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Textile designer Ane Lykke has developed a three-dimensional wallpaper which explores the visual parallax created by two multicolored layers of hexagonal boxes. Currently on display at the Danish Design Centre, her so-called “Mind the Gap” wall decoration inspires interaction with the observer.

”The exhibition explores a very common phenomenon, which we have all experienced, for example when passing two parallel grid fences. As we move we see new wave forms or patterns arising. This is the principle that I have used in the exhibition. I want to find new ways of affecting the perception of a space, demonstrating that the spectator plays a crucial part,” says Ane Lykke, who adds that in physics this phenomenon is referred to as interference patterns.

Mind the Gap consists of a two-layered wall where the layers are separated by a 14 cm-space. The layers are made of hexagonal plastics boxes with stripes made of red lines in varying density and directions. The two layers turn into large pattern areas that change with the light and the spectator’s movements. As Ane Lykke puts it, the wall is “passively waiting” and is only activated when the spectator moves within the space. Then variations of the patterns follow along as a film, forming a living, vibrating surface. In this way, the spectator alters the wall. [via http://www.dexigner.com/.]

Thanks to research from the University of Southern California and Princeton University, almost any surface in a building, whether flat or curved, could become a light source: walls, curtains, ceilings, cabinets or tables.

Scientists studying organic light-emitting devices (OLEDs) have made a critical leap from single-color displays to a highly efficient and long-lived natural light source. The invention, described in the April 13 issue of Nature, is the latest fruit of a 13-year OLED research program led by Mark Thompson, professor of chemistry in the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and Stephen Forrest, formerly of Princeton University and now vice president for research at the University of Michigan.

“This process will enable us to get 100 percent efficiency out of a single, broad spectrum light source,” Thompson said. If the device can be mass-manufactured cheaply - a realistic expectation, according to Thompson - interior lighting could look vastly different in the future.

Since OLEDs are transparent when turned off, the devices could even be installed as windows or skylights to mimic the feel of natural light after dark - or to serve as the ultimate inconspicuous flat-panel television. [via Smart Economy, April 14, 2006; suggested by Walter Derzko, Toronto.]

Remember Light-Transmitting Concrete? Áron Losonczi, the Hungarian inventor of the fiber-optic embedded blocks, has developed a light fixture called LitraCube which utilizes four interlocking panels of the material.

As promised when the material was first developed, a wall made of “LitraCon” allegedly has the strength of traditional concrete but thanks to an embedded array of glass fibers can display a view of the outside world, such as the silhouette of a tree, for example.

“Thousands of optical glass fibers form a matrix and run parallel to each other between the two main surfaces of every block,” explained its inventor Áron Losonczi. “Shadows on the lighter side will appear with sharp outlines on the darker one. Even the colours remain the same. This special effect creates the general impression that the thickness and weight of a concrete wall will disappear.”

For just 595 Euros for LitraCube, you can claim you have built your own “structure” out of LiTraCon.

One of the most intriguing recent developments in the display industry has been the discovery and development of polymer light emitting diodes (PLEDs). It all started in the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University in 1989, when it was found that ‘organic’ LEDs could be made using conjugated polymers.

In particular, polyphenylene vinylene (PPV) was found to emit yellow-green light when sandwiched between a pair of electrodes. The initial device efficiencies were very low, but the researchers quickly realized the commercial potential of this discovery, especially for the manufacture of displays which emit their own light. These would offer significant advantages over the main display technology used today (liquid crystal display or LCD), in which a separate light source has to be filtered in several stages to produce an image.

PLEDs have a number of intrinsic advantages over liquid crystal devices. PLED is an emissive technology: it emits light as a function of its electrical operation. A PLED display consists of polymer material manufactured on a substrate of glass or plastic, and does not require additional elements such as backlights, filters and polarizers. PLED technology is very energy efficient and lends itself to the creation of ultra-thin lighting displays that will operate at lower voltages. The resulting benefits include brighter, clearer displays with viewing angles approaching 180 degrees; simpler construction resulting in cheaper, more robust display modules, and fast response times allowing full color video pictures even at low temperature. [via Cambridge Display Technology Ltd.]

If you’re a regular here at Tinselman, you may be aware that I spent some years of my youth on a skateboard…

Look at me go! A careening rocket of raw skateboarding might! I am pure energy! I am pure control! I am tinselman!

I’m not skateboarding so often these days but I still enjoy the decks. They’re a lot more impressive then they were back then. So maybe the skateboarding kid in me has been thrilled to see these decks become slowly accepted as bonafide works of art!

If you’d like to view some of these decks, stop by the “3 Feet High” site and take a look at their gallery. 65 tattoo artists, illustrators, designers, photographers and fine artists, were each given a single blank deck and asked to explore a simple theme. The show will be running in Hoboken, New Jersey until June 2nd, 2006.

