Over the past four years, a thriving market for household solar panels has sprung up in India, with the help of a United Nations programme which assists local banks in offering cheaper loans for the panels.Since 2003, the $1.5 million programme has helped 16,600 Indians living in the southern state of Karnataka buy solar power systems for their homes and small businesses.
Jyoti Painuly, senior energy planner for the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), lists examples of people who have profited from the scheme: “There is the food vendor who told us ‘Now my food doesn’t smell of kerosene, so I sell more of it,’ and the tailor who said that he can work a few extra hours during the day, bringing in more money.”
The project began by selecting five vendors of household solar panel systems in Karnataka. With funding from the UN Foundation and the Shell Foundation, UNEP helped train the vendors, who were having limited success selling their wares in India – despite some of them having businesses exporting to Germany.
Archive for April, 2007
Indian Style Solar Power
Sunday, April 29th, 2007Timeless Transformation
Thursday, April 26th, 2007I had a brief tech this afternoon. My friend Trebien Pollard is presenting a piece at the Dance Sampler this Saturday at Symphony Space. The piece is a 12 minute section of a larger full evening work we will be presenting at the Joyce Soho this July.
Tech was very fast as is so often the case in the dance world. The evening consists of 16 works by as many choreographers. It can be quite an interesting evening. As a result each group is allowed 45 minutes to tech the piece. That gave us just enough time for me to write a dozen light cues and then run the piece twice. Organization is critical in these situations as there really is no time to lose.
What is funny about is that I did not get a chance to actually watch the piece(and will not be able to as I will be with the NYTB show that evening). I find there are two ways of observing a piece. One is how I look when I am working on it and the other is after it is done reflecting on the work I have completed. When I have only done the former, I do not consider it having seen the piece. My eyes are so concerned with the formal aesthetics of the thing that I often moss out on the sensory enjoyment of the work.
Trebien and one of the dancers Liz, and I all went to graduate school together. From there and since then I have probably lit around ten pieces of his. Its nice to have that familiarity with a work. You are able to understand the textures of the piece better. The general aesthetic is in place and then you can work on the details.
The lighting is much simpler than I had hoped, but it was all we really had time for. As much as the individual cues are important, with dance especially I find the timing of the thing, how the light moves and transforms, to be of even greater value. Thus getting in the two runs rather than building as many cues as possible was of more value. Fewer light cues of greater integrity are in the end a better way to go almost all of the time.
I have worked with choreographers who seem to think that the job of the lighting designer is to write light cues. That is we are to create as many different looks as possible and to have the lighting for a piece change every time there is a minor transformation in the movement phraseology.
I tend to take the almost extreme opposite view when it comes to dance. Unless there is a need for the lighting to change, I do not like to make changes. The piece must demand a transformation in the environment before I write a cue. I think this is a good way to look at any performance, but I find it to be of most crucial value in dance.
Dance is to theatre as poetry is to literature. Even while the poem may be quite complex, they are very delicate things held together by there merest intonation of a word. The presence or absence of a single word or phrase will either make or break a poem. So too can a single misstep make or break a dance.
I remember an article I came across once in an old copy of Lighting Dimensions Magazine written by Jennifer Tipton about lighting dance. In it she speaks to the use of color and how there is often an idea that wild and saturated colors can be used in dance, because it is dance. She goes on to explain how this is a misunderstanding and that while there may well be times where the use of heavily saturated colors can be appropriate there is nothing inherent to dance that makes that exception as opposed to theatre or opera.
Taking this same line of reasoning I explored it in relation to the movement of light and discovered a similar truth. Most of our life and our experience occurs under a constant, or very slow moving light. Perhaps we are under the fluorescent lighting of an office or outside under the slow moving gaze of the sun. Either way we do not have many and wild transformations in the lighting environments we find ourselves in. Even in a night club the environment is a static one even thought the physical lights themselves may be moving and blinking, the quality of the environment remains the same.
Given this, and given that dance, and other performance mediums, are an extension of our daily experience, why then would we consider the movement of the light in a dance to exist in so radically divergent a state as it does in our lives? The light should be heightened, certainly, as dance is a heightened form of reality, but heightened or no, it is still woven of the same thread.
When the light finds a need to change then it can and must change. But to do so arbitrarily is just that, arbitrary. James Turrell explores this in many of his works especially his installations like the one at PS1.
The sun is constant. It is everything around us changing that makes it appear to transform. There is a quality of mutable consistency to natural light, and even the artificial light we engage with, that is so often lacking in lighting for performance. That stillness is so necessary to allow the stories that must be told to come alive.
Come See My Show This Weekend!
Thursday, April 26th, 2007This Friday and Saturday, New York Theatre Ballet will perform Antony Tudor’s “Judgement of Paris,” in New York’s Florence Gould Hall. I saw the company’s performance of the work about a year ago, and it stuck in my imagination. NYTB has eminent Tudor interpreter Sallie Wilson to stage and coach, and the dancers have real acting chops. But they also have the humility to bring out the subtlety in a joke. If you never understood why Tudor was great, I recommend seeing New York Theatre Ballet’s productions of his ballets. Above: Venus, Minerva, and Juno take turns attempting to seduce their tipsy customer.
