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February 20 2012
Surviving Progress
Click here to view the embedded video.
Montreal filmmakers Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks’ documentary feature, Surviving Progress presents the story of human advancement and reveals the risk of running the 21st century’s software — our know-how — on the ancient hardware of our primate brain which hasn’t been upgraded in 50,000 years. It is up to us to prove that making apes smarter was not an evolutionary dead-end.
Thanks Linda.
February 16 2012
Conservationists Turn Their Sights on Urban Habitats
For city-dwellers, the closest ‘true wilderness’ to be found is usually the weeds sprouting in abandoned lots. Snow-capped, postcard nature might be beautiful but is often inaccessible. The Nature Conservancy, a US-based charity that buys up land to stop development, is debating re-focusing its conservation ethic on the concrete jungle. With 50% of the human population now living in cities, the Conservancy is worried that a wilderness-focused message is loosing its relevance for urbanites.
Bill Ulfelder, the director of the Nature Conservancy in New York, sees the 22,000 acres of roof in the city as a vast potential habitat. “There’s a lot of talk about rooftop gardens and storm-water catchment,” Ulfelder says, “But this is also a great opportunity to put habitat back in the city. Let’s think about habitat for pollinators and birds.” A concentrated effort to bring wild organisms back into an urban environment may mean that we can soon welcome birds more exotic than the standard pigeons, sparrows, and redtail hawks. Let’s hope our kids still remember the word for ‘heron’ or ‘magpie’.
Story via Grist. Image via Wallyg. Thanks to twitter-er Namhenderson for the heads-up.
February 07 2012
Essay: Time Between Emergence and Design
Previously, experiences of time emerged from nature as given – offering seasons, the rhythm of humans, plants and animals. Nowadays, people integrate nature-time, body-time, inner-time, clock-time, and global 24/7 systems-time. Human beings, in past, current and next natures, have to deal with emergence and design of time in order to survive.
By CAROLINE NEVEJAN
To think about how future new worlds are visualized, assumes that these images reveal how life in decades to come will be shaped. These visualizations offer insight into today’s imagination of next natures and next cultures to come. However, in these visualizations ‘time’ as a process of emergence and design, is often forgotten. This essay argues that time design is distinct in any next nature that will emerge.
Witnessing Spatiotemporal Trajectories
At the end of his life, American philosopher Thomas Kuhn1 concluded that in communities of practice human beings’ need to recognize other beings’ spatiotemporal trajectories to be able to share concepts and thereby develop language. In this statement he suggests that without understanding other beings’ movements through time and space no communication will be possible. This statement challenges today’s experience of global systems-time of millions of people who manage to communicate with people they do not know or see in the online world. Nevertheless in today’s experience the feeling of having ‘no time’ has become a common good. Reaching out to anyone anywhere seems to generate ‘no time’ as a result. Will human beings be able to overcome the loss of sharing spatiotemporal trajectories and share concepts in next natures to come? What time design requirements would be needed to facilitate a time design that will foster the emergence of communication and possible new language as well?
In the past 15 years systems-time has invaded and restructured many professional practices the world over and people have developed a variety of time designs to make the 24/7 economy work for them. Without formulating it as such, a widespread knowledge and experience of time design has emerged in businesses, organizations and personal practices too. In current interdisciplinary research at the Delft Technical University, four features have surfaced as being crucial in time design for human beings involved: integrating rhythm, synchronizing performance, moments to signify and duration of engagement. Hereunder these four dimensions are outlined with the awareness that more research in any of these will benefit future time design.
Integrating Rhythms
When working in distributed teams, organizing a shared rhythm is crucial for keeping communication and business processes in flow (2). Simple things, like one well-structured online meeting a week, generate trust and well being for all involved. When working in different time zones, adaptation to others at the expense of personal time has to be taken into account. In small businesses people benefit from the fact that distributed work on a day-to-day basis facilitates personal life styles for those involved. Finding the ultimate rhythm between people’s personal time given the work that has to be done, is crucial for success. Global 24/7 systems-time has expanded human experience of time fundamentally. It offers immediate connections to other places anywhere facilitating interaction and transaction anytime and affects social structures of finance, law, business and family life profoundly. Human beings, through a methodology of trial and error, find solutions to integrate different rhythms they are confronted with. Different kinds of time merge necessarily in personal, social and collective experience of time: nature-time, body-time, inner-time, clock-time and systems-time.
Human beings have to deal with emergence and design of time in order to survive.
Nature-time has a huge diversity of scale in time designs. Long eras and short time spans, stretched rhythms and instant events are deeply interwoven. This is the environment in which human presence exists. Human bodies can only exist in one place and therefore human beings have partial perspective on nature-time as a whole. Human biological existence, the holder of body-time, is dependent on rhythms like day and night, heartbeat and breath. Human existence also contains a sense of psychological inner-time, which has hardly been investigated and yet underlies processes of growth and transformation and defines how social situations and events are perceived (3).
Many centuries ago clock-time was introduced to mechanically structure shared social time. In the variety of clock-times, nature-time was integrated. Whether the clock was made by use of the sun, by smaller and smaller radars or by digits in contemporary design; clocks made it possible to socially anticipate what will happen next. Clock-time always offers a local perspective on time because it is fundamentally connected to a specific region or place. Places are defined by nature-time offering seasons, climates and specific ecological systems that characterize a place. Clock-time and nature-time are integrated in local agendas take that into account the context in which the human body survives.
Integrating rhythm is part of any next nature that will emerge
Today’s systems-time, based on algorithms operating on a global scale, is changing the planetary landscape profoundly. Where before systems were built on principles of mandate and delegation, systems have become participants in communities of people in their own right (4). Systems need clock-time to synchronize, but they are detached from nature-time. Like climate and weather, systems-time can also only be known through partial perspective, but unlike climate and weather, human beings can communicate in systems-time and many millions do so everyday. Above all the use and impact of systems-time is its immediacy. Human beings can travel to expand their experience and mental map of the place they live. Systems-time offers an expansion of connection in an instant, any place anytime. It fosters the experience of being in one place while bodies involved reside in different places. Just as nature-time profoundly challenges human existence, so does systems-time.
Nature-, body-, inner- and clock- time offer rhythms that are shared and structure social life. Rhythms cannot not integrate (5). Over several centuries humankind developed a conscious integration of rhythms, inventing work hours, school hours, lunch breaks, agendas, holidays and more. Systems-time is challenging the integration of rhythms, since it does not seem to have a rhythm of its own. In day-to-day experience individuals integrate systems-time to their benefit, but for organizations this is more problematic. Research into beneficial systems-time design has not been taken up yet. Integrating rhythm is part of any next nature that will emerge, even though it is not clear which rhythm will dominate human life in the end. Human beings need to recognize and integrate rhythms to survive: nature-time, body-time, clock-time, inner-time. Especially systems-time, which gains importance day by day, is hard for human beings to recognize even though systems participate in human society more and more.
Synchronizing Performance
In seeking well-being and survival human presence judges and anticipates what will come next. In meeting a new person there is a moment when the encounter starts. Bodies reach out through perception and from the first instance a careful tuning of presence emerges. Lots of tacit knowledge is exchanged in such moments of exploring doubt and hesitation. Granular perception offers instant negotiation resulting in synchronizing the performance of presence to establish common ground upon which interaction may proceed.
The tuning of body rhythms in this process is profound; already a piece of glass between two people sitting at the same table breaks synaesthesia between them (5). Sensory perceptions, simple emotions and more complex feelings influence processes of synchronization fundamentally. To facilitate synchronization social structures have invented gestures of encounter. The handshake is such an example. Body language is distinct in these moments; the possible recognizing of each other’s spatiotemporal trajectories is at stake.
Mediating granular perception is complex. Collaborating distributed teams cannot communicate a simple phenomenon like color, for example (6). Nevertheless, human beings do synchronize in mediated communication in the variety of media they use. In a phone call – where bodies are not present but the voice is – this negotiation happens through a switch between talking at the same time and silences that are just too long before conversation continues smoothly. SMSes need to arrive just in time and so on. On the Internet, digital handshakes have the character of ‘pitching one’s presence’ after a period of investigating an online environment (7).
And even during participation, the process of synchronization is continuously ongoing in social networks and mailing lists because community members correct each other all the time to protect the ‘tone of voice’ they have agreed upon. When not sharing physical interaction people synchronize through engagement in time, through pitching and judging performance, through social control. Synchronization of performance of presence will remain a feature as long as human beings want to interact in any next nature that may emerge. Synchronization between human beings and animals, ecosystems and larger technology systems is indispensable for interaction to take place.
Moments to Signify
Part of human existence is that meaning and signification are continuously generated in personal lives and in social structures that emerge through time. Emphasizing specific moments of transformation, of passage of time, highlights the process of time. It helps people to deal with time. Human societies have invented rituals and celebrations for specific moments in time through which meaning emerges for those involved.
Just as nature-time profoundly challenges human existence, so does systems-time.
In personal lives signifying moments play an important role. Be it a private experience of becoming aware, or a collective celebration in which one partakes, these signifying moments produce identity and are fundamental for cultures to survive. Through orchestrating signifying moments, shared experience emerges and offers participants a perspective on their individual position in context of the biological, ecological, technological or social whole. In offering a perspective, it also produces this perspective, which is how cultures emerge and design at the same time. Creating ‘moments to signify’ is needed to create commitment for those involved (8) People need to share experience for ideas to become sustainable and materialize in the real world.
Special signifying moments offer unanticipated impact. In situations of trauma and tragedy the human mind accelerates. When bearing witness to moments of trauma, human beings dramatize to communicate impact (9). In these traumatic ‘imaginative’ moments inner-time dominates perception. Stories of trauma may even include perceptions of experiences that never took place. However, they reveal an inner experience of impact that needs to be signified to be able to communicate. Signifying moments are necessary for meaning to emerge. Offering a shared experience and/or offering an intense personal experience, they are fundamental for cultures to sustain. Any next nature that includes human life will be faced with the human need to signify. Moments to share the process of signification can be designed or will emerge. In these moments human inner time interacts deeply with surrounding rhythms and shapes culture.
Duration of Engagement
One’s short-lived presence on Facebook can be as authentic as a real-life land ownership spanning 80 years (10). Where authenticity used to be a property of being in one place for long stretches of time, in today’s world this notion is replaced by being engaged in an activity for specific durations of time. Duration of engagement qualifies participation, validates contributions and therefore deeply influences human lives. Consequentially, it is not enough to be just present any more. Individuals need to prove existence by constantly transacting (7). The formulation of ‘duration of engagement’ stresses the fact that there is a beginning and an end to activity. From simple time designs to more complex situations in which time emerges, people have to adapt to beginnings and endings continuously, just as birth and death are fundamental to human existence.
For human beings the transformation between the start and end of engagement is crucial to their well-being because it generates ‘empty time’ in between. In empty time, whether one is bored or not, feelings, emotions and a different thinking surface and human presence emerges. When such empty time is not granted, as in the Global Service Delivery model in the outsourcing industry in India in which people are monitored 24 hours a day, human beings’ well-being is seriously jeopardized (11). To generate empty time, robust structures of time design are needed (12). Only in moments of empty time can people experience the situation they are in and act on their well-being.
Communities of Practice
When accepting the proposition that recognizing spatiotemporal trajectories of other beings is fundamental to the ability to share concepts and develop language, any next nature that includes human presence will have to facilitate this recognition. In current nature, systems-time is especially challenging to the human mind. Its scale and speed can only be partially perceived and it does not seem to have a rhythm of its own. Human beings find solutions to integrate it anyway, but it is not a given that people will be endlessly capable of doing this. If next nature includes human presence it has to take into account that human beings integrate their own rhythm with the environment, synchronize performance of presence to be able to communicate and create moments to signify. Thus meaning emerges. Meaning in turn needs specific durations of engagement, with a beginning and an end, and has to include empty time to sustain human well-being and survival.
In the tension between emergence and design, human presence in past, current and next natures is shaped. The experience of time influences the experience of place, how we relate to each other and our scope of possible actions. Any next nature will also be defined by its time design in which integrating rhythm, synchronizing performance, moments to signify and duration of engagement will define how human beings will be able to create communities of practice in which concepts, language, social structures and cultures will emerge.
Photo from Curious Expeditions on Flickr.
REFERENCES
1. KUHN, THOMAS S. 2000. THE ROAD SINCE STRUCTURE, PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS, 1970–1993, WITH AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL INTERVIEW, EDS. JAMES CONANT AND JOHN HAUGELAND. CHICAGO: THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS.
2 WILSON, REBEKAH. 2008. WITNESSED PRESENCE AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING, INTERVIEWS BY CAROLINE NEVEJAN CONDUCTED IN THE CONTEXT OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH WITNESSED PRESENCE AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING (FACULTY OF TECHNOLOGY, MANAGEMENT AND POLICY, TU DELFT & NL NET). HTTP://WWW.
