Filmmaker, actor, artist and writer Miranda July can now add “techie” to her hat rotation.

The Los Angeles-based eccentric has created a new social media app, which she calls Somebody. And it’s about as awkward as you’d expect a Miranda July project to be.

According to W Magazine, July had an idea that she began to obsess over: “I’d been telling everyone about it, and trying to figure it out how to get it made.”

The idea is simple, for a Miranda July project, anyway. Using Somebody, the app sends your text to another person other than whom it was intended for. Instead, it goes to the next nearest person. The onus is then on that person—a potential stranger—to deliver the text in real life to your recipient. How they know who you are isn’t clear, and probably part of the goal. Standing inside a crowded venue could mean walking up to a dozen strangers before finding the correct recipient.

“The app makes people do things they normally wouldn’t do,” July told W. “It can get outrageous. I do like the fact that it creates these ephemeral experiences, but I also hope that some people will document their message deliveries, just so I can see them.”

If it doesn’t sound all that awkward, just imagine, for example, Miranda July walking up to you and shouting “LOL!” in your face. Out of context (in response to a funny kitty picture you texted your BF) it would seem strange, if not downright scary. But that’s just July’s point and her hopes of bridging our real life worlds with the tech bubbles we all live inside. Just how weird can we get? For July, it seems there are still no limits.

The project is sponsored by Miu Miu and presented by the New Museum and you can snag the app on iTunes.

Find Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

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Image: Cameron Wittig

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Beijing artist sells a glass jar of fresh French air at auction for $860. The move signifies the problems with Beijing air quality.

Can we put a price tag on something as invaluable as fresh air? Apparently, yes. And it happened.

Beijing-based artist Liang Kegang auctioned off a small glass jar filled with fresh air from Province, France. And the going price? $860.

While on a recent trip to the south of France, Liang couldn’t pass up the opportunity to make a statement in response to the detrimental state of Beijing’s air quality issue. He photographed himself ‘filling’ the ‘clean south of France air’ into the jar on March 29, 2014. The jar sold at an auction on March 30 to Chengdu-based artist and entrepreneur Li Yongzheng.

Beijing, a city home to twenty-one million people, is one of the world’s most polluted cities. Extremely highs levels of thick smog constantly pose serious health issues to Beijing’s citizens. As the chart below shows, since April 2008, there has only been 184 days total where air quality levels were considered good.

Six years of Beijing air pollution summed up. image: Quartz

“Air should be the most valueless commodity, free to breathe for any vagrant or beggar,” Liang said in an interview. “This is my way to question China’s foul air and express my dissatisfaction.”

featured image: Sunset Noir and Home Naturals

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Three Ways China Is Working To Clean Up It’s Air Pollution 

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For Pregnant Women, Air Pollution Just As Bad As Cigarettes

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VideoThe energy of dance.

A beautiful and creative artistic journey by way of dance.

EMBRACE from Ashley Rae Pearsall on Vimeo.

The post Video: Embrace appeared first on EcoSalon.

The recently launched eco-conscious fashion line Océé is inspired by oceanic imagery. Each piece is made to order and 2% of the proceeds benefit Surfrider Foundation Europe.

Océane Buret connected with the ocean at an early age, while spending summers sailing with her family across France and Europe. Since then, she has spent time working in the fashion industry in Paris, New York, Auckland and Los Angeles. Chaz Gangster is an American artist whose work is inspired by the swirling colorful display of oceanic imagery. He has also worked on costumes and art featured in music videos by artists like MGMT, the Killers, and Chairlift.

The two met in New York City in 2009 and decided to start an eco-conscious fashion line together. This first collection by Océé features five prints of Gangster’s art on unisex T-shirts and tank tops made from organic cotton. The prints – named “Onde,” “Abysse,” “Anémone,” “Evume,” and “Méduse” – pay tribute to the priceless but fragile environment in our oceans. Fittingly, the collection was made in partnership with ocean conservation organization Surfrider Foundation Europe, to which Océé donates 2% of their profit.

One of Buret’s main goals, however, is to propose a new behavior towards fashion, develop an alternative to mass production and fast fashion and raise awareness about sustainable development among its customers. Each piece in the collection is a limited edition of a 1,000 and are made to order according to custumers’ selections, which involve print, size and shape. The only way to purchase an item is to pre-order it online via Océé’s website.

Buret hopes to expand the line to include swimwear, surfwear, accessories and even more custom items. In the meantime, we’ll just lose ourselves in these gorgeous prints.

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Seeing a love of the water on land.

