A photo of a partially buried keyboard in a computer dump in Ghana. It is taken from a slideshow on the New York Times website.
“In Agbogbloshie, a slum in Accra, the capital of Ghana, adults and children tear away at computers from abroad to get at the precious metals inside. Copper is perhaps the most desirable, then brass, then aluminum, then zinc. At the dump, the machines are dismantled and often burned to extract metals for resale. The equipment in this digital cemetery come mainly from Europe and the United States, sometimes as secondhand donations meant to reduce the “digital divide” — the disparity in computer access between poor nations and rich.
Francis Alys has made many of his videos available online through his website. Most of the videos have been made public domain through creative commons licensing and can be downloaded while a small number are only available to be watched online.
image: still from SometimesMaking Something Leads to Nothing, Mexico City, 1997, 4:59min
This photo was taken from the Guatemalan Government’s Flickr feed and shows a “massive, spontaneous sinkhole (“hundimiento”) that appeared today in Zone 2 of Guatemala City, after overwhelming saturation of rains from tropical storm Agatha.”
This incredible image is by Abbas Kowsa and comes from his series Shade of Earth: 2007-8 which documents some of the “hundreds of thousands of Iranians visit the fronts of the Iran -Iraq war (1980-1988) during their New Year (Noruz) holiday…
The pilgrims, often family members of those who died, travel with buses from all over the country to visit the places where the fighting was the heaviest. Iran lost over half a million soldiers during the eight year trench war with neighbouring Iraq.”
“A giant ant colony pumped full of cement,and then excavated reveals one of Mother Nature’s marvellous wonders.
We’ve seen what these giant ant mounds look like above ground but this is an incredible view of what the structures looks like underground – which some have called a wonder of the world.”
The Nerve – Music and the Human Experience is a six part radio series. The first episode, which dealt with how we perceive music, was played as the lyric feature last Saturday evening.
All of the episodes except the fifth be listened to here (not sure why the fifth isn’t available).
The titles of the episodes are below.
Episode 1: Wired for Sound (Music & the Brain)
Episode 2: In the Key of DNA (Music & Evolution)
Episode 3: The Pipe, the Drum and the Thunder Run (Music & War)
A BBC Imagine programme about Anish Kapoor to coincide with his exhibition at the Royal Academy. It’s a great chance to see his studio and works in production including his computer made concrete pieces which I previously poasted about. Embedding has been disabled on the videos but here is a link to the documentary on youtube
