boyd Deep Canyon Desert Research Center will take place over two days and will be designed as an Open Space workshop, using Open Space Technology, a proactive facilitation technique. The gathering aims to encourage reciprocal exchange of information, knowledge and experience in a non-hierarchical manner. Participants will live in the Boyd Deep Canyon Desert Research Center and camp and will share the responsibilities of organisation, cooking and discussion.

FoAM, as the founder of the Luminous Green initiative, hosts two remote presentations at the two workshops (on Saturday 14 February and Tuesday 17 February).

On 19 and 20 February 20 2009 the Luminous Green Open Space Workshop will take place at UCSB. The UCSB workshop will be devoted to a trandisciplinary discussion on the potential of art/science alliances for world changing activities and will involve a plethora of artists, academics, humanists, social and natural scientists and engineers in discussions devoted to strategizing future world systems that will go beyond the current status quo.

Is there anything that we can learn from existing social experiments, or the fringes of arts, design and technology to help us make our economic and political systems less fragile and unstable? What can artists, designers and engineers learn from the way policy and business approach the global environmental turbulences? Are individual ethical horizons and participation the basis of any world changing activities? The second day will be devoted to an Open Space Session connected to the UCSB West Campus spaces and the experimental Media Arts and Technology Program and SciARC student STEM initiative.