As blogged on ‘Strange Harvest’. I can think of a few ordinary objects that are palindromic – sledge hammers and pickaxes come to mind..
Double-headed screw
http://strangeharvest.com/obscure-design-typologies-palindromic-objects
Palindromic Objects
Shouting Vase
Another quirky product from Japan, the Shouting Vase. Thanks for the link Elaine!
Shouting Vase
Turn your loudest, most urgent frustrations into mere whispers with the Shouting Vase. The plastic jug is designed to fit over the contours of your mouth and absorb your screams and shouts, “storing” them in the vase and emitting a softer version of your angry cries through the tiny hole at the base.
http://www.japantrendshop.com/shouting-vase-holds-your-anger-p-293.html
Olafur Eliasson’s solar-powered lamp
The artist Olafur Eliasson, known for his large scale installations, has produced a solar-powered lamp for use in the developing world. Titled Little Sun, Eliasson produced the lamp in collaboration with engineer Frederik Ottesen. It is an example of work by artists, such as Marjetica Potrc, related to design for the developing world – though Eliasson might be fairly unique here in designing an actual mass-produced product for real use.
Little Sun
The project has a high-level art world presence – it will, the Guardian tells us, be used in the surrealism rooms of the Tate Modern in 2012, ‘which will be plunged into darkness after normal opening hours, and visitors invited to visit them by the light of Little Sun lamps’. They will also be for sale in the Tate store.
Explaining why he had developed a social project, the Berlin-based Danish artist said: “Art is always interested in society in all kinds of abstract ways, though this has a very explicit social component. The art world sometimes lives in a closed-off world of art institutions, but I still think there’s a lot of work to show that art can deal with social issues very directly.”
The fact that the lamp – with its cheery petalled face – had been designed by an artist was important, he said. “People want beautiful things in their lives; they want something that they can use with pride … everyone wants something that’s not just about functionality but also spirituality.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/jul/12/olafur-eliasson-cheap-solar-lamp
Interested too in the mention of Eliasson’s cancelled Olympic project in the same article:
Little Sun, as the lamp is called, has risen out of the ashes of Eliasson’s Cultural Olympiad project, Take a Deep Breath, which the Olympic Lottery Distributor (OLD) declined to fund after details of the proposal were leaked to a newspaper. The project would have asked participants to inhale and exhale on behalf of a cause or idea, and then capture the thought on a “breath bubble” on a website. The “negative publicity” showed that the work was “contentious”, found the OLD’s board, according to its March 2012 minutes, and they “struggled to justify the £1m sought”.
Moscow charity gala
An article in The Guardian newspaper today describes a high-profile ‘charity’ event held in Moscow, which uses the idea that it is ‘awareness’ raising as an excuse for it’s lack of material contribution to charity:
It was a starry event that lured some of the biggest names in Hollywood along with a sprinkling of the Muscovite elite. There was Woody Allen, playing with his jazz band after a performance by Andrea Bocelli.
There were Francis Ford Coppola and Jeremy Irons, Orlando Bloom and Steven Seagal, Sophia Loren and Dionne Warwick, all gathered in the leafy heights of southern Moscow for a charity gala like no other: this charity does not dispense its largesse.
The Federation Fund, which has presented itself as a children’s charity since forming late last year, has rapidly turned into one of the most controversial operations in a country known for opaque projects. This weekend, after weeks of billboard advertising splashed across the capital, it laid on a lavish two-day show in aid of … Well, it was not entirely clear what the event was in aid of.
The charity says it is no longer about raising funds, but raising awareness. Some of the guests said they had been paid to attend.
Doubts about the Federation Fund surfaced soon after an inaugural concert in St Petersburg this year shot it to prominence, thanks largely to Vladimir Putin’s notorious version of Blueberry Hill, which became an internet hit.
Three months after that show, the mother of a sick child wrote an open letter to the president, Dmitry Medvedev, complaining that hospitals promised donations had received nothing. The fund moved quickly to donate medical equipment to several hospitals, and then denied any wrongdoing, saying it had been set up to generate publicity, not cash.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/11/moscow-charity-authenticity-questioned?INTCMP=SRCH
This is an extreme form of something detectable in other campaigns which spend lots of money to raise ‘awareness’, with a disproportionately small material outcome, such as the RED campaign, for which Advertising Age wrote:
The disproportionate ratio between the marketing outlay and the money raised is drawing concern among nonprofit watchdogs, cause-marketing experts and even executives in the ad business. It threatens to spur a backlash, not just against the Red campaign — which ambitiously set out to change the cause-marketing model by allowing partners to profit from charity — but also for the brands involved.
http://adage.com/article/news/costly-red-campaign-reaps-meager-18-million/115287/
World Press Photo 11 review frames ‘attention’ as a “blunt instrument”
Omar Feisal, a Reuters photographer based in Somalia, won the Daily Life Single category at the 2011 World Press Photo awards with this picture of a man carrying a shark through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia. Photograph: Feisal Omar/Reuters
In a review of World Press Photo 11 in The Observer on Sunday 29 May 2011, Roland Elliott Brown writes:
Many make the most of minor subjects: Feisal Omar’s picture of a Somali carrying a man-size shark through a devastated Italian colonial street is the most extraordinary, otherworldly image in the book; Marco di Lauro’s image of a Nigerian meat market conjures Hieronymus Bosch. Daniel Berehulak’s images of the Pakistan floods, by contrast, are efficient documentary shots of a traumatic, “big” news subject, but lack the streak of visual experimentation or surreal commentary that would give them “artistic” punch. Some images, such as Javier Manzano’s Mexican murder victims, have absurdity and bleak beauty to spare, but only regional resonance. The form’s tilt in favour of experienced photographers and “artistic” work enables an escape from any suggestion that juries sit in judgment over suffering humanity. Yet it also validates the photojournalist’s cliche, that their skills “bring attention to” far-flung subjects. “Attention” is a very blunt instrument, more effective locally than from afar, where it produces mostly helpless perturbation.
