[-empyre-] Mapping Food trails ...

Tue Mar 8 04:17:00 AEDT 2016

Amanda, 
Wish I was a bit closer to New York so I could have attended some of the Fairs and other events going on this past weekend. 

Thanks for sharing these mapping projects.  As I was reading Stefani’s post and looking at the multiple links you have shared I was thinking about our discussion last month on -empyre, “Across borders and networks.” We spent the month taking about the disenfranchised refugees or political asylum seekers who are seeking a space and place to flourish.  

The Nomadic Milk Project if I am understanding correctly inscribes a sand map in relationship to the mobility of the herdsmen’s mobility as tracked by GPS network translated to sand mapping via a robot. The gesture of marking the earth with the sand robot realizes the landscape underfoot. I am wondering if any of the herdsmen mark the land? 

"The project NomadicMILK aims to raise awareness of those mobility patterns and the use of space through an artistic visualization of the dairy routes, achieved by combining new media such as global positioning systems, mobile telephones and GPS. Fulani herdsman and Peak transporters will be equipped with GPS receivers built into mobile phones...In this way, it becomes possible to communicate about something that is normally invisible: the routes covered by individuals and their daily routines in a spatial context. In addition to the aesthetic aspect of the project, the route visualizations will give both the Fulani herdsmen and Peak transporters a new perspective on their own perceptions of place, mobility and economics. Their comments and reactions to the sand-drawings of the routes that are so vital to them will be the central focus in the project.” 

I am thinking about Ricardo Dominguez’ project Immigrant Border Tool that tracked water sources and safety.  

I am looking forward to hearing more about Stefani’s Food and the City Project.  In light of my own post yesterday I was thinking about my own strategy of drawing into the newly rototilled earth to demarcate and map the crop rows.  Sometimes vertical long rows, other times short horizontal rows but always trying to figure out where the sun, wind, and rain will best suit the harvest.  

" Soon we will be turning the earth over with our rototillers (or by hand) and planting the early crops of peas, spinach, lettuce, onions and hoping that there will be just enough rain, not too much to wash away the seeds and just enough to propagate and nurture the new seedlings.”

Thanks to both of you.  Wondering if anyone from last month might also want to make some correlations between last month and this month? 
Feeling better. Renate

On 3/6/16, 4:30 PM, "empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Amanda McDonald Crowley" <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of amandamcdc at gmail.com> wrote:

>----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>On Mar 4, 2016, at 5:47 PM, Stefani Bardin wrote:
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>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
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>> 
>>  https://ipk.nyu.edu/ipk-working-groups/foodandthecity
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>> We are so interested in hearing from you all on my many levels including knowledge you may have about great interventions currently happening in the food system.  
>> Any experience you may have had around mapping/visualizing/building a platform for such a fluid, mercurial and unwieldy topic?
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>Apologies all for the slow start. New York City has been a little crazy busy these last days with the various art fairs and related events!
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>Firstly thanks Stefani for the great introduction to the No Free Lunch project and Food and the City research group.
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>Stefani and Marina recently invited me to join the group, and I have been thoroughly enjoying the monthly meetings.  And in fact last Friday they invited me to present on artists who are doing work in this area. Some of the works I presented were by artists who think about mapping, and systems thinking.
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>One of the projects that immediately came to mind was Esther Polak, Ieva Auzina and RIXC's award winning MILK project, http://www.milkproject.net. Developed in 2005, they were exploring the idea of a Europe with no borders; ad also thinking of the international food trade routes, in this case milk, produced by Latvian farmers, made into cheese with the help of an Italian expert, transported to the Netherlands,  finally consumed by Dutch citizens. 
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>Nomadic Milk, undertaken by Polak in Nigeria in 2009 was a direct follow on to this project.Here Polak traveled to Nigeria accompanied by a custom built robot. Here she worked with a nomadic Fulani family of cow herders in Abuja’s vicinity; and the truck drivers who provided the distribution routes of a powdered milk brand from city Lagos to the Abuja. What's especially interesting for me in the project is that they map these trade routes specifically by means of the people involved. The projects both allow groups of people involved to gather around the image and reflect communally. And simultaneously the installations that are developed from this research, and community building also have beautiful and innovative mapping, as well as intimate and important storytelling aspects.
>Here's information on the project: http://nomadicmilk.net/blog/?page_id=2
>The interactive web version of the project: http://nomadicmilk.net/
>And video documentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdSdGKvCvpA
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>Photographer Henry Hargreaves literally makes wonderful maps of foods, http://henryhargreaves.com/food-maps-2 
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>Leah Gauthier, while undertaking a residency at Eyebeam developed a project called Sharecropper, which was a series of "micro" food growing spaces across New York City, which for her was as much about building a network and community across the city through growing food. Perhaps not so much about mapping or cartography, as a way to navigate the city through building a community through sharing food. http://leahgauthier.com/sharecropper/?page_id=8
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>One the the grass roots DIY projects I'm rather fond of is "Falling Fruit" a collaborative mapping project, and is open for anyone to contribute. Its a pretty extensive mapping of "urban harvesting"  - any foods that are in public space, be that good foraging spots, fruit trees in urban or suburban gardens that might overhand public land, or good spots for freegan-style dumpster diving. https://fallingfruit.org/?c=forager%2Cfreegan&locale=en
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>There are of course quite a number of these mapping projects.
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>Another that comes to mind is Fallen Fruit's Endless Orchard, an extension of their Urban Fruit Trails project is a really great project to plant, map, and share fruit specifically. http://fallenfruit.org/projects/endlessorchard/
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>I'd love it if others might share mapping projects that might be relevant to this line of investigation.
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>amanda
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