transitlab

Last week was also an experiment in remote collaboration. On thursday, a group here in Newcastle met at ISIS to think about a complex topic “bio char“.

Pete Hindle and I had attended a keynote by Australian scientist Tim Flannery on bio char.

Image via Wikipedia

I had no idea what it was untill that stage, but described simply it is a way to make mineralised carbon that is resistant to degradation. How does that help us? Well, it doesen’t rot (or only very slowly), and so locks away carbon(which would become

Image via Wikipedia

carbon dioxide,

methane etc), but the kicker is while you are making this, it is possible to extract oils/volatiles/tar that can be burnt to make electricity, or heat things.

So for me this seems an interesting way to power interactive artworks. There are two other hubs, one in Regina, Canada (Rachelle Viader Knowles) interested in Solar and the other in Bangalore, India  (Prayas Abhinav) interested in Biomass.

All of these fall under the banner of “powering new media artworks with locally relevant sustainable strategies”.

Image by sctv via Flickr

This first stage event involved a modest nine people, and our thoughts are up at http://st.ation.in/wiki/projects:co-ordinated_ecodesign

So what did we discover, that it is fun to collaborate over timezones, that three way chats over skype work well (until the internet fell over), that doing it with others works.

Thanks to Pete, Helen, Ben, and Derick at my end for contributing.