Previous skating posts:

• Whoah–Hey! and Dogtown
• Lords of Venice

XsunX has developed very thin translucent coatings and films that create large area monolithic solar cell structures. This semi-transparency makes their so-called Power Glass glazing desirable for placing over glass, plastics, and other see-through structures. Using patented processes, such as reel-to-reel manufacturing techniques and multi-terminal cell structure designs, XsunX is working to commercialize large area cell manufacturing processes for thin film flexible plastics.

XsunX claims that Power Glass may provide as much as a 100% efficiency-to-cost gain over conventional opaque solar cells. This 100% gain in efficiency-to-cost is based on estimates of Power Glass solar cells operating at as much as 50% the efficiency of conventional opaque amorphous solar cells yet costing as little as 25% to produce. [via the XsunX website; suggested by Clayton Whitman, Seattle.]

In 2004, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) published a report on the environmental hazards posed by over 280 sunken ships littering the 36-mile stretch of Iraq’s coastline along the northern end of the Persian Gulf. 3 wars later (the Iran–Iraq War from 1980 to 1988, the 1991 Gulf War, and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003), a broken chain of tankers, tugs, barges, and patrol boats—”many of which still hold petroleum products, unexploded ordnance, and possibly rocket fuel, propellants, and toxic chemicals“—form hulking barricades in a poisoned sea stew sluicing around Iraq’s two and only deep-water ports, which are critical to receiving reconstruction supplies.

According to the UNDP survey, “Aside from the 282 sunken vessels identified in the UNDP survey, hundreds more remain submerged in the channels and estuaries north of Umm Qasr and near the neighbouring territorial waters of Kuwait.”

Leaking oil is the main culprit threatening the Gulf, where close to “80% of people in the region get their freshwater from desalination plants there”, according to this article. But with many of the shipwrecks containing live explosives, the half-submerged galleons are extremely dangerous to move, and in increased counter-clockwise water currents I imagine them swaying around almost like beached whales rolling in the surf, or sunken skyscrapers packed with bombs, “munitions, pesticides, refined fuels, and pollutants” that ooze out industrial chum galaxies from their great steel stomachs stinking of an ocean death. The last 25 years have turned the Iraqi portion of the Gulf into a disastrous toxic graveyard, spreading, territorializing - Occupation in the form of an informal coastal minefield; or, a perfect inadvertent fortress moat.

Asylum world brings us some Google map images of the submerged armada. (And thanks to Javier Arbona for dropping this my way.)

Akin to something crossed between the grassroots filmmaking of
Kids with Cameras
and the participatory-culture of the
Border Film Project
,
MAQUILAPOLIS
, or “City of Factories”, is a self-produced documentary made by (and about) the female workers in Tijuana’s sprawling maquiladora assembly factories.
Shot on digital cameras distributed to a group of promotoras (community-based activists) after a six-week technical training and story-telling workshop, the film follows and “meets women who are each dealing with the hardships of environmental toxins, labor rights abuse, infrastructure and housing issues”, and, among other things - women’s rights.
Filmmaker Vicky Funari, and artist Sergio De La Torre, collaborated together with the women’s organization Grupo Factor X in Tijuana, to organize and help the workers adapt the camera to their daily lives. Through a series of intimate narratives and teamwork, the documentary assembles a portrait of a community managing to create “liveable solutions to the complexities of life in a globalized city“.

Sergio is a friend of a good friend of mine (both of whom are doing great work), but I have to say, this looks like a fascinating project - and I can’t wait to see it. The film “approaches the workers as experts who can provide us with keys to our common future” the website reads, “inviting them to co-author their own story on videotape.” And, isn’t that what it’s all about: communities coming together to bring their own stories to the forefront of larger debates, empowered by grassroots artistic collaboration?
Though I haven’t seen it yet, I will venture to say, what sounds most promising about Maquilapolis besides any poignancy of what it reveals about the maquiladoras themselves (or the real-life cultural impact of “globalization” on the Mexican side of the border), isn’t just the cinematic experience the film leaves behind, but, rather, what it has already gone on to establish with this community of workers for the future. The women continue to use the cameras today as a sort of fixed apparatus for recording and relaying the ongoing struggles and visions of their daily lives, symbolically empowered by their use of the very consumer products they assemble in the factories. The filmmakers are actually looking for additional funding to host an editing workshop in hopes of encouraging more people to become active in the day-to-day documentary story-telling of their plight playing out along the border.

[Image: Tribeca Review of
Maquilapolis
, 04.13.06.]

With all the vitriolic attention on immigration spit out in the media these days, distorted by gross exaggerations of the border being the number one threat to U.S. national security, the time for a genuine depiction of US/Mexico border geopolitics — made (and told) by the people central to the confluence of hardships there — is crucial to our understanding of why, and how, we should seriously consider addressing the region.
In short, the hype over how the maquialdoras were going to boost the Mexican economy has hardly panned out, nor has this industry at all helped to alleviate the pressure of illegal immigration to the United States. In the last 20 years the US/Mexico border has been the fastest growing population of any border region anywhere in the world. There are 12 million illegal immigrants estimated living through out the U.S., but the numbers also suggest approximately 12 million people have migrated to the southern border in that same time, driven by an explosion in consumer goods manufacturing and import/export markets, which have made the 2000 mile stretch the most densely populated geography between any neighboring First and Third world nations. An additional 10-15 million are predicted to crash the border zone by 2020.

