PDX 2014 week 1 report

I’m in PDX this month in residence at an awesome tiny home, through Ann Chen’s good graces and her project NDOI (Nomadic Dept of the Interior); Ann also cofounded Phats Valley Residency in Cape Cod. This house is a handmade cabin, in the middle of NE PDX. Its chief resident is a cat named Miriam.

I’m spending the rest of June setting up things for July-August.
At that time, I hope we’ll be testing designs, doing some public events (including food, drinks, walks, kayaking and talks), growing mycelium to test forms and density, and getting the clay cup and tea plan organized.

I’m still looking for a cube-truck sized piece of riverside land to do this all on, just a 2 month loan….

 

1. Carrying a dirty shovel on public buses and into Safeway is a great conversation starter, ranging from toxic clay to Brooklyn weaponry to “Are you alright?”

2-11. Dug 40 lbs of clay up by Linnton, with PNCA MFA CD colleagues Alicia Navarette and Emilie Skytta (thanks Alicia for documenting!!!). Finding the site required some remembering, but it’s a nice exposed bank of relatively elastic clay, and clean of debris and vegetation.

12,13. I  broke it up into small pieces to dry out in the PNCA Ceramics studio. I’ll condition it next week.

14. A bowl made of mycelium from ecovative. Made by TLAAG, my Sampan Super Chai design partners.

15. Pea flowers (edible) that I am freezing. Planning a big dinner end of the month at Cyril’s PDX, with their chef Marie Mourou, and the generosity of proprietors Sasha and Michael, who run in tandem Clay Pigeon Winery. They — and their output/progeny/love fare — are delicious.

 

 

This is a recording from Linnton today, on the way to the clay banks on the Willamette. We walked from the train tracks where we parked the car, past a foul former something (electric grid hub, cleaning pools?), past some young-looking wetlands scrub, and past the landmark radio towers. Huge beasties, with delicate birdsong all around.

+ + +

Other things that happened:
Oliver Kellhammer and I skype-planned some public engagement actions for late July. He’ll be coming from work with Kathy High in Troy, doing brownfields work with NATURE lab. Ethnoecologist Kimberlee Chambers will be joining us in thinking through food. Consider: nature walks, specimen collection, umwelts, picnics, kayaks, bioremediation superstars, design charrettes.

Here are some titles:

Otter (or Osprey) Umwelt
The Jacob von Uexküll Memorial Picnic Kayak
With Oliver Kellhammer and Kimberlee Chambers

The Mighty Mouse Botanical Scavenger Hunt
in the Willamette Cove
with Oliver Kellhammer

Working with Non Human Helpers
Design charrette on using remediating materials in Sampan Super Chai

More to come on this soon.

 

 

plastiglomerates in the plastisphere

We have micro-macro ecosystems that contain new forms of geological evidences:

“Future Fossils: Plastic Stone”

…researchers have discovered an unexpected way that some plastic waste is persisting: as a new type of stone.

The substance, called plastiglomerate, is a fusion of natural and manufactured materials. Melted plastic binds together sand, shells, pebbles, basalt, coral and wood, or seeps into the cavities of larger rocks to form a rock-plastic hybrid. The resulting materials,researchers report in the journal GSA Today, will probably be long-lived and could even become permanent markers in the planet’s geologic record.

“Most conventional plastic is relatively thin and fragments quickly,” said Richard Thompson, a marine biologist at Plymouth University in England, who was not involved in the research. “But what’s being described here is something that’s going to be even more resistant to the aging process.”

Plastiglomerate was discovered in 2006 by Charles Moore, a sea captain and oceanographer at the Algalita Marine Research Institute in Long Beach, Calif. Mr. Moore was surveying plastic washed up on Kamilo Beach, a remote, polluted stretch of sand on Hawaii’s Big Island.

 Patricia Corcoran’s been working on this – see “An Anthropogenic Marker Horizon in the Future Rock Record.” As a result of her research in Kamilo Beach, HA, she writes

We use the term plastiglomerate to describe an indurated, multi-composite material made hard by agglutination of rock and molten plastic. This material is subdivided into an in situ type, in which plastic is adhered to rock outcrops, and a clastic type, in which combinations of basalt, coral, shells, and local woody debris are cemented with grains of sand in a plastic matrix (Figs. 2A and 2B). Of the 21 sample locations containing plastiglomerate on Kamilo Beach, in situ plastiglomerate was identified at nine. Partially melted polymers adhered to basalt outcrops included fishing nets, piping, bottle caps, and rubber tires. Locally, molten plastic had infilled vesicles in volcanic rock, thereby forming plastic amygdales.

