Many Thanks

Cultura21 Launches New Website

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Dear all,

Today, I have the pleasure to announce on this list, two important news from Cultura21: Our relaunched, redesigned, multilingual website at cultura21.net, and the new Cultura21 eBooks series:

New Website: just launched

Please visit http://www.cultura21.net to discover our redesigned website. On this new website, you will find information not only about the activities of Cultura21, but also about other news relevant to Cultura21 themes. Don’t hesitate to browse through the 46 “pages” (top menu bar) and 100 “posts” (right-hand “categories” menu) already available on the website. You will also find a new ‘forum’ on the website (for which you will have to register, in order to contribute).

The website is currently available in the following languages: English, French, German, Spanish, and Esperanto. Further languages will follow (Danish and Turkish are expected for the future).

The web-magazine and the wiki remain available at the same web addresses as usual, and they are linked from the new website too.

With many thanks to the editors who made this possible, and most especially to Roland Prüfer, our designer and webmaster!

Cultura21 eBooks series: 3 volumes already available

The Cultura21 eBooks Series on Culture and Sustainability, edited by Sacha Kagan and Davide Brocchi, presents findings from inter- and trans-disciplinary perspectives in research and practice. The eBooks are published openly online by Cultura21 Institut e.V. in order to support broad dissemination and to stimulate further debates in civil society and further action-research in the field.

The eBooks, which are available as PDF files, are published as part of Cultura21’s Web Magazine and thus can be found at: http://magazin.cultura21.de/piazza/texte and the latest eBook from the series can be found also on our new multilingual website at http://www.cultura21.net.

So far (since December 2010), three eBooks have been released already, in three different languages (German, French and English):
– Vol. 1: Lisa Grabe. Das „Projekt Nachhaltigkeit“. Zu den Grenzen des Nachhaltigkeitskonzepts aus kultureller Perspektive. PDF direct link
– Vol. 2: David Knaute. Le Syndrome Karamoja: Repenser la crise des sociétés pastorales dans le contexte de la globalisation. PDF direct link
– Vol. 3: Julia Hahn. Creative Cities and (Un)Sustainability – Cultural Perspectives. PDF direct link

Kind regards,
Sacha

Emulating Genius: learn how to do it in under 2 hours

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Many thanks to everyone who came to the event, ran around forming adaptive eco-systems and generated new design possibilities. (And sorry to those who couldn’t get in because the event sold out).

Biomimicry is a new discipline that consciously emulates life’s genius.

It’s a design principle based on the genius of nature. The idea is not simply to utilise the natural world, but to learn from the exceptional aspects of its design.

It is the most radical approach to problem solving I have heard of.

And when architect Michael Pawlyn (FRSA) told me about it, I thought: ‘ Hmmm, it’d be good to learn how that works – not just ‘hear about it’ as something interesting – it would be great to understand the principles of it, then find ways to apply it.’ Then I drifted off into a daydream about the possibility of applying biomimicry in the arts….

So Michael has been developing games that can teach the principles of how biomimicry works – and we g0t to try them out with him and ecologist Dusty Gedge (FRSA).

The event is part of the Barbican exhibition Radical Nature – Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969–2009.

The genius behind the genius of biomimicry is Janine Benyus – she is an Ada Lovelace for the 21st century. If you want to see a short introduction to Benyus’s work, her latest TED talk is now online.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology