The goal: to build a sustainable eco-community and keep at bay developers with dreams of massive hotel complexes.

Memberships — Nomad ($220), Hunter ($440) and Warrior ($660) — entitle members to seven, 14 or 21 days on the palm-fringed 200-acre oasis, 100 at a time. Fees cover food, lodging and local airport transfer.

This is not for the five-star hotel crowd. The tribe will be roughing it, especially the early arrivals, who will have only tents and basic shower and toilet facilities.

"The first job for the tribe," [co-founder Ben] Keene said, "is to build for those who come later," working alongside paid Fijian laborers to build beach huts. There's no electricity, but solar energy will provide Internet access.

Lindsay Lawson is a Los Angeles-based artist whos work I love. Her website has amazing videos, including her reenactment of the Challenger disaster. --JH

"The 4,000 guardsmen here for these late-winter exercises will encounter 500 soldiers from the 509th, 500 support staff, a dozen Apache and Blackhawk combat helicopters, 30 tank-like Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and 1,000 jeeps, Humvees, and sundry other things with wheels. Commanders on the ground get video feeds from simulated surveillance planes flown over 3-D maps of the battlefield. In-game journalists produce three daily newspapers, a radio show, and a nightly reel of video highlights. More than 200 of the role-players are Arab Americans, many of them Iraqis, bussed in from around the US for extra realism. A three-week exercise can cost up to $9 million.

The environment, too, is eerily detailed. Many of the 'towns' are rough models: a handful of corrugated aluminum and wood-frame buildings with an upright drainage pipe serving as a minaret for the mosque, for example. But the most elaborate town, Suliyah – officially named Shughart-Gordon, after two soldiers killed in Somalia – has dozens of multistory concrete buildings, including a school with a playground, an open-air market, and a convincingly equipped hospital. There’s even a cemetery. During exercises, the pumps at the gas station can explode in a 30-foot fireball. Rooftop concussion cannons throw in random bursts of noise and flame. Fog machines and speakers fill the buildings with smoke and the sounds of gunfire or barking dogs. More than 900 cameras record it all."

"They’ve staged bloody aftermaths of bomb attacks, applying gory makeup to Vietnam veterans with missing limbs to make extra-convincing bomb victims. Teams of 'firemarkers' zip around the Box on all-terrain vehicles, rigging up Hollywood-style pyrotechnics for roadside bombs and explosives-laden cars. Prevatt reminisces about a mass grave they created, a charnel pit of bound mannequins with simulated head wounds. 'We put a bunch of bones and meat in there and buried it for a couple days so it would smell right,' he says.

The JRTC expends enormous resources on elaborate scenarios that try to replicate, predict, and manipulate human behavior. That can mean gunshots, but more often it means subjecting troops to hours of entirely prosaic jobs. Trainees at Polk spend days guarding gates, maintaining security at demonstrations, and placating civilian leadership. 'It’s all about building and developing relations with the locals,' says Petraeus of the Combined Arms Center. 'Knowledge of the cultural terrain is as important as knowledge of the physical terrain'."

Peter Baldes' animations are very great. You have to see them. I also like his new animation, Joan Jonas, Vertical Roll, Sliced vertically, which is included in the gifshow curated by Marisa Olson. --JH

--JH

This is very funny. --JH

Graffiti Research Lab's Throwies at the Maker Faire

James Powderly sat down with me and walked me through the process of making throwies. They are easy to make and fun to throw on things. Graffiti Research Labs brought in a bus and they let people make throwies to throw on things. In this video (see original post), James explains that throwies are more than little lights to throw around. GRL takes it conceptually deeper by exploring political issues around prison time for graffiti artists and bringing those issues to communities in a gentle way...

Previous Throwie Articles: howto, throwie talkies, on/off tabs, and motion sensitive. Thowie instructions and interesting discussion is over at instructables and for subscribers, here is the Digital Edition Throwie Article. I used a few seconds of footage from two GRL videos that you can watch here and here. Both vids are great. Go watch them too! Click here to get the video (MP4) delivered automatically with iTunes. This video will play on PC/Mac/Linux/PSPs and iPod video devices - Link. Make Podcast. [Posted by Bre Pettis on MAKE Blog]

people hike in LA? cough cough . . . seriously? cough . . . --JH

AP - Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson says he has leg-pressed 2,000 pounds, but some say he'd be in a pretty tough spot if he tried.

Urban Eyes

HTTP Gallery is pleased to present Urban Eyes, an intermedia project by Marcus Kirsch and Jussi Angesleva. Private View: 1st June 2006 7-9pm; Exhibition: 1st June - 9th July 2006, Friday- Sunday: 12 noon-5 pm; Unit A2, Arena Business Centre, 71 Ashfield Rd, London N4 1NY; tel: + 44 (0)20 8802 2827; info[at]http.uk.net

Urban Eyes uses wireless technology, birdseeds and city pigeons to reconnect urban dwellers with their surroundings. The Urban Eyes feeding-platform stands in one of London's public spaces. By landing on the platform, pigeons tagged with RFID chips send aerial photographs of their locality to surrounding Bluetooth-enabled devices. In this work pigeons become maverick messengers in the information super-highway, fusing feral and digital networks. HTTP Gallery provides an interface to the project, mixing live and documentary footage and offering visitors an opportunity to experiment with Bluetooth.