[Image:
Bridging Troubled Waters in Ambos Nogales


by Miriam Davidson, 1998.]

According to Tyche Hendricks in the
SF Chron
, “The largest concentration of maquiladora jobs is in Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, followed by Tijuana, just south of San Diego. Reynosa, across the Rio Grande from McAllen, Texas, is third in maquiladora employment.” He goes on to write that Reynosa employs “more than 92,000 workers in 200 factories [that] produce everything for the U.S. market from distributor caps to candy canes. Those jobs have made border cities into magnets for workers from the interior of Mexico, where government support for subsistence agriculture has evaporated. The largely American-owned factories, which first arose in 1965, now employ nearly 1.2 million people.” There are approximately 3,500 plus maquiladoras currently operating along the border today.
The failure of the maquiladoras is largely in part because they are essentially legitimized slave factories as opposed to any kind of viable economic alternative for Mexico’s grossly lopsided economy. From what I’ve heard, the average wage of a worker is around $95 a week, and that’s working overtime. Further, neither country’s labor policy has served in any way to discourage exploitation on either side of the fence, but rather has had the opposite effect. “These massive cross-border flows occur by design” says Douglas S. Massey, “under the auspices of the North American Free Trade Agreement. But at the heart of NAFTA lies a contradiction: Even as the United States moves to promote free movement of goods, services, capital and information, we as a nation somehow seek to prevent the movement of labor. We wish to create a North American economy that integrates all markets except one: that for labor“.

[Image: Maquiladoras, by Ingolf Vogeler.]

Those concerns have also been compounded by transnational companies shopping around the globe for competitive exploitable labor, and recent moves have taken many of the jobs to labor markets in Asia. This article reported that roughly 226,000 workers, in a relative short period of time between 2000-01, were laid off by these foreign companies as massive shifts of maquiladora portfolios left Mexico. The author says, “And where do you think all those people went?”
To further show that the maquiladoras have not helped to reduce the influx of illegal immigration, Hendricks cites a U.S. report showing that the number of people working in these factories along the border still continues to rise, as do the number of factories themselves. From ‘90 to ‘05 Maquiladora jobs in Mexico have increased from 454,432 to 1,174,234. So, it is not entirely unobvious to assume that the constant increase in the number of factories crowding the border and the people they employ are in some part responsible, if even perhaps indirectly, to the surge in the number of border-crossers.
Massey, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University and co-author of the book “Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Age of Economic Integration,” has stated, “Instead of viewing Mexican migration as a pathological product of rampant poverty and rapid population growth, we should see it for what it is: a natural byproduct of economic development in a relatively wealthy country undergoing a rapid transition to low fertility in close association with the United States.”

[Image: Many of the homes in Chilpancingo are made out of packing crates the workers buy from the maquilas, 2002.]

To make matters even worse, while the debate remains polarized between a conservative agenda seeking to convert the issue of immigration into one of national security (in order to contract billions of dollars into militarizing the border), and the left, who at least emphasizes the issue as a complex permutation of our own labor policy and practice - the other great concern (which seems to get less and less attention) is the swelling environmental crisis that consumes the region in nightmarish swaths of habitat degradation and catastrophic waste-disposal.
As most of us know, environmental justice is generally linked to economic and social justice. So, it can be the least bit surprising to attempt an explanation of the overwhelming poverty that has piled up along the border and the issue of mass illegal immigration in terms of the environmental consequences systemic to the institution of exploited labor that has defined the border.

[Image: Community members built this makeshift bridge across the river of run-off that divides the two sides of Chilpancingo, 2002.]

The state of roads and sewage infrastructure in most border cities “is sliding toward desperate,” says UC Berkeley Professor Harley Shaiken, an expert in labor and trade. “The maquilas are paying minimal if any taxes, and the result is an infrastructure that is inadequate to the growth taking place.”
According to a friend of mine, Chris Nelson, who is focussing on environmental policy enacted around the border, “Approximately 11% of all the trash in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley landfills in 2002 came from maquiladoras.” Meanwhile, Tijuana is an environmental disaster. Nelson proposes an overall strategy of cleaning up the border as a way to begin restructuring the transborder economy of the region through mutual civic projects that incentivize environmental responsibility, and by bringing forth comprehensive and progressive socio-economic transformation programs through “operationalizing industrial ecology”.

[Image: Ecoparque, an experimental water filration/irrigation project on the steep hillsides of Tijuana.]

Anyway, more on that later. In the meantime, if you get a chance to go see the documentary – do it. Here’s the schedule of dates. And, if you have any spare cash, don’t be afraid to donate. And, if you do manage to see this, shoot me an email, or comment here, because I’d love to hear responses to this. If I get chance to see it, I’ll post a review here. Stay tuned.