Nevertheless, viewers can hardly object if the pictures of pain displayed in their shelters arrive dressed up for the marketplace of their sympathies; to the extent that they do, they may need to learn to be perturbed in finer, bolder ways.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/may/29/world-press-photo-11-review
This description of ‘awareness’ as a ‘blunt instrument’ bears out the description in my thesis of the PlayPump’s ‘awareness-raising’ as limited, in that it doesn’t help to inform the viewer of the complexity of the water problem in the developing world, just of its own ability to solve it.
“Donor aversion to ‘unsexy’ water projects…”
Fiona Harvey, Monday 27 June 2011
“A key development goal to halve the number of people without access to basic sanitation by 2015 will be missed because donor countries have diverted aid money away from “unsexy” water projects, according to the World Bank and the charity WaterAid…”
Steve Robins – How Shit Became Political
At the African Centre for Cities.
When: Aug 4, 2011 (3.30pm)
Where: Rm 2.27, Davies Room, Engeo Building, Upper Campus, UCT, Cape Town
In this seminar, Professor Steven Robins of the University of Stellenbosch’s Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology discusses the challenges that activists, journalists and writers confront when trying to render the mundane realities of “structural violence” and chronic poverty politically legible. It is particularly concerned with how these representational challenges are played out in terms of the binary relationship between the “spectacular” and the “mundane.”
The Information Blanket
The information blanket
‘Every baby needs a blanket. Every parent needs education and training about how to protect and raise a newborn. The information blanket does both’
Randomistas
An editorial in the Guardian praises the work of Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee – the ‘randomistas’ – in conducting randomised control trials on development initiatives. Would like to see Ben Goldacre’s comment on the quality of their trials, as it’s one of his areas of specialty.
Particularly interested in the mention of their research into whether recipients of free mosquito nets value them – ‘an emphatic yes’. Kudos to them for questioning the simplistic (and non-evidence-based) idea that people only value things they have to pay money for; a convenient fiction for the interests that want to charge for goods and services (like water).
In praise of … Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee
Through lots of microstudies, they make a subtle case for one big argument: aid really can help poor people
6 June 2011Since the banking crisis broke, the different schools of economic thought have gained much exposure. You’ve heard of the Keynesians, the monetarists, the behaviouralists. Well, now meet the randomistas. The nickname given to the work done by MIT economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo refers to their use of randomised control trials, familiar to whitecoats working in science labs but not so common among crumpled development analysts in, say, West Bengal. Yet Banerjee and Duflo put the random trial to excellent use to find out what works. Want poor families in north India to immunise their children? Offer the parents a small bag of lentils as an incentive and vaccination rates make a startling jump, from around 5% to almost 40%. Or take the question of whether poor Africans really value mosquito nets they are given free. Much debated within university faculties, it took a randomista to go out to west Kenya and find the answer (an emphatic yes). Duflo and Banerjee tell these stories in a lovely new book called Poor Economics. As they admit, randomistas cannot answer some big questions – how to tackle food prices, for instance. But through lots of microstudies, they make a subtle case for one big argument: aid really can help poor people, provided the money follows the evidence. The economists back home lining up to warn George Osborne his plan isn’t working must wish there was some simple experiment to settle the manner, without making guinea pigs of us all.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/06/praise-esther-duflo-abhijit-banerjee
The politics of toilets in South Africa
David Smith in the Guardian, 17 May 2011:
Why is South Africa still providing ‘apartheid toilets’?
How can a nation that builds five-star hotels and airports and hosted a successful World Cup still fail to provide decent sanitation?
… Like the Reverend Wright’s fiery sermons, or Gordon Brown’s “bigot” gaffe, unexpected bumps in the road can change the course of election campaigns, and so it is that televisions and newspapers in South Africa are full of images of toilets ahead of tomorrow’s local government vote. The image has come to symbolise the post-apartheid state’s continued inability to deliver electricity, running water, sanitation or housing to millions of people. It has left many wondering how a nation that can build five-star hotels and airports, host a successful football World Cup and enshrine human rights in its constitution can violate the basic right to defecate in private.
Toilets are the battleground between the two principal rivals for South Africans’ votes. The African National Congress (ANC), 17 years in power, has come to regard itself as the natural party of government with overwhelming support from the black majority. The opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) – which controls Cape Town and claims it is the best-run city in the country – is striving to bury its reputation as the bastion of the white elite. First there was an open lavatory scandal in the DA’s backyard. Cape Town was condemned in a recent court judgment for building 50 unenclosed loos in the Makhaza section of Khayelitsha. The gleeful ANC claimed this proved what it had been saying all along: that the DA protects the privilege of Cape Town’s affluent suburbanites while kicking its township dwellers in the teeth. These were “apartheid toilets built by racist whites who don’t respect blacks”…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/17/south-africa-toilets-david-smith