Art, sand and the sea come together in this short by Red Reel Video, as they follow artist Alejandro Gonzalez through his work in Baja, Mexico, bringing the wonders of the ocean to the surface.

Drawings on the Wall from RED REEL on Vimeo.

The post Video: Drawings on the Wall appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnAbout that heart.

Did you know? You’re the one I love.

I love you for loaning me the money even though you didn’t have it to loan.

I love you for lying under oath to protect a child.

I love you for standing by my side on the beach the day I really, finally left, holding just the silence with me.

I love you for needing my desperate hope in the aluminum boat in the pounding storm as much as I needed yours; I love you for making me an equal in that moment despite the decades in difference.

I love you for taking the blame because I was the good one and you were the bad one.

I love you for reading to me through every winter.

I love you for letting me make my own decisions – and mistakes. I love you for that more than you know.

I love you for year after year.

I love you for reminding me that I define who I am, and letting the present be enough, the memories their own.

I love you for the encyclopedia of me you retain in your memory, the intensity of your listening so strong I feel if this is possible, it is possible for us all.

I love you for letting me be.

I love you so much for the full heart behind the skittish glance.

I love you for wanting to marry me though you knew it wasn’t enough.

I love you for the four-minute voicemail demanding I believe in myself because you believe in me, a rapid-fire roller coaster of tears and force and defiance. And on the other end, me listening, in tears.

I love you for forgiving my lashing.

I love you for remembering me just the way I hope to be remembered.

I love you because you are fresh.

I love you for seeing the value in the adventure for its own sake; for never asking why.

I love you for so many things, and I worry you don’t know.

Most of all, I love you for breaking my heart.

“Why are you an artist?” a friend once asked me.

“Because art is for the broken ones who want to love the world.”

“Dear God, woman,” he said. “I’ve wanted to marry people for less than that.”

A broken heart is an open heart. And the truth is that we are all broken.

This is the latest installment in your editor’s column, The Insider’s Guide to Life, exploring topics such as media, culture, sex, living, and anything else. Cheers and spellcheck!

Image: Franco Folini

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ExclusiveArtist Alicia Escott’s intensely humane explorations of loss, longing, commercialism and ultimately, love.

“The best way I can express this is that I have lost enough hope to find a new hope.”

San Francisco-based artist Alicia Escott tells me this over coffee at The Summit, a popular cafe in the Mission District. We’re talking frankly, not philosophically, about pragmatic challenges of creativity and environmental issues, specifically, how one can retain any sort of optimism, much less focus, in the face of the enormous ecological challenges we face. (There have been six great “die offs”; we are poised for another.) “I heard an environmentalist being interviewed once,” she is saying. “The journalist asked him how he was okay with eating meat or some other destructive behavior. He answered, something like, ‘You know, you wake up in the morning, you take a shower then you walk around the corner to get coffee. It’s 9 a.m. and you have already walked over a mountain of skulls.'”

Escott is thoughtful, though not measured. She pauses for fresh lengths between questions.

“I function with a dichotomy that is extreme in a sense – I both think it’s perhaps ‘too late’ for humans but I also think about things from an evolutionary point of view,” she says. “Humans came out of great tumult. We are on the verge of another tumult. So I feel daily heartbreak; yet I also feel hope.”

Escott has already made a name for herself in environmental circles for her subtly captivating pieces that use disposable packaging as a medium for transcribing objects of both life and destruction. There is a bear on a bag seemingly expiring in undergrowth, a trout as litter in a stream (literally a fish out of water), and an atom bomb test on a to-go sushi container. (The last was too popular in a sense, says Escott. “They are so optically beautiful they trick you. That was a distraction from what I’m really wanting to talk about, so I did not make more.”)

The work, most notably that created on plastic sacks and film, is so fragile as to be temporary; the fleeting hand-drawn images are something like a compassionate catalog of the living past, or what will soon be our past. The art will not survive, and in fact, is not meant to – Escott has entire series expressly created to be recycled. But to describe her as an environmental artist or to view her work as somehow ironic is to miss the point.

“My approach is one of a thoughtful person, not only as an environmentalist, activist, or green advocate,” Escott says. “I am very hesitant about labels. I think we are making mistakes, and I have a lot of pain around these issues…but it’s really not for me to say. Us poisoning our oceans may return us, simply, to a primordial soup. Perhaps something better can come out of it. So my approach is holistic.”

