This Sunday, January 17, 2009 starting at 4pm.
Good Beer is the Best by Eric Steen
Eric Steen will be pairing beers together on hand-made serving trays for guests. Good beer makes for good conversation. Steen will also be screening sci-fi movies.

This Sunday is a POT LUCK! So please bring a dish if you can.
As always, bring a project, share a project..get help and help others please!

IGLOO Gallery
325 NW 6th #102
PDX, OR 97209

Hours & Location
First Thursday 6-10pm,
Saturdays 1-5
and by appointment.
Closed last Saturday.

And of course Sundays we chill.

Events this January are pretty much magical!

Things to Do
Watching Michael Jordan score 68 points with Cyrus W. Smith, drinking paired beers and watching sci-fi with Eric Steen, dancing to Jen Delos Reyes’ dream mix of soul/motown, having a potluck with Paige Saez in the Igloo kitchen, drinking Nathan Langler’s batch of Igloo Home Brew, and getting intergalactic with altered state audio meditation night.

Closes Sunday January 25.

*Concurrently showing is < a href="http://www.garywiseman.com/"Gary Wiseman's installation / performance entitled Where Am i.

Please come visit us! Most if not all Makerlab Events and IGLOO Gallery are at the same magical place!

326 NW Everett St. #102
Portland, Oregon 97209
(In the Everett Station Lofts, on 6th ave between Everett and Flanders)

All other events please see calender details above

Tonight, we did the usual Urban Derive. There was a caveat — we had to find the moon. There was snow everywhere in Portland, Oregon. Thus, our moon-finding ability was slightly stunted and slippery.

But, we found an outdoor elevator. I also wore a mustachio. We did some video-taping as well. However, none of it has been edited yet. We’re not sure it will ever be. You know what happens when one videotapes too much. The endless black hole of media accumulates very quickly. The event horizon of inaccessibility increases with each additional minute of footage.

We did end up finding the moon, but it took us an oracle and a number of signs later. There was also a bridge, a railway, and some funky antics.

Here’s to you! We hope you found the moon tonight. If not, no worries. Simply wait around for another period of time and it will be sure to find you. Soon. Very soon.

Rock on.

Each Sunday when we meet I make some food for us, usually a soup. The food usually goes over very well! It’s fun for me since so much of the last few years of my life have been all about learning new skills on the internets and I miss making things in the real world. Making food for my friends on Sundays fills a void (many hackers can’t hack the foods and are too busy with projects) and makes me happy ’cause I live alone and don’t have much cause to cook for myself. Or desire too, to be honest.

Anyway, here is what I made today:
(note: I cook to my taste, not the rules whatever those may be)

Red Lentil Soup with Greek Yogurt

• lots of red lentils (4-5 handfulls rinsed)
• One white onion chopped
• 6 cloves garlic in slices
• Finely sliced carrot
• Lots of olive oil
• Dash of sesame oil
• Vegetable broth to taste
• Cumin to taste
• Turmeric to taste
• Salt/pepper to taste
• Greek yogurt (with honey if you are wacky like us)
• Avocado
• Coconut milk

I mixed up the onion, garlic and carrot in the olive oil with salt and pepper and fried all of that up till it was golden and slightly smushy. Then added the lentils and water and brought the whole thing to a boil. Then I added lil bit of sesame oil, the cumin and turmeric and mixed that together. Then I added a half can of coconut milk.

This cooked up very nicely and was ready to plate very quickly. A small scoop of yogurt in the bowl and the soup poured over this, then a couple of slices of avocado on top.

@reidab on mushrooms

This past Sunday at IGLOO Gallery was pretty festive. Nathan Langler from the PNCA Grad program came over and taught us how to brew beer, we got to help a band make music and we made delicious food.

We brewed a dark winter beer with sour notes and chocolate and caramel and I got to learn all about mash-tons, car-boys, and other cleverly named devices.

Nathan Langler, the brewmaster (left) and Damien Gilley, gallery curator (right) talking about how to bre beer while we are waiting for the water to boil to make the Wort.

The grain mixture for our beer!

It should be ready to drink around January 7th- just about a month away from Sunday. This is my second time brewing beer with Nathan and he is a fantastic teacher, very thorough and devoted to his craft. Nathan’s artistic practice is all about brewing beer and the social constructs around brewing and drinking beer.