Rounding Out Design Style
Thursday, April 26th, 2007The problem is, of course, complicated. First, there is the corruption of the word “design” itself, as it’s generally applied to an Apple object. What distinguishes your iPod from your brand-x MP-3 player is not design: that brand x machine also is distinguished by design. By bad design. What is unique to Apple is more accurately called “style”: a clear signature vocabulary of forms and materials, superabundant to the mere requirements of function, that convey a certain sensibility, atmosphere, association, vibe. Of course, all those rounded corners may aid in manufacture and structure, but they also say in a comfortingly Jetsonian way: “I’m from the future, and so are you.” It’s the familiar tension between Modern and Modernist, in which a particular high style is mislabeled as “design,” and a corrupted understanding of the phenomenon of design is misrepresented as an additional “feature” of an object. The danger here is the implication that design can be reduced to a characteristic of an object, and not the animating spirit behind all its characteristics in total, (and, thus, the notion that an expensive detail that can be dispensed with by the practical-minded).But Aesthetes and Moderns beware, it gets worse. The good design of the iPod is not to be found in the high style that shapes its material form, but in the inspired interface between that physical object and the information design and the software embedded therein. Consider the clickwheel, that sensually pleasant disk that is the latest addition to a very short list (keyboard, joystick) of powerful attachments between embodied and virtual information. Turning and depressing that clickwheel aligns different functions with charming simplicity and deft complexity, and has a fluidity to it that approaches some organic ideal for the choreography between man and machine. (And, of course, all that software in the machine is generally functional, friendly and fantastic.) But the great functional elegance of this intersection between hardware and software has been all too easily confused and conflated with the ostensible elegance of the hardware itself — and irritatingly designed Apple hardware gets a pass.
What’s wrong with Apple hardware, aesthetically speaking? To closely examine the details of even the newest and coolest Apple product, the iPhone, is, eventually, to be reduced to tears. First impressions of a deft and considered modern object dissipate. To be sure, like the clickwheel, the iPhone’s multifunctional pressure screen is a lovely intersection of information design and ergonomics. But god and the devil are always in the details, so let’s get fastidious about them.
Novel Sunsets
Wednesday, April 25th, 2007Sunrises and sunsets on the planet must be spectacular. If you could stand on its surface, you would see its red host star looming 10 times wider in the sky than our own Sun appears.Team member Xavier Delfosse from Grenoble University in France says he hopes that spacecraft missions will probe the world for signs of life over the next decade or two.
“On the treasure map of the universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X,” says Delfosse. “Because of its temperature and relative proximity, this planet will most probably be a very important target of the future space missions dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life.”
The Future of Robot Ethics
Tuesday, April 24th, 2007“Robot technology is accelerating with applications in the home, in the workplace and in the military. It is hard to keep up and we are at a point where the public need to make some informed decisions about our future,” says Professor Noel Sharkey.“Some researchers believe that robots will have consciousness on a timescale of 50+ years while others believe this is a fairytale. The problem is that robots may be required to make decisions that could affect our lives much sooner. While some governments are beginning to draw up ethical guidelines, we need to initiate proper public consultation and informed public debate now.”
Not Your Typical Freedom of Religion Case
Tuesday, April 24th, 2007To settle a lawsuit, the Department of Veterans Affairs has agreed to add the Wiccan pentacle to a list of approved religious symbols that it will engrave on veterans’ headstones.The settlement, which was reached on Friday, was announced on Monday by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, which represented the plaintiffs in the case.
Though it has many forms, Wicca is a type of pre-Christian belief that reveres nature and its cycles. Its symbol is the pentacle, a five-pointed star, inside a circle.
Until now, the Veterans Affairs department had approved 38 symbols to indicate the faith of deceased service members on memorials. It normally takes a few months for a petition by a faith group to win the department’s approval, but the effort on behalf of the Wiccan symbol took about 10 years and a lawsuit, said Richard B. Katskee, assistant legal director for Americans United.
See the Forest for the Trees
Monday, April 23rd, 2007Researchers have uncovered a 300-million-year–old-fossilised rainforest, buried deep below ground in a coal mine in Illinois, US. It is by far the largest such forest ever found and provides an unprecedented look at the ecology of one of the world’s earliest tropical forests.Palaeobiologists from the US National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) in Washington DC, US, and the University of Bristol in the UK found a bizarre menagerie of extinct plants including club moss that grew a metre thick and more than 40 m high. The fossils were found nearly 100 metres underground at the Riola and Vermilion Grove mines in Vermilion County, Illinois.
The forest was buried in mud 300 million years ago when a large earthquake or other catastrophic event caused the entire region to suddenly drop below sea level. The fossilised forest lay preserved on top of a layer of coal that, when removed by miners, left the ancient forest visible on the mine ceiling.
“You’re looking up at a ceiling a metre or two above your head with fossilised tree trunks and ferns scattered all around,” says William DiMichele of the NMNH, who led the study. “You can walk through the mine looking up at this forest as if you were walking through a modern-day rainforest.”
Urban Forestation
Sunday, April 22nd, 2007One million new trees will join the urban landscape of New York City by the year 2017 to reduce air pollution, cool temperatures and help improve the city’s long term sustainability, officials said Saturday.The tree program is one of 127 environmental proposals that Mayor Michael Bloomberg was set to outline Sunday in a speech at the Museum of Natural History, timed with the observance of Earth Day.
His administration has been working for more than a year on the package of ideas, which is also expected to include a controversial plan to charge motorists extra for driving into certain parts of Manhattan, as a way to cut down on traffic congestion and pollution.