SYSTEMSDESIGN.TBM.TUDELFT.NL/WITNESS/INTERVIEWS/RW/INTERVIEW-RW.HTML (ACCESSED 21-06-2010)
3 OLIVER, KELLY. 2001. WITNESSING, BEYOND RECOGNITION. MINNEAPOLIS/LONDON: UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS.
4 BRAZIER, F. & VEER, G.VAN DER. 2009. “INTERACTIVE DISTRIBUTED AND NETWORKED AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS: DELEGATION PARTICIPATION”. WORKSHOP PAPER ACCEPTED BY THE WORKSHOP HUMAN INTERACTION WITH INTELLIGENT & NETWORKED SYSTEMS, ORGANIZED BY THE 2009 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON INTELLIGENT USER INTERFACES, SANIBEL ISLAND, FLORIDA. (HTTP://WWW.IIDS.ORG)
5 KUMAR, SIRISH. PERFORMANCE AND THE FUTURE OF BROADCAST MEDIA LAB, PERFORMING ARTS LABS, UK. HTTP://WWW.PALLABS.ORG/PORTFOLIO/TIMELINE/MAY_2001_PERFORMANCE_AND_THE_FUTURE_OF_BROADCAST_MEDIA_LAB/ (ACCESSED 21 JUNE 2010)
6 GILL, S.T., KAWAMORI M. KATAGIRI W, SHIMOGIMA A. 2000. “THE ROLE OF BODY MOVES IN DIALOGUE”. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION (RASK), VOLUME 12 PAGES 89-114.
7 ABRAHAM, SUNIL. 2008. WITNESSED PRESENCE AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING, INTERVIEWS BY CAROLINE NEVEJAN CONDUCTED IN THE CONTEXT OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH WITNESSED PRESENCE AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING (FACULTY OF TECHNOLOGY, MANAGEMENT AND POLICY, TU DELFT & NL NET). HTTP://WWW.SYSTEMSDESIGN.TBM.TUDELFT.NL/WITNESS/INTERVIEWS/SA/INTERVIEW-SA.HTML (ACCESSED 21-06-2010)
8 SOLOMON, DEBRA. 2009. COLLABORATING IN A COMMUNITY: ARTWORK DEVELOPED IN THE CONTEXT OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH WITNESSED PRESENCE AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING (FACULTY TECHNOLOGY, MANAGEMENT AND POLICY, TU DELFT & THE NETHERLANDS FOUNDATION FOR VISUAL ARTS, DESIGN AND ARCHITECTURE). HTTP://WITNESS.BEING-HERE.NET/PAGE/2112/EN (ACCESSED 21-06-2010)
9 OPHUIS, RONALD. 2009. METHODS FOR PAINTING. ARTWORK DEVELOPED IN THE CONTEXT OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH WITNESSED PRESENCE AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING (FACULTY OF TECHNOLOGY, MANAGEMENT AND POLICY, TU DELFT & THE NETHERLANDS FOUNDATION FOR VISUAL ARTS, DESIGN AND ARCHITECTURE). HTTP://WITNESS.BEING-HERE.NET/PAGE/2110/EN (ACCESSED 21 JUNE 2010).
10 HAZRA, ABHISHEK. 2008. WITNESSED PRESENCE AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING, INTERVIEWS BY CAROLINE NEVEJAN CONDUCTED IN THE CONTEXT OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH WITNESSED PRESENCE AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING (FACULTY TECHNOLOGY, MANAGEMENT AND POLICY, TU DELFT & NL NET). HTTP://WWW.SYSTEMSDESIGN.TBM.TUDELFT.NL/WITNESS/INTERVIEWS/AH/INTERVIEW-AH.HTML (ACCESSED 21-06-2010)
11 ILAVARASAN, P.VIGNESWARA. 2008. “SOFTWARE WORK IN INDIA: A LABOUR PROCESS VIEW”. AN OUTPOST OF THE GLOBAL ECONOMY, WORK AND WORKERS IN INDIA’S INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY, EDS. CAROL UPADHYA AND A.R.VASAVI. NEW DELHI: ROUTLEDGE.
12 FEIGL ZORO. 2009. MOVEMENT THROUGH TIME. ARTWORK DEVELOPED IN THE CONTEXT OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH WITNESSED PRESENCE AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING (FACULTY OF TECHNOLOGY, MANAGEMENT AND POLICY, TU DELFT & THE NETHERLANDS FOUNDATION FOR VISUAL ARTS, DESIGN AND ARCHITECTURE)
February 02 2012
Hybrid Hummer
Who knows after some future energy crisis, it becomes en vogue to use a horse to pull your horseless carriage. For now it is our peculiar image of the week. Created by Walter Robinson.