Nathan stirs the grain into the hot water in the Mash-ton to make the Wort.

Nathan takes out some of the grain to make a filter at the bottom of a bucket. We will then pour all of the water and grain (Wort-making goodness) into the bucket and drain out all of the liquid back into the Mash-ton. Then it will be the Wort! The whole gallery smelled sweet and sour like malt and sugar. Very nice for a chilly, rainy Sunday. Oh and of course we drank beer the whole time we were making the beer.
Just cause.

Tristan, Anselm’s son is pointing at the liquid draining out of the bucket. It was very hot and I was freaking out that he would stick his fingers into it and get burned and also possibly ruin the beer!
This part of the process, from water-boiling to grain-adding to wort-draining took the longest time. Maybe like 3 hours. We ate a lot of rice and beans and talked and worked on the IGLOO website while we waited.

Once all the grain was separated from the Wort we dumped the grain and went back and put the Wort back on to boil and added these hops that smelled really, really good.

Then Nathan cooled down the whole mixture in the bathroom utility sink (which is huge) with this cool copper tube that had cold water running through the inside of it and then poured hot water out into the sink so that the whole thing cooled down to a specific temperature really fast.

He then poured the contents of the mixture through a strainer to get out the hops and it went into the carboy. The only thing left to do was to add the yeast!

We went through the whole process and now the beer is bubbling away in my kitchen. It sounds like a tap dripping slowly and it’s nice to know that something is growing and fermenting happily in the gallery.

If you want to see the full set of photos from our beer-making adventures go here!

THEN! The band Bones Made of Lazers (Sean Carney and Posie Currin) performed for us and we were able to participate and add to the music; as a group we all got together and clapped to create the rhythmic back-beat for the song. Carney and Currin’s Bones Made of Lazers is an open-source collaborative project involving downloading and reusing stock tracks and backbeats, layering them with keyboards, violin, base and guitar and then reposting the music online for further glitching/reworking and remaking. Sean Carney says he will get me a link to the tunes by this weekend so I will post it up for folks to grab.

And Kelvin Pittman played Sax while they set up for their show

While the music was playing we made a pizza that looked like a laptop computer which I seem to not have photos of but was quite delicious.

So we’ve been working very hard. In fact, we have now spent over 6 hours on this thing! Just think of what we could’ve done with those six hours. We could’ve played hopscotch, consumed ice cream, or watched three Disney films.

Instead, we focused on giving you a better user experience.

There were, of course, some mistakes:

But we fixed them.

Kind of.

In other news, we were captured by a mustache blog yesterday. Apparently, our hair problems were liked by somebody.

What is next? Well, more posts, of course. Not that we ever stop. I think this blog began only a few weeks ago, and already there are 50 posts here. With a group of awesome sweetopian people like we have posting on this blog, it’s pretty hard to stop.

And with that, I say cheers, and best wishes;

We all grew mustaches.

Bram’s was very nice.

Kelvin’s migrated.

And then it worked!

See you next time!

I am not sure how much time we all spent at Makerlab during this period. I beleive I arrived at IGLOO on Friday night and stayed clear until Sunday. Bram Pitoyo stayed too. We had a long series of discussions, foods, and sweetopian awesomeness.

At one point, the number of Macbooks at Makerlab reached critical mass. The technosocial gravity of Paige was too much for them to overcome and they quickly aggregated around her. Reid’s explanation was that it “probably had something to do with recontextualizing paradigms”.

Then the cameras conglomerated

It is important to get the right angle for these things.

http://www.pecha-kucha.org/cities/portland-oregon

If you have no idea what Pecha Kucha is:

“Pecha Kucha Night, devised by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham (Klein Dytham architecture), was conceived in 2003 as a place for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public.

But as we all know, give a mike to a designer (especially an architect) and you’ll be trapped for hours. The key to Pecha Kucha Night is its patented system for avoiding this fate. Each presenter is allowed 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds each – giving 6 minutes 40 seconds of fame before the next presenter is up. This keeps presentations concise, the interest level up, and gives more people the chance to show.”

“Pecha Kucha (which is Japanese for the sound of conversation) has tapped into a demand for a forum in which creative work can be easily and informally shown, without having to rent a gallery or chat up a magazine editor. This is a† demand that seems to be global – as Pecha Kucha Night, without any pushing, has spread virally to over 100 cities across the world. Find a location and join the conversation.”