Presentation Summaries

Deena Capparelli
Deena will talk about the growing of native grasses, trees, and shrubs on a 15-acre site in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Focusing on the activities of the MOISTURE project, she'll expose the problems of propagating seeds and the joys of having your plantings devoured by Mojave ground squirrels.

Beatriz da Costa
Beatriz da Costa will present Free Range Grains, a collaborative project with Critical Art Ensemble addressing the politics of GMO food labeling in a Euro-American context. Free Range Grains consisted of a live performative action. CAE/da Costa constructed a portable public lab to test processed food products for common genetic modifications. Interested participants brought in food products that were tested for possible transgenic contamination.

Melanie DuPuis
(coming soon)

Dan Froot
Oral History meets Toy Theater as prominent performance artist and UCLA Associate Professor Dan Fruit introduces “Who's Hungry?”, an interdisciplinary sociology/performance project that strives to illuminate the political, social, and economic dimensions of hunger and food insecurity in our own back yard.

Sheila Fennoy
We in the western world have lost our connection with the earth. In this presentation I will discuss how this happened and what effect this has had on the society and the environment. A brief history of the changing roles of gardens in society will be presented. I will show you some of my favorite gardens and discuss how we might reshape the way we use our land, especially gardens, to rekindle our bonds with the earth and our community.

Fritz Haeg
Edible Estates is an attack on the American front lawn and everything it has come to represent.
Edible Estates reconciles issues of global food production and urbanized land use with the modest gesture of a domestic garden.
Edible Estates is an ongoing series of projects to replace the American front lawn with edible garden landscapes responsive to culture, climate, context and people.
Edible Estates is a practical food producing initiative, a place-responsive landscape design proposal, a scientific horticultural experiment, a conceptual land-art project, a defiant political statement, a community out-reach program and an act of radical gardening.

Pearl Ho
FDA at Home repurposes a common desktop computer scanner into a diagnostic tool for the testing of pesticides in food. The project is a response to the limited food information available to the public. Components of the project include an open-source utility, at-home diagnostics instructions, and public results database.

Roman Jaster
In light of the urgent problems this world faces—environmental destruction, poverty, inequality, war—how can graphic designers participate to create solutions for a better future? I will present two projects in which I used my design skills to create positive impact. The book “Reclaim+Recover,” which I curated and designed, catalogs interventionist artist project that aim to transform urban ecologies. The project “Please Re-use Me” demonstrates how graphic design can be employed as a medium for social intervention. In this piece, I handed out 150 modified grocery bags to encourage shoppers to reduce waste.

Martha L. Orozco-Cardenas
Transformation is one of the most important technologies to analyze the expression of genes, create plants that express new traits, and manipulate the genome of the recipient organism. The first generation of genetically modified crops mainly benefited producers and the seed companies by improving crop productivity, reducing agrichemical inputs, and subsequently reducing labor costs. However, a new generation of transgenic crops will have traits beneficial to consumers, such as higher nutritional value, premium quality, low allergenicity, oral vaccines and therapeutic medicines.

Claire Pentecost
(coming soon)

Stephen Vines
Reverend Stephen Vines will use the concept of "garden as metaphor" to awaken the process of community empowerment. As a garden grows given nourishment, so does mankind, yielding a feeling of collective self-reliance for all residents involved. A central theme of United Human Family Network is to preserve and build family-oriented community alliances and greatly encourage local food production and gardening throughout the City of San Bernardino.

Claude Willey
Claude will discuss the love triangle of the 21st Century: Food, Fossil Fuel, and Climate Change. What is the relationship between nitrogen fertilizers, energy use, transportation, and arable land? How can we mediate our future food needs with the rising cost of oil and natural gas? And do we really need that 3,000-mile caesar salad?