January 30 2012
Years
Good old analog technology, now even better than ever before. Artist Bartholomäus Traubeck created a hyper-nostalgic record player that, rather than making music from vintage vinyl records, uses slices of woods to generate sound.
The player analyses a tree’s year rings for their strength, thickness and rate of growth as input for a generative algorithm that outputs piano music. Watch the video to enjoy the sound of a tree and appreciate the beauty and variety of nature from a whole new unexpected perspective.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Thanks Yuri Keukens.
January 28 2012
Goats Replace Lawnmowers in San Francisco
They might not be as fast, but goats offer several advantages over diesel-powered lawnmowers. They’re quieter, they emit fewer greenhouse gases, and they fertilize soil as they go for no extra charge. They can easily climb slopes where mowers can’t reach, and can clear thick brush without the help of herbicides. City Grazing of San Francisco has capitalized on the benefits of goats, and leases out their 50-member herd for landscaping needs around the city.
These back-to-the basics of landscapers who replace mowers with goats, or farmers who replace tractors with horses, represent an unusual trajectory for the Hierarchy of Technology.* Technologies normally become accepted and widely-used before they are superseded by new technologies and sink out of sight. Except for meat production, livestock has largely lost out to machinery in industrialized settings. In a time where oil was cheap and global warming unknown, goats and horses were clearly obsolete. But in other contexts – greenhouse gas emissions, soil erosion, cuteness – it becomes clear that old-fashioned, four-legged technologies can become cutting-edge a second time.
*For more about the Maslow-style Hierarchy of Technology, get your hooves on a copy of the Next Nature book.
January 21 2012
Rule #7: Respect Social Standards
Part 7 of the 11 part series Golden Rules of Anthropomorphism and Design.
Anthropomorphic products enter the human social space. Humans have the most complex social behavior of any organism on Earth. Anyone or anything trying to join in should be careful to do it right. Although an anthropomorphic product may function perfectly, if it crosses social boundaries it will still tick people off. This can cause the product to become a social reject, which won’t do sales much good. Luckily, it’s not hard to figure out why things go wrong. Imagine a scenario where a person and a product interact, then replace the product with a second person. If the actions of the second person and the product don’t match up, then there’s something off about the product’s design.
Image via Anvari. For other parts in the series, see part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5 and part 6.
January 19 2012
Hidden Cities Emerge from the Amazon
Famed for its jaguars, orchids, and horrifying parasites, the Amazon is just as famous for what it lacks: human presence. For many years, the prevailing wisdom has been that throughout history, the Amazon rainforest has only been sparsely occupied by nomadic tribes. However, new evidence of permanent and complex human settlement is emerging from the forest floor. The role of these geoglyphs, trenches carved into the ground 1,000 to 2,000 years ago, are largely mysterious, but they may share characteristics with the Nazca Lines.
Researchers first became aware of the geoglyphs in the 1970s. As deforestation accelerates, more and more of the gigantic geometric shapes are coming to light. These discoveries are helping to upend traditional notions of the Amazon as a primordial, pristine wilderness. Large portions of Amazonia may in fact be a second-growth forest that regenerated after European warfare and disease wiped out massive portions of the native population.
The first Spanish explorers to the region reported finding settled towns and cities with palisades, roads, and fortifications. Though their accounts have usually been dismissed as exaggerations, their descriptions may in fact provide an accurate portrait of a lost civilization. According to geographer William Woods, “If one wants to recreate pre-Columbian Amazonia, most of the forest needs to be removed, with many people and a managed, highly productive landscape replacing it.”
Image via Google Maps. For a history of the search for civilizations in the Amazon, read Finding the Lost City.
January 06 2012
Rule #4: Complex Products Tend to Be Anthropomorphized
Part 4 of the 11 part series Golden Rules of Anthropomorphism and Design. See part 1, part 2, and part 3.
Think about a spoon. Now think about a spoon with a face. What do you think it is? Most likely, you think it’s a spoon with a face. Now think about a computer, which doesn’t have a face. Are you more likely to swear at the spoon or the computer? Humans have a natural tendency to anthropomorphize things they can’t explain. In the past, mysterious phenomena such as the weather, the sun or the moon were anthropomorphized in the form of gods.