Sampan Super Chai PROGRESS REPORT APRIL 29, 2014

Been busy working on a few aspects of SS Chai. For one thing, with TLAAG as design partners, we have a design proposal.  If anyone is interested in reading… we’ve created a long proposal as well as an “executive summary.”
Here’s a really topical overview:

Sampan Super Chai is a prototype for a floating art/science platform that addresses both local and global concerns of climate, citizenship, and the ecosystem. It drifts from downtown Portland to the Columbia as a tethered cluster of floating modules. Participants investigate the rivers’ tangled relations, becoming familiar with the comprehensive, “dark ecology” of the present.

Sampan Super Chai provides hands on encounters with the river in three structured ways:

Process: Using the river to produce and drink tea together, as a hands-on encounter and convivial activity
Observe: Empirical citizen science, in both short and medium length encounters
Imagine: Placing the present within the larger ecosystem context, and a span of Deep Time

TEA: Central to the public-facing aspect of Sampan Super Chai is the process of making and drinking chai: cleaning water from the river, making clay cups from its banks, and infusing herbs from the shoreline, while using black tea transported from across the Pacific.

MATERIALS: Modular structures incorporate plastic flotsam from the Pacific. As counterpoint, the floating rafts and buoys are made from mushroom mycelium (fungal threads). Mycelium material is molded to replace Styrofoam in building and packaging materials.

 

Here are a couple of  facets of the project:

BUOYS.

2014-03-21 19.47.37

Buoy grown from Ecovative’s GIY pre-inoculated mycelium + substrate mix

I’ve started a work group with my ITP colleague Eric Rosenthal and 4 students – Erika Miller, Ken Amarit, Kina Smith and Laura Juo-Hsin Chen – on a prototype of the “data buoys.” These will light up the project at night, in a magic  act of dematerialization:)

We’ve taken apart garden lights and are using a combination of solar cell, battery, and bright LED light. I am currently prototyping a buoy made of mycelium, which would grow around a plastic water bottle, which would be weighted at the bottom, and contain all the electrical components at the top. This way the buoy contains all the elements we’re talking about – plastic waste, petroleum, renewable energy, and mycelium / ag waste material. I think we can make the buoys out of a sawdust-eating mushroom, if we want to get Northwest with the project. Or Willamette Valley ag waste would be great too.

 

CLAY.

Masters candidate Talya Stein has been working with the clay I brought back, at NYU Steinhardt’s Ceramics Dept. under the tutelage of the Chair, Judy Schwartz and the Kiln Master, Shida Kuo,

These slabs each represent a mix of the hand-dug Willamette R clay amended with mined ball clay, from 10% – 50% amendment.

Here is the break down from Talya:

 

1. Dry the clay and break it up to little pieces.

2. Make powder out of the clay.

3.Add water gradually and mix.

4. Let the clay dry a little.

5. Make a lump out of the clay

6. Measure precise amount of the clay and the Ball clay.

10% increments. (10% = 5g)

7. Make sure not to mix anything up! 10% Ball clay, 90% Mud = 5g Ball clay, 45g Mud…

8. Wedge balls together.

9. Make Tile tests (Making them look like little tomb stones is optional).

These were bisque fired at Cone 6.

 

3 2 1 5 7 9 11 12 13 15 17 test slabs1

 

The 9:1 ratio held up as a slab, so we thought we could try 100% river clay, now that we understood how to process the clay correctly (completely dry and pulverize, weigh, add water slowly, wedge long and well).This had similar issues to my tests in Portland- cracking, falling apart, not enough elasticity.

 

Next step was trying the 9:1 river/ball clay mix as cups:

1-1 2-1 3-1 4-1

These are getting fired on Friday.

