See Fluxxlab at UB This Afternoon

Tuesday, April 20, 5:30pm, UB South Campus, Crosby Hall, Free--FLUXXLAB. By Steel for Buffalo Rising:

The Food and Emerging Media Speaker Series is designed to examine the role of emerging media and new technology on exploration, articulation, and understanding the many aspects of food. Over the last few months, this lecture series has hosted artists, farmers, architects, curators, and historians whose work and research focuses on how media and technology have mediated and influenced our relationship to food. Issues examined include sustainability, social networking, emerging technologies and how each of these subjects impact our often out-of sight-out-of mind attitude toward our food production system.

Fluxxlab is a new company started by Columbia University grads Jennifer Broutin and Carmen Trudell. To date, their work has focused on sustainable energy harvesting, specifically in the form of converting small amounts of human energy into electricity. The partners graduated from Columbia University's Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design program where they met and began their research and collaboration.

The picture above is Fluxxlab's concept for an energy harvesting revolving door. The idea is to capture the otherwise wasted kinetic energy in the door as it is used by people. Normal revolving doors employ mechanical systems of gears and oil to make the door move at a safe speed (slow and steady) and to stop in a reasonable time period. The waste energy from doing this is dumped off as unusable heat. The electricity generating door concept would use a built in electrical dynamo to control the door speed. The result would be to produce electric current every time the door is used. The electricity would be fed into the power grid. Millions of people would be generating useable energy every day with no additional effort. What a great concept! It should be interesting to hear what this pair of innovators has to say about food, and energy, and sustainability.

This lecture series is sponsored by the University of Buffalo Departments of Media Study, Philosophy, Visual Studies, Architecture and Planning and the UB Canadian-American Studies Committee.