Claire Fanjul (b.1986, Belgium)
The work of Claire Fanjul is placed under the sign of ambivalence. This young artist is steeped in the ancient culture and also mastered the traditional techniques such as engraving and etching. She draws her inspiration from the repertoire of primitive Flemish and German to shape her dreams and gives clearly a vision of the imagination of our century. Fanjul’s ink and line drawings have a dark edge with twisted characters, faces and fauna intertwined in a tapestry that tells its own story.
Represented by Mazel Galerie @ Drawing Now 2013
[more Claire Fanjul]
Lost Your Keys? Your Cat? The Brain Can Rapidly Mobilize a Search Party
A contact lens on the bathroom floor, an escaped hamster in the backyard, a car key in a bed of gravel: How are we able to focus so sharply to find that proverbial needle in a haystack? Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have discovered that when we embark on a targeted search, various visual and non-visual regions of the brain mobilize to track down a person, animal or thing.
“Our results show that our brains are much more dynamic than previously thought, rapidly reallocating resources based on behavioral demands, and optimizing our performance by increasing the precision with which we can perform relevant tasks,” said Tolga Cukur, a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience at UC Berkeley and lead author of the study published April 21 in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
Today we’re excited to share a guest post from Alexandra Pappalardo, a graduate student at the Savannah College of Art Design who recently completed a very Unconsumption-y course there, addressing new ways to think about what often seems a disposable object: the pen.
The disposable pen is such an afterthought for so many of us that an estimated 1.5 billion pens are thrown away each year in the United States alone. That’s 48 pens per second. How many of these, do you think, were empty?
As a masters student in the Design for Sustainability program at the Savannah College of Art and Design, I was part of a class, taught by professor Scott Boylston, that researched behaviors surrounding pen usage and disposal. Our task: “radically altering people’s perceptions of the disposable pen.” We poked into our classmates’ pen cases, baited students with free candy, distributed surveys, observed and created conversations. Inspired by other cases of upcycling, we designed and prototyped new product solutions for dead pens.
Finally, we staged a one-day “pentervention.” We lined the walls of our design building with interactive posters, set up a station for abandoned pens to be adopted, and not even professors were safe from the enigmatic and compulsive pen bandit. Much of it was silly, to be sure, but it wasn’t ignored and it didn’t produce the glassy-eyed effect of a shaming environmental lecture. Using all of our foundational work and the results from Pentervention Day, we created a website — www.pentervention48.com.
On the site you can delve into our research findings, check out product prototypes, find out what students wrote on our art pieces, and watch original videos designed to both entertain and educate. You’ll never look at the disposable pen the same way again.
— Alexandra Pappalardo
Pictured, from top: Pentervention Day; Pen Play: A necklace from expired pens; a flier with tear-off tabs that include suggestions for pen reuse; an invitation to give your pen more meaning — and “pensonality.” See the Pensonality site for more.
If you’re a student or professor with a project dealing with creative use or mindful consumer behavior that you’d like to share with our audience, write to us at unconsumption@gmail.com
