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Originally by jb from A Hill Country Journal on August 30, 2007, 12:38am

OXO Pour and Store Watering Can is from the Good Grips line up, and allows for economical storage/watering with either the fine rose-sensitive nozzle or the water-saving traditional spout that rotates the can into a more compact position, either way, efficiency is on your side with this orange OXO watering can.

Also available in green, what makes this can cool, is the reversible nozzle that will extend when in use and screws back against the body of the watering can while instorage, with a pressure sensitive extension nozzle that plugs into the filling hole when not in use, avoiding mosquitoes.

The nozzle also comes with marking measurements that figure in with the amount of water in the main body to give you a more exact measurement, while taking care of your bonsai, herbs or other miniature garden pots as the case for water conservation may be.

Measuring 8 x 3.5 x 3.5 and weighing 6 ounces, this orange watering can by OXO holds one quart (ideal for house/office plants and container gardens, where water conservation is vital) and allows your garden to be just a little bit more self-reliant.

This orange OXO Pour & Store Watering Can provides a continuous soft sprinkle/traditional nozzle and useful non-slip rubber on both handle and nozzle, with higher quality measurements that also allow for a more economical storage, and a more sensible tomorrow; through the conservation of our earths most precious resource, life giving water, one garden at a time.

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Other OXO products:
OXO Salad Spinner

Tags: OXO Pour Store Watering

Originally by admin from Aaron’s Home and Garden on June 21, 2007, 12:00pm

British artist Andy Gracie creates bio-robotic composites, systems that play out a tightly-coupled symbiosis between biological and technological elements. Gracie recently asked me to write about his work, and the text below was an initial response - a longer essay will be out later in the year.

New media art is overrun, now, with monsters, hybrids, chimera and cyborgs, with real and figurative mixtures of the made and the born, the “natural” and the “unnatural”. Miscegenation - the archaic taboo on inter-racial breeding - is revived here in a kind of inverted form. The transgressive thrill of mixing “bio” and “tech” is a recurring theme, and while cyborg art is now relatively old (Stelarc), it maintains its visceral effect because it accesses a primal (turned cultural) mechanism of identity-formation. This is me: that is not me. Artists use this effect as a tactical hook, but by focusing on the cyborg / monster, work like that of Stelarc, Piccinini or SymbioticA can have a kind of renormalising effect; as long as the chimera is objectified, it remains (safely) other, over-there. My humanity is never at issue.

In the late 1960s, art practice began to come to grips with the emergence of post-industrial capitalism, a social order characterised by increasing connectivity and interdependence. Influenced in part by the emerging field of cybernetics, artists turned to the figure of the system - a dynamic, real-time, abstract network of causally intertwined entities and forces (more). In “Systems art” the work itself is a real-time system, a process that performs some quality of system-ness or “systemacity,” and in doing so it alerts us to the complex, networked systemacity in which we continue to find ourselves. 

Small Work for Robot and Insects

Gracie’s work reflects the concerns of the chimera tradition, contemplating technologised life, or living technology. However its great strength is that it does so through the methodology of systems art. It breaks open the monstrous figure and reveals it to be not a thing but a process, a coupling, a coming-together, a co-negotiation. Others, such as Ken Rinaldo, have explored similar hybrid systems; Rinaldo seeks to exemplify a mutually-beneficial symbiosis between biology and technology. Gracie’s work is less idealistic, but potentially richer in its implications, for symbiosis lies on a continuum with parasitism, and the dynamic networks of real ecological relations operate not in pursuit of some overarching “harmony,” but locally, specifically, functionally. Gracie’s work plays out the externalised character of ecological relations; his robotics illustrate what is machinic about all ecologies: networks of functional connection. In Fish, Plant, Rack the connections are played out: fish (sound) robot (nutrients) plant (video) fish. None “recognises” or is “aware of” the others, but all are coupled into an adaptive network of mediated stimuli and response.

Fish, Plant, Rack

Here mediation is not a representational process, but a concrete connection, a way of coupling an agent with its physical envirionment. Gracie’s earlier Samplebot demonstrates this, as its piezo-electric pickup transduces its physical environment into sound, and interprets that sound as instructions for its behaviour; the “program” here is only partly digital; it is largely embedded in, and comprised of, the robot’s environment. This is the beginning of stigmergy, the biological phenomenon where the environment acts as a shared medium which shapes, and is shaped by, organisms within it.

Stigmergy, like symbiosis and parasitism, is beautiful in the way it obliterates conventional thinking about agency, subjectivity and environment. Agency is not local and internal, but distributed and external, embedded in the environment. Agents are not independent but interlinked, and not like the consenting adults of the social realm, but through partial, contingent, concrete channels of input and output. Agents don’t recognise each other, but selectively and adaptively mis-recognise; nonetheless they become inextricably, functionally, coupled. Here is the real, important, monster: agency is systemic; systems have agency. Gracie’s work diagrams the systems that we are ourselves enmeshed in, and explores the hybrid, emergent and collective agencies that must be latent in these networks.

update: for more on Gracie’s work, including some technical detail on Small Work for Robot and Insects, see this paper co-authored with Brian Lee Yung Rowe.

Originally from (the teeming void) on August 8, 2006, 3:56pm

A rare treat last night: some generative art in Canberra. The event was a one-night show at the Front gallery from Australian artist Pierre Proske, presenting the results of a residency at the ANU’s Department of Archaeology and Natural History. Proske was embedded with the Paleoworks group, who do palaeo- and archeo-botany, mainly by way of using microscopes to look at ancient pollen.

