In the information age we can ask: why use durable materials for ephemeral purposes? A gallery guide, an invitation – need they last for generations? Need plastic caps and containers be durable to marine conditions for decades, circulating ad nauseum thru ecosystems? Need we use machine lubricants, like PCBs, that last for centuries, mestasticizing the livers of each little Tomcod swimming thru the Hudson, collecting through the bodies of all the larger fish and into the breast milk of women, the cord-blood of newborn babies?
Although cultural ephemera is rich and important museums can archive in a variety of ways and we can design the cultural afterlife of our material artifacts. Digestion is the new medium. And information and material are not inexorably tied.

Exploring the Afterlife!
You are invited to partake in an experiment to revise this cultural habit–a collective but correctable error. We simply substitute temporal materials for the longlasting, and design how they degrade and circulate thru our socio-ecolgocial systems. We use an inexpensive, enzymatically driven high=performance biodegradation process : your digestive tract. The aggregated efforts of many of us can outperform most industrial processes… you are a digesting machine!

Your participation is solicited in the following :

The Cross(x)Species adventure club issues edible invitations so u can taste this possibility (these include some incredible tastes);

An edition of Edible Gallery Guides [EGG] for Jeremijenko’s Connected Environments Exhibition [CEE].
These have an unmistakable taste of the reverent hush that characterizes museums-certain ecumenical aftertaste. They are Proust Madeline of the museums climate-controlled white-walled quality, a taste that, if not exactly delectable is nonetheless impregnated with a rich history of cultural symbolism.

Fun to share. Preservative Peanut and Pesticide Free. Kosher, Vegan, Fairest of Trades, Organic (who’s really checking?) and absolutely edible.

Jeremijenko on Dipity.

The farmers have pointed me towards a few personalities to begin profiling. Firstly there is the herd that is currently being milked for commercial milk and cheese production and then there are the cows who are taking care of the calves. The latter are kept separately and are lovingly referred to as ‘the nursery’. In the nursery I met Norma and Josie who are acting as wet nurses. The cows are mothering 5 calves between the two of them, calves who are not necessarily theirs.  Norma is an older cow, and a veteran mother. She is a Normande which are said by the North American Normande Association to “reach sexual maturity early and have good fertility, mammary conformation, mothering ability and production longevity”. Josie on the other hand is a Jersey which is one of the oldest dairy breeds, popular because of its milk and butterfat production.They have an average weight of 900 pounds, and produce more pounds of milk per pound of body weight than any other breed. Most Jerseys produce more then 13x their bodyweight in milk each time they lactate. Norma and Josie are in the nursery due to the fact that their milk has tested high in somatic cell counts. Somatic cells are white blood cells which are produced when the immune system is in overdrive due to an infection of some sort, possibly mastitis. The milk is not commercially viable when the somatic cell counts are too high and if Norma and Josie’s counts don’t drop they will have to leave the herd. In this instance the farmers are performing a type of experiment to see if rigorous suckling will lower their somatic cell counts. They will test again after this batch of calves is weened from Norma and Josie. This constant milking from calves takes quite a toll on Norma and Josie physically and they are both looking quite thin these days. Traumatic suckling syndrome? Might they benefit from an online support group of nursing mothers? Josie is now a password holding member of http://www.breastfeeding.com/forums/.

Adaptation to fairly rudimentary housing development … not only ducks but owls and otherscheck in …

speculations about thte animations of drought for instance …

a good thousand recent papers on water research .

use

another reason why we just need to explode the riparian zones … more better everywhere.