No Farms, No Food

My complete and utter lack of presence on this blog is balanced (I think) by all the wonderful real-life things I have been doing outside in the world! Those things consist almost entirely of farming. Growing food, watering food, weeding food, stacking food, eating food, making food, canning food, feeding food, gathering food, slaughtering food, butchering food, composting food, selling food, turning food into drink – I’ve been learning the intricacies of how food genuinely works in our lives, where it comes from and where it goes.

In my thoughts and actions I am striving to really pull together a lot of aspects of my life right now, and I hope that this blog will soon reflect that gathering. I am intensely excited about a lot of endeavors right now, but I am struggling to convey this excitement (and best yet, how it is all linked!) properly to others – but never fear!

Soon enough I will properly unleash myself on the world, but right now I am saving up ideas, energy, money and of course, food.

Episodic Gully Activity, Success!

Sun kissed and flooded with vast amounts of knowledge, I am back at Hampshire College after a week long stint at the Lunar Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas. While at the conference I presented this poster of my current gully research during the Thursday evening poster session

After listening to, talking with, and presenting for over a thousand planetary scientists from all over the world  I realized just how awesome this field really is. Though graduate school is still only a thought on the horizon at this point, I would like to continue to be a part of planetary science until I (likely) decide to acquire some higher degrees in this pretty sweet field of study.

Journey in a Bottle: Final Installation

My final installation for my January Term class wound up taking on a life of its own. My original plan was for it to be a larger universe in a bottle piece, filling a room and ending in a wall of Mars (complete with sound, images, and fabric.) Anyways, I have not seen the last of that idea, but for my final installation project I was faced with a challenge:

I had 12 hours to complete the project.
I wanted to vote in the Massachusetts senate elections.

To vote, I had to journey to Natick – a four hour round trip. While driving, it was not possible to work on my installation as I had intended, and as my installation required picking up various materials at stores – it was not like I could pull an all nighter after voting and still keep my original idea. So it morphed. What is the most important in the universe right now? This journey: the journey to vote.

And so I worked it into my universe that I was depicting with my bottle. Molly McLeod (a friend from Hampshire with her own awesome website) agreed to journey with me and make an installation together as we drove to mark our adventure.

The bottle is the beginning of the universe. The wires that explode out of it represent the different pathways of the universe. First, the journey of elements, second, the journey of stars and planets, third, the journey of Lindsay and Molly voting! The fourth wire leads to a cup filled with small beads which I dropped out of the window along our journey to mark our path. Everyone is invited to take beads from this cup, connecting themselves to the journey of the universe I’ve depicted.

Here is what the inside of the car looked like after Molly and I were done with it!

Molly recorded our conversations in pictures and hung them on wire throughout the car!

Adventure!

Adventuring to Mars! (one step closer, anyway)

My abstract was accepted for presentation (via poster) at the Lunar Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas this March! I am quite excited to make a poster, travel to Texas and participate in a planetary science conference. My abstract sheds light on evidence for the complex geologic histories of gullies, recent geomorphological features on Mars.

You see, gullies are geologically recent features (within the last million years or so) formed on steep slopes  and they are created with some amount of water. Groundwater bursts, snow and ice melt above and below ground have all been suggested methods of formation, along with others, though I believe the story is getting more complicated with the addition of pasted on material along crater and valley walls. In any event, my abstract is concerning the evidence for episodic depositional events in gully systems. If gullies are often formed in episodic events, as opposed to one catastrophic event, that will tell a lot about their formation process.

In the very near future I will update my Mars page to explain more fully the research I’ve been working on. I’ll post my abstract once I have the permission of the other three authors and in the meantime I’ll be preparing for Texas!

I feel I need a sign that says “Under Construction” but then I would need another one that says “Continuously”

Life is a constant bombardment of under constructions signs, and this wordpress blog is currently, and likely will always be, a reflection of that chaos. This is a new venture for me – having my own little corner of the internet like this, I haven’t done the website proper on my own since Geocities in 6th grade.

Conventioneers was a wordpress blog I kept with several other friends. Criss Cross Circus and Downside Up are two other wordpress blogs I was involved with only from the sidelines.

But this one – this one is all me and I am still figuring out what that might mean and what that could look like. So be warned, especially in these early times – this place is subject to my every whim and fancy. So.

Under Construction. Continuously.

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Which literally means right now I have no idea why my installation photographs are so dark and I would like to figure out how to change that since they were not dark yesterday. Apologies.

So instead, come see some of my work in person at the Arisia Art Show in Boston, Massachusetts this Friday-Sunday.

But Fire Thought, She’d Really Rather Be Water Instead

Right now I am a Division III student at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, which means I am in my final stage of my undergraduate education – free to culminate in the final thesis piece of my choosing. Along with this awesome power, prestige, and ultimate academic freedom comes an ocean of responsibility.

My current projects topic in my Division III include:
Mars
Geomorphology
Planetary Science
The Universe (Cosmology)
Art Installation
Circus

Come back to check up on my happenings. I promise the next two-three years will be great fun, and likely beyond that.