The resulting works use micro-botanical images as poetic and aesthetic materials to reflect on the residency itself. In one series they’re used to texture Superformula shapes, creating hyper-layered clouds that seem organically lumpy and mathematically crisp at the same time. In another series Proske used portraits of his Palaeoworks hosts to “seed” accumulations of tinted micro-blobs; they play on the edges of abstraction, at the same time evoking (for me at least) some big ideas about identity, multiplicity, and symbiogenesis.

Proske’s blog of the residency is a wealth of detail. His previous work is worth checking out too - the Intelligent Fridge Poetry Magnets (pdf) attracted widepread attention earlier this year; and apparently they may yet appear on a home appliance near you…

Originally from (the teeming void) on November 29, 2006, 9:17pm

The ABC’s new arts show is about landscape painting; in the first episode aired last week, John Wolseley worked with three Bendigo artists at an old mine site. For mainstream arts TV it was actually pretty good, thanks largely to Wolseley’s eccentric persona - somewhere between British naturalist and deep ecology shaman. His ethos also struck me, based around an experiential and material immersion in the landscape. At one point he scraped his canvas over some charred saplings, “collaborating” with them to arrive at a scratchy charcoal underlayer of the developing work.

Over the weekend I visited the coast and wondered about generative art as a medium for responding to landscape. I can’t grind up local ochres for a nice impasto, so where does that leave me? Alienated, blinking in the sunlight, laptop plein-air? I did a quick experiment, studying the textures of the surrounding casurina forest and coding up a simple drawing machine in Processing. As in drawing, I worked from close observation, but it was synoptic, rather than specific; looking for patterns, tendencies, signatures, rather than tracing details. And to respond the generative artist has to find a procedure or algorithm, rather than an image - a way of making something. That gap between observation and procedure is productive in itself. Observation constantly challenges the representational ability of the algorithm: the lichen that grows on the casurina trunks is a crucial visual element in that texture, but the procedure I wrote was focused on growing trunks, not lichen. One path leads towards more detailed simulation; another could be to treat the model as a sketch or diagram - a looser and perhaps more poetic representation.

Jon McCormack’s work has been exploring this territory for years; Eden, Morphogenesis (pictured) and the latest Bloom are all responses to a specific (Australian) landscape. The audio ecosystem of Eden was inspired by a visit to Litchfield National Park in the Northern Territory. Morphogenesis and Bloom come from more detailed studies of native plants, which are modelled then slightly mutated. McCormack’s earlier Turbulence was an all-out digital hypernature; these latest works are crypic variants, rather than fantastic monsters. By “detuning” the model, these nature studies interact with their originals to set up a kind of uncanny interference pattern.

Way back in 1994 McCormack argued for the role of the computational medium as a way of knowing about the world: “You might expect that my ideas about the world are introverted around the machine, in fact the opposite is true. The computer has shown me things about the world that I could not have known, understood or seen any other way. I see and appreciate nature in a fundamentally different way than before.” (Wild essay) Is this still true of the Flash/Processing generation of artists? The current aesthetic seems to reflect an environment that is predominantly urban, networked and social. Any exceptions come to mind? Where are the new computational nature studies?

Originally from (the teeming void) on April 2, 2007, 3:35am

It is some time since I’ve participated in Green Thumb Sunday and partly I blame winter. This photo was taken in July (around the 10th of July I think). It is outside the lodge at Perisher in the Snowy Mountains and I’m sharing with you the Eucalyptus Pauciflora - known to all as Snow Gums. Simple, huh. To my knowledge, someone please correct me if I’m wrong, they are the only Eucalyptus which grows in the snow in Australia. They don’t grow very tall and they almost always have some wavy motion going on with their trunks and branches. We love them. We planted a pauciflora in the first garden I created in Canberra. However, they are very slow growing and even though I lived in that house/garden for 9 years, when we left it was still only up to a tall man’s shoulder. . . .

Oh, I know, I know. I am so late to this party. But I truly don?t think you can grasp the magnificence of Buffalo?s lovely new gaming facility (which has been open for some time) unless you have seen it in person, so to speak. My sister and I were driving back from the Botanical Gardens and took Ohio Street off the Skyway. Soon enough, there it was, in all its splendor. I didn?t notice too much activity around it. But we were too busy laughing our heads off to really pay attention. . . .

It’s that time of year when the Indian pipes (Monotropa uniflora) start popping up everywhere in the woods, raising their ghostly little stems through the leaf litter. This clump is just unfurling its small hanging flowers… yes, it is a true flowering plant, not a fungus; in fact it is classified in the same family as rhododendrons and blueberries (I think taxonomists do have a sense of humor after all). Indian pipe is a saprophyte, relying for its nutrients on soil fungi that in turn grow on tree roots.
There are many odd little things that grow in Iowa’s forests, but this is surely one of the oddest.

This is the only flower in my garden that seems “happy” right now. ‘Autumn Joy’ Sedum. Even its name has a happy word in it… joy.

How do I know it’s “happy”? Can flowers be “happy”?

My sedum flowers aren’t wilting, they are as big and full as they have ever been, and they are starting to attract bees. They are signaling the end of summer and the beginning of fall. Presumably they will go to seed at some point well after the first frost. They are a bright spot in my otherwise dismal flower garden. . . .

reBloggedto sedum

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