 

Next steps get a little confusing to me.
Judy Schwartz, Chair of Ceramics at Steinhardt, had this exchange with Talya:

 

Future steps:

1. Test the water absorbent of the clay

If the clay is fired to a higher temperature, the clay can become vitrified..meaning the clay becomes almost like a glaze and is not absorbent of moisture. The lower the fire  or heat, the more porous the clay. That is why flowerpots are such good vessels for plants because water evaporates easily through the pores of the clay. We can run a sample of the 100% mud clay as you call it, in the high fire kiln and see if it melts….when it gets this hot….2300 F… this clay would probably melt and be totally non porous. The next high fire will be next week or email Shida and he will put the sample in the kiln to see if it melts or if not you will see how there is no porosity. Make a sample at home and bring it in to put into that kiln but put it inside a high fire clay bowl in case it melts out flat.

2. Glaze–

for low fire ..yes, that is fine.

3. Test if the water gets toxic

I guess  you mean from a glazed sample cup?

If  you want to test toxicity of the clay I guess you would take it to a lab before and after firing.

4. Test the breakabilaty  of the mugs

I do not know a test for this….

but what do you want to accomplish knowing how much pressure it takes?

Does this make sense? Do u think we should be doing anything else?

5. I tried to explain to Marina what you told me about taking out the iron from the clay.

Your mud clay looks like a standard clay found around river beds…containing a fair amount of iron oxide making the clay fire red… it is called an earthenware clay.

We use earthenware in the studio too, but I use a refined earthenware paying extra to have the iron oxide removed so that the students have a cleaner body to glaze on. When you mixed yours with mine, you can see how the clay got lighter and lighter because there was less a percentage of Iron Oxide in the clay body.

kayaking the superfund

Went kayaking with Joan Lundell, recent grad from PNCA MFA in Collaborative Design and Sasha Davies of Cyril’s fame; Joan generously hauled her boats up to Cathedral Park where we set off, and in 4 hours of drifting and poking around, got as far as the  edge of Swan Island. It’s doleful out there, especially on an overcast day. Across the river, what look like gas storage tanks read like a cluster of blank mosques. Homeless camps dot the shore. “Aquatic squatters” live in boats in Willamette Cove, near-permanent transients in  the heart of LWG’s superfund remediation plan, ducks are drifting, dogs are chasing sticks into the water, and people are fishing.

I’m confused by the directive that you’re not supposed to walk in the sediment, where most of the superfund site’s toxins are embedded. This is where people are camping, and dogs are being walked. And none of this gets back into the water, next to a swimming beach? Nothing stirs it up, not even “prop wash” – propeller agitation from the tankers that come up and down the river collecting grain and depositing cargo from overseas?

 

 

 

 

study-area

soil and shorelines

1. Talked to Dr Elaine Ingham, chief scientist at the Rodale Institute in PA (formerly at OSU).  She’s a Soil Diva: an energetic, brilliant, committed soil expert and the author of my favorite quote from the film Symphony of the Soil*:

“It’s Times Square on New Years Eve in the soil, all the time”.

I already found out that half the microorganisms I drew are “bad guys,” which really upset Dr. Ingham. I clearly need some schooling. I’m going to learn this fall, soil analysis and microvideography, at least superficially (bad pun sorry I bet soil can engender lots of those) .

* I’m indebted to Stefani Bardin for turning me onto the film.

 

2. I went to Pomarius, Peter Schoonmaker’s brother-in-law’s nursery in part because it’s spectacular (and full of foreigners:) but also because the city’s doing sewer lines and there was a big cut outside along the curb, in which a lot of clay was exposed. So we grabbed a shovel and started to make for the trench when a worker came and forbade us to get in there – and dug the bucket of clay up himself. Stinky, but awesome. Now I have material to test this winter til I get back out on the river.

He also gave us a tour inside the manholes – flowing waters, nasty pipes suggesting toilets (as Timothy Morton likes to say, “There’s no there there”), and stagnant shit under the nursery’s plein aire dining area, with strange stumpy crickets clustered around the upturned lid…

sewer 2

sewer1

sewer crickets

My hosts Sasha and Michael, the proprietors of the brilliant wine and food spot in the SE, Cyril’s at Clay Pigeon Winery, think I make all this stuff up, just ride my bike all day long and come home with weird stories:)

It’s been lux, and I am sad to be going home.