There are eternal, contextually unsettling and shamanistic themes in Escott’s work. In a recently commenced series, she sends “Love Letters,” dated from the past, to acquaintances and friends alike. The letters include faded sepia and black and white photographs of simple scenes like children in yards and flocks of birds. The letters are poetic, eerie, profoundly haunting – and just slightly creepy. “It’s interesting playing with that tension,” she says with a mischievous smile. It’s clearly also enjoyable. My own Love Letter (“Love Letter to a Thick Billed Ground Dove. Extinct 1927.”) begins with “Last week I set the clock on my iPhone to December 18th, 1914” and includes the following line:

“Then came rock n roll. More than anything I wish I could show you rock n roll, you would love it, I’m sure. And there was the telephone, and then answering machines and call waiting and then caller id, and now you can have that with you always. Honestly.

There would never need to be these distances anymore.”

My notebook contains this list of words I jotted down before meeting with Escott, and I share them with her.

Bereft

Buddhist

Longing

Acceptance

Human

Lonely

Heartbreak

Healing

I ask if the Buddhist tendency is intentional. I’m the first writer to do so, and she considers it for a long moment. “My work tracks the heart – attachment, loss.” There is an unmistakable healing quality to the approach. “I work from the perspective of the human condition and more so the condition of life,” she says.

Alicia Escott

“I used to talk more about the evils of plastic and was focused on didactic aims,” Escott says. “Now, I am talking about something more esoteric, I view plastic as [among other things] a metaphor for talking about the packaging of our lives. Ideas are virtualized. They are commoditized – they are Likes on Facebook.”

The works’ comment on contemporary culture’s materialism and collective isolation is a compassionate treatment. She says she deals with complex issues simply, but her creations are pure more than anything else. Hence the trouble with labels.

“Consciousness must occur on many layers; it’s not just green. It’s easy to get bogged down by categories – but we shouldn’t stay too long.”

Images courtesy Alicia Escott. Works featured are from the series Littered Drawings.

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SeriesA mound of dead batteries is reborn as a colorful sea creature.

A battery powers everything from appliances to watches to your car, and when it’s out of juice, well, that’s the end of it. Nowhere else to go but the landfill.

Artist Michel de Broin had another idea. He gathered hundreds of old batteries before they landed at the recycle facility and made his Dead Star, a colorful creation that seems to come alive, again.

Editor’s note: This is the latest installment of a new art series at EcoSalon, The Heart of Art.

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seriesIntricate watercolor paintings – small in size, big in imagination.

These tiny, detailed paintings by artist Wendy Davenport Whatley, invite us into an extraordinary and fanciful version of nature. At first glance, the drawings come across as scientific and literal, but most of the lively, green and growing things in Whatley’s watercolors are figments of her own imagination.

She offers these gems to us on small pieces of paper; and when I say small, I mean measurements as minute as 2.5 x 3.5 inches. Her largest paintings are 9 x 12 inches.

So if you’re searching for small and natural, yet other-worldly, your search is over. Find all of Whatley’s work, as well as items available to purchase, at her website and Etsy shop.

Editor’s note: This is the latest installment of Kim Derby’s art series at EcoSalon, The Heart of Art. We heart art, and there’s nothing nicer than a daily dose to offer a moment of contemplation.

The post The Heart of Art: Things of This Nature appeared first on EcoSalon.

seriesA sculptural, formerly forever diamond crafted from salvaged wood.

Artist Ron van der Ende’s extraordinary depiction of the diamond given to Elizabeth Taylor by Richard Burton in 1969 is oddly apropos considering Taylor’s recent passing. Taylor was inarguably the epitome of “diamonds are a girl’s best friend.”

In 2009, van der Ende used reclaimed timber to build the bas-relief sculpture (image above), entitled Taylor-Burton after the real diamond. It appears three dimensional but actually lies almost flat on the wall. Van der Ende didn’t paint any of the found wood, but painstakingly placed each piece like a mosaic.

The actual 68 carat Taylor-Burton diamond probably inspired awe and envy in many women at that time while today, our evolving values and raised consciousness might just provoke in us a sense of disdain for such excess. For example, the Taylor-Burton diamond, mined in South Africa, is considered conflict rather than forever.

To wit, on the back of van der Ende’s sculpture he pasted an image of a South African diamond mine worker (image below).

A sobering contrast to the high profile jewelry boutique you find the mined rocks in.

Editor’s note: This is the latest installment of Kim Derby’s new art series at EcoSalon, The Heart of Art. We heart art, and there’s nothing nicer than a midday dose to offer a moment of contemplation.

The post The Heart of Art: Formerly Forever Diamond appeared first on EcoSalon.