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With an ever-increasing amount of technology intended to "improve", "augment", and/or "add convenience" to our busy lives, there seems to be less of an emphasis on creating devices to reflect or comment on our natural or built environments. Taking this challenge as a starting point with her work, Chicago-based artist, Sabrina Raaf, examines the seemingly "invisible" elements of modernized and technologically equipped spaces by re-interpreting this covert data through mechanized objects that create feedback in the form of sound or other visual outputs. From exploring live data sets in the immediate gallery space with "Translator II: Grower", a robot that measures carbon dioxide levels and draws corresponding blades of grass on the wall, to exploring the tension between humans and adaptive or automated systems with "Dry Translator", Raaf's work exposes the unspoken conflicts between society's push for technological autonomy and the struggle to retain human emotion and sensibility.
A long-running effort by the Person County school board to find a site to replace an archaic bus garage could be coming to a conclusion. After months of searching for an alternative location to the one along Leasburg Road, school district leaders are eyeing the old fairgrounds along Virgilina Road. Schools Superintendent Ronnie Bugnar was asked the chances on a scale of one to 10 that the site is going to be the best place. "I would say at this point it's certainly an eight," he replied. "I don't see any problem with it," school board Chairman Gordon Powell said. "It all appears to be going well and we don't anticipate any major problems there." County Manager Steve Carpenter said he believes light is at the end of the tunnel now. "We're always optimistic," he said. "They'll eventually get it worked out." The school board last month agreed to a 90-day option to buy from the landowner, Bernard Fogleman.
The Government's pledge to carbon neutralise every new British home by 2016 may sound ambitious now, but will appear pretty basic to the homeowners of the future, for whom zero carbon living will be a given. By 2080, the avant-garde may be living in houses on stilts (far right) with removable walls, kept cool by dirty bathwater, according to a new study by Arup Associates and Zurich Insurance. In a separate report announced this week, the first steps on the path to sustainable housing were outlined by Ruth Kelly, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government. By 2050, according to Ms Kelly, a third of the total housing stock will be less than 44 years old. And everything post-2016 will, of course, be zero carbon, which means producing enough clean energy to cover any power taken from traditional sources.
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