Archive odds and ends | Timm Suess

Interesting Kickstarter project: Safecast X

Sunday, June 10th, 2012 | non-decay, odds and ends | No Comments

Safecast X (image by Safecast, CC -by -na)

By chance, I stumbled across Safecast, a global sensor network for collecting and sharing radiation measurements. I.e., it’s a crowdsourcing approach to measure worldwide radiation. Their scope is mainly Japan, but looking at the yesterday’s strange Reddit story about a radiation spike in Indiana/Michigan, one might wonder if a global preparedness network might not be a good idea.

Safecast has now a crowdfunding campaign running on Kickstarter to produce an open source Geiger counter for alpha, beta and gamma radiation (most counters only measure gamma). It’s called the Kickstarter X.

Check out their campaign (which is already fully funded) and consider donating – I think it’s a worthwile effort. Rewards include a range of goodies, from stickers to a fully working Geiger counter to a measurement trip to Fukushima.

Safecast X Geiger Counter on Kickstarter

Tags: campaign, crowdfunding, Geiger counter, Kickstarter, radiation, Safecast

Beauty in Decay

Saturday, July 31st, 2010 | decay, odds and ends | 1 Comment

I’m proud to announce that a number of my Chernobyl pictures have been published as part of a abandonments photo book project called Beauty in Decay – and what a beauty it is! Editor RomanyWG and his team put a lot of effort behind this opus, featuring 200 pictures from 50 artists. The book is available for £19.95 at CarpetBombingCulture.

In this context, two well-known UK newspapers have reprinted some of my pictures – the Sunday Times Magazine and The Sun. Find the articles below.

Tags: abandonments, beauty in decay, book, collection, newspaper, Sun, Times

Chernobyl Journal: Epilogue

Saturday, July 4th, 2009 | odds and ends, project wormwood, updates | 2 Comments

After three months of intense publishing, the Chernobyl Journal is now finished. In order to make it easier to read and find, I have collected all material around the trip on a special page. You will also find separate pages for pictures, videos and sounds alone.

Thank you!

My great thanks goes out to my fellow zone travellers, Beat, René and Laura, for pulling this project through – I couldn’t have done it without you. Thanks to the Chernobyl InterInform team – especially Yuriy – for the amazing tour and the freedom we had to explore the zone. Thanks to Robert for borrowing me a Geiger counter to keep us safe. Thanks to the organizers of the Pecha-Kucha Basel Night for allowing me to show my pictures. Thanks to all of you who commented, shared, corrected mistakes, translated Russian, and spread the word. And a big, big thanks to my wife, my favorite art critic, who had to bear me geeking out on Cherno-stuff week after week and still supported me and kept me sane. You’re all amazing – THANK YOU!

So, what’s next?

For now, my plan is to enjoy the summer, and concentrate on some more sound recordings (I’ve got a new microphone, which I really want to try out) . There are at least two short movies from previous locations in the making (a brewery and a potassium mine). My backlog of pictures from the last three years is still huge, so expect more decay photographs. I also might take a dip into abstract photography, because I’ve become increasingly fascinated with it.

As for my plans for the Chernobyl material, I am planning to organize an exhibition within a couple of months, and am playing with the idea of publishing part of the journal as a book. Stay tuned.

Flickr Photo Meme

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 | odds and ends | 1 Comment

Cool, someone tagged me in a photo meme! The rules are that you go to your own Flickr site, browse to the 6th page and write something about the 6th photo on that page.

Here are the previous posts that led to this one; I was tagged by BradP, man of mystery and social media magician:

… many more previous posts …
Andy’s post
Dani’s post
Paul’s post
Sheila’s post
Brad’s post
my post:

The Zombies Are Sad Today (bw)

My 6th page 6th picture is called “The Zombies Are Sad Today” and shows a crawlspace in an abandoned coal processing plant in France. If I remember correctly, I had to climb up some pillars to take this shot, which was situated between the end processing hall and the trainyard underneath it (the coal could be filled directly into the train wagons).

Overall, this place represents one of my favorite urban exploration trips – an amazing, cathedral-like structure, which reminds me of Robert Pinsky’s poem “The Refinery”. Also, we had a great crew, about 6 people from Switzerland and Germany, who shared an military bus without heating. In freezing November.

The rules of the meme state that you have to tag a 6 other people who carry on the torch! I’m tagging the following people:

Tags: meme, photography, photomeme