Being one of the last remaining signs of nature in a metropolis such as London, the urban pigeon population represents a network of ever-changing patterns more complex than anything ever produced by a machine. However pigeons' movements are based on a one-mile radius around their nest. Any pigeon you see everyday shares the same turf as you. Urban Eyes crosses and expands human mobility patterns offering to reconnect you with your neighbourhood.

In the 1960s, situationists Debord and Jorn composed psycho-geographic diagrams of Paris, which described navigational systems based on their drift through the city. For this, they used Blondel la Rougery's Plan de Paris a vol d'oiseau, a bird-eyes map of Paris. Inspired by this methodology, Urban Eyes enlists our feathered neighbours to establish a connection between the bird-eyes view of the city as now distributed by Google Earth and our terrestrial experience. [Related]

About Marcus Kirsch and Jussi Angesleva

Marcus Kirsch holds an MA in Interaction Design from Royal College of Art. He was invited to the 2004 Seoul Biennale and as exhibiting artist and to last year's Rotterdam International Film Festival and DEAF Festival. He was awarded a silver Art Directors Club NY and a fusedspace.com award in collaboration with Jussi for 'Urban Eyes'.

Jussi Angesleva holds MA in Audio Visual Media Culture from the University of Lapland in Finland, and MA in Interaction Design from the Royal College of Art and has shown at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Siggraph, ZKM and Science Museum London. He has received awards from Royal Society of Arts, NESTA, from D&AD (together with Ross Cooper), Prix Ars Electronica and the Art Directors Club of Europe. He is currently working at ART+COM in Berlin, Germany and is a co-founder of new media agency Prosopon.

For more information and images, please contact Stephanie Delcroix

This project is supported by Arts Council England (London), V2 lab (Rotterdam, Netherlands) and Furtherfield.org.

From the dog, tiger and pig website that is ModernPooch.com we have this amazing story.

In a zoo in California, a mother tiger gave birth to a rare set of
triplet tiger cubs. Unfortunately, due to complications in the pregnancy,
the cubs were born prematurely and due to their tiny size, they died shortly
after birth.
The mother tiger after recovering from the delivery, suddenly started to
decline in health, although physically she was fine. The veterinarians felt
that the loss of her litter had caused the tigress to fall into a
depression. The doctors decided that if the
tigress could surrogate another mother's cubs, perhaps she would improve.

After checking with many other zoos across the country, the depressing news
was that there were no tiger cubs of the right age to introduce to the
mourning mother. The veterinarians decided to try something that had never
been tried in a zoo environment. Sometimes a mother of one species will take
on the care of a different species. The only "orphans" that could be found
quickly, were a litter of weaner pigs.
The zoo keepers and vets wrapped the piglets in tiger skin and placed the
babies around the mother tiger.

Thanks to Jodi for this!

bitforms gallery has just opened an exhibition with works by Bjoern Schuelke and by R. Luke Dubois.

Drone 6 and Installation shot

Schuelke is showing 12 of his Solar Kinetic Objects, sculptures powered and adorned by solar cells, some which employ tiny red blinking lights and propellers.; Nervous a fluffy bright ball of fur that shakes, emits beeps and funny sounds as viewers move closer to it (video from Beap04); the Aerophon #4, a motorized pipe organ that responds to motion with bellows of sound and compression of the instrument’s body.

R. Luke Dubois' works explore the constructions of pop-cultural ephemera and its temporal value structure.

Billboard, a 37-minute sound installation for iPod, uses all the songs that topped Bilboard’s Hot 100 chart chronologically since August 1958. Each of the 857 songs plays for one second, representing each week the song stayed at #1.

Billboard and Academy

His video installation Academy arrays algorithmically determined visual averages of all the past Academy Award "Best Picture" winners since 1927, smearing film sets and actors together in time. In a third installation, Play, the flickering faces of every Playboy Magazine centerfold from the publication’s first 50 years (1953 to 2004) meld together, emerging with a collective portrait.

The exhibition runs until July 15, 2006, at the bitform gallery, New York.

Via see art/make art. Images courtesy of the gallery. PDF of the press release.

Reuters - A swan has fallen in love with a plastic swan-shaped paddle boat on a pond in the German town of Muenster and has spent the past three weeks flirting with the vessel five times its size, a sailing instructor said Friday.

Filed under: Portable Audio

Now we know the truth. In an interview with NBC's Brian Williams, Apple CEO Steve Jobs explained why Apple comes up with new iPod models so frequently: "You keep on innovating, you keep on making better stuff," Jobs said, in response to a question from Williams about why a new iPod might seem outdated as soon as you take it out of the box. Then Jobs offered a bit of advice to consumers: "If you always want the latest and greatest, then you have to buy a new iPod at least once a year." Gee, thanks, Steve. We always thought it was the dead batteries or battered shell that kept sending us back to the Apple store. Glad you could set us straight.

[Via iLounge]

A survey conducted by the Piaggio Group (the guys who make Vespas) concluded that almost one in three Americans would be extremely or somewhat likely to consider using a motor scooter (like the new Piaggio MP3 pictured above) for their everyday transport