Organized Networks
Organized Networks
			
							
					
															
			
							
					
															Seed up !
Is a campaign to support the Belgian project seeds for food, initiated by prof. Willem van Cotthem. The project objective is to collect seeds for growers in North african refugeecamps. Just the seeds from tropical fruit and vegetables that we have an abundance of in our supermarkets and on our kitchentables, are expensive and hard to get hold on for people cultivating in the areas where they climatwise easily can be grown. Seeds are by nature hardy and if we collect them from our food, dry them and pack them with some care, they can be used and provide food for people in camps that have very little access to fresh food otherwise. The very grassroot, user friendly character of the action, is also suggesting an alternative to great scale aid projects, and great scale agriculture policies (=monopoly), letting information and seeds travel independently over unionborders
Cowdown !
Kultivator shows two pieces, that concerns the development towards less biodiversity and injust distribution of foods and goods globally, promoted a.o. by European union Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). In both works the link is laid between the restriction on freedom and development that monopoly and closedcode/copyright is causing in software and the same phenomena occurring on farming and food supply.
The Cowdown is an installation with a reconstruction of a now extinct breed of cow, ”The Ölandsko” that used to be common on the island where Kultivator is sited. The cow is modelled 1:1, and standing inside a small ready made greenhouse outside Växjö public library. Inside the library, visible from outside, is a screen with the cowdown terminal animation, showing source code and a large variety of cattle breeds from all over the world. Images of the various breeds and short facts about their characteristics, history and breeding schemes are colored in the terminal green black, suggesting that we are watching a wonderful richness of variety, that needs to be kept, and at best expanded.
							
					
															Information and knowledge about the flora and fauna, historical facts and speculations are highly interesting and plentiful, but hard to get hold on for a visitor, or the younger generation living here.
The project intended to set a structure, both analogue and digital, for sharing this information, and build on an open source guide for this specific route, that will be owned by everybody and nobody, mimmicking the common use of as well the forest as of the path with communal respect and cooperation. In our presentation we will give a short resume over this work, and show examples of the strategies we have used to engage different cathegories of people to contribute.