Still Water’s living-learning center on Chapel Street, LongGreenHouse, has been exploring the intersection between Native culture and Permaculture with students from many walks of life. In July thirty students from the university’s Upward Bound program attended Joline Blais’ workshops on greenhouses and plant guilds.
Meanwhile kids from LongGreenHouse’s Wassookeag school have been busy too: in April they made dreamcatchers with Penobscot elder Charlene Francis; in July they visited the Black Bear Food Guild; in September they built a geodesic dome with Intermedia MFA student Bill Giordano. The BBFG’s July newsletter described the Wassookeag students as “intelligent, thoughtful, and incredibly enjoyable”; they “had a zeal for learning that was really amazing.”
More at http://wassookeag.org
Over forty authors from the National Poetry Foundation’s conference on poetry of the seventies have published their work using a new Still Water tool that reveals connections among different peoples’ writing.
Craig Dietrich and Vanessa Vobis have been announced as 2008-2009 Still Water Research Fellows. Artist-researcher Craig Dietrich engineers interfaces for creative and scholarly examinations of transnational culture using tools as varied as streaming video, database-driven Flash interfaces, cell-phone texting, and Dashboard widgets.
German-born Vanessa Vobis is an installation and multimedia artist whose research focuses on the underside of biological and cultural systems. Her custom-built ecosystems such as Plot, Body Beasts, and The Crystal World suggest natural history dioramas that are both otherworldly and familiar, repellent and compelling. Recently exhibited in Sweden, Estonia, and the Netherlands, Vobis’ videos have won a Silver Eddy at the Cedar Rapids Film Festival.