Nowadays, technological products have advanced to such a degree that most people don’t understand them. They try to explain a device by ascribing human emotions and motives to its behavior. The more complex, capable and autonomous a product is, the more likely it’s going to be anthropomorphized. Designers of technologically advanced products should anticipate how users will anthropomorphize their product, and design it accordingly.
Photo via Top Design Mag.
December 09 2011
Apes Like Cooked Food, and What that Means for Human Evolution
Humans are the only species on earth that cooks its food. Not only do we cook our food, but we usually find the flavor of cooked foods preferable to the raw version. Compare the smell of raw and pan-fried bacon. Which version makes you drool?
It’s no coincidence that your dog may be drooling alongside you. Several animals that have never eaten cooked food show a marked preference for a nice roast or stir-fry. Chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans all prefer cooked carrots, sweet potatoes, and even meat.
This natural predisposition has important implications for human evolution. Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham argues that cooking is not some simple, pleasant cultural development. Instead, it is the central driving force that transformed us from primitive hominids into Homo erectus and on through to Homo sapiens.
The key to cooking lies in the energy demands of our giant minds. The human brain uses up a quarter of the body’s daily energy requirements. Cooked food provides significantly more available calories than raw food. From a chemical perspective, a raw and baked potato might have the same amount of total calories, but from a dietary perspective, the starches in a raw potato are largely useless to the average human gut. Add to this the fact that many poisonous plants become edible after cooking, and the first chefs were looking at a sudden increase of calories, not to mention free time. This influx of tasty nutrients allowed Homo erectus to redirect spare energy to evolving oversize brains.
Wrangham’s argument breaks down if animals favor raw food when give a choice. If our ancestors did not naturally prefer cooked food, they might never have bothered figuring out how to throw an antelope on the barbeque. The fact that the great apes gravitate towards the taste of cooked food is a good indication that Wrangham’s hypothesis may be correct.
Humans have become so perfectly adapted to cooking that it’s tough for us to live without ready access to a stove or campfire. Raw foodists have supplements, drying machines, and other wonders of modern food technology to get enough calories to survive. According to Wrangham, there are no verifiable examples of anyone surviving on a raw diet in a state of nature. Throw someone on a desert island with an endless supply of steak tartare, and they’ll still die of malnutrition unless they brought along a frying pan and a zippo.
Our dependence on heated food is encoded in our bodies. Our weak jaws, tiny teeth, small stomachs and short guts all indicate that our bodies are absolutely dependent on cooking as a a form of ‘exterior digestion’. Cooking, along with language, may be the most natural technology that there is.
Thanks to Peter van de Graaf for the heads-up. To learn more about how cooking created leisure time and institutionalized sexism, read Richard Wrangham’s excellent book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Photo via Avax News.
November 26 2011
Hunter-Gatherer
Different totems, same rituals. Peculiar image of the week by Walter Robinson.
November 23 2011
The Search for the “Real” Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is fake-for-real. While it’s true that there was a minor harvest feast in 1621, held by English immigrants and Wampanoag Indians, the event was never celebrated regularly, and largely dropped off the national radar for the next 200 years. It took the Civil War for Abraham Lincoln to formalize the holiday, a political move he hoped would promote national unity.
Even if the holiday is invented, at least the food is real, right? When Americans sit down to groaning tables on Thursday, it’s tempting to think we’re participating in a culinary tradition not that far removed from the time of the Pilgrims. Thanksgiving food is, after all, as authentic and naturally American as apples (Kazakhstan), potatoes (Peru), and green bean casserole (Campbell Soup Company). Maybe we can find some culinary authenticity hiding between the gravy boat and the cranberry sauce. Hope you’re hungry…
No Potatoes, No Pigs, No Fun
Most so-called “traditional” Thanksgiving dishes would have been alien to the Indians and Pilgrims in attendance at Plymouth, Massachusetts. They might not even have recognized mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes or cranberry sauce as edible food. Sweet corn, the kind that can be eaten fresh from the cob, may not even have existed at the time, let alone been grown in Massachusetts. Apples, so vital for pie, were also off the menu. The English settlers had to wait for their imported apple seeds to grow, and on top of that, their crops were measly until they carted European honey bees across the ocean to fertilize the orchards. Forget ham, pork, or sausage too; the settlers were not the pig-raising types. And as for drinks? Nothing but water.
Plenty of Eel to Go Around
Most Americans nowadays would be just as puzzled by historical Thanksgiving foods. Pumpkin and other squash were likely eaten on the menu, but only as part of savory dishes. Other foods that Wampanoag and English gobbled down have been completely relegated to history. Venison is one of the few certainties of the first Thanksgiving – the Wampanoag brought a gift of five deer for the meal – but venison, like all wild game, is a rare sight nowadays. Clams, mussels, oysters, eels, cod, and lobster were also in abundance in Plymouth, not to mention turtle. Seafood, so vital in 1621, would look as out-of-place in a modern Thanksgiving spread as a mapo tofu.
At Least They Ate Turkey?
Turkey is a likely candidate for the Thanksgiving food that’s managed to survive the centuries unscathed – maybe. Wild turkeys were abundant in 1621, and Indians and immigrants alike enjoyed the bird. That’s not to say that M. gallopavo was actually served at the feast. The Pilgrims would have been just as likely to eat wild ducks, or even swans. Cookbooks from early American history preserve an astonishing appetite for wood cock, partridge, snipe, pigeons, and song birds of all kinds. Literally anything with meat on its bones and feathers on its back was chucked into the stew pot. For a real authentic feel for your Thanksgiving dinner, you might want to set up a bird feeder and shoot the first thing that lands.
Gobble, Gobble, Wobble
But let’s not be so fast about the turkey. Is our own iteration of the bird really that authentic to the holiday? Snow-white, broad-breasted, and enormous, the modern turkey would have perplexed the Pilgrims. 99.99% of all turkeys sold in the United States come from a single breed of turkey, the aptly-named Broad Breasted White. The most popular breed of turkey for over three centuries was the Bronze, a cross between wild turkeys and European domestics. During standardization and science obsessed 1960s, Bronzes and other old breeds like Bourbon Red or Slate Black Spanish all but disappeared from American farms.
Bizarre and marvelous, Broad Breasted Whites lost their natural bronze coloration because white pin feathers make the plucked carcasses more attractive to consumers. They reach market weight up to 12 weeks before ‘heritage’ breeds, and weigh in at around 18 kilos per bird, compared to a measly 10 kilos for a wild turkey. True freaks of this breed can grow as large as 36 kilos. Great for producing breast meat, the Broad Breasted White is not that great at being it bird. They can’t fly, their legs get bowed and wobbly under their weight, and their giant breasts prevent them from reproducing as nature intended – thanks, artificial insemination!
A Faux Feast
There aren’t many “100% natural” foods, and there is no one “authentic” Thanksgiving. Culture largely decides what we accept as historical reality. In a hundred or two hundred years, future Americans may be astonished to learn to that the Wampanoag did not come bearing gifts of dinosaur meat, and the Pilgrims did not chow down on the most American vegetable of all, pizza.
Image via Zimbio.
November 04 2011
Mushrooms in the Mokum
Mediamatic is hosting a pop-up urban mushroom farm in the middle of Amsterdam. Rows and rows of shiitake, oyster, and the elusive almond-flavored Agaricus subrufescens are sprouting on metal shelves. With its experimental vibe, Paddestoelen Paradijs (Mushroom Paradise) proves that mushrooms might just be our best friends in the age of resource scarcity. They grow off dead, decaying, and often discarded organic matter, are low emission, and their roots can produce a material that’s stronger than wood, as light as packing foam, and completely biodegradable.
Click through to see a living wall, the Christian mushroom cult, and Philosopher’s Stones.
French artist Michel Blazy slathered a wall with a ‘cement’ of tomato paste and powdered potato flakes. After a few weeks of benign cultivation, the red wall is beginning to show signs of green, fluffy life. Soon the entire space will be covered with the kind of mold that normally makes us go “ew,” not “interesting.”
Humans and fungi have a long shared history, and not just because mushrooms taste really great in cream sauce. Some have theorized, with varying degrees of believability, that Christianity began as a psychedelic mushroom cult. Richard Doyle, previously featured on Next Nature, is granddaddy of this field for his belief that psychotropic substances spurred the evolution of the human mind.
Of course, no exhibit on mushrooms would be complete without some live, psychedelic versions. Here, Sclerotia tampanensis is growing next to some harmless but inedible turkeytail mushrooms. The Mediamatic staff is quick to emphasize that while mushrooms are certainly interesting as recreational substances, they’re far more useful as the food, medicines, and building materials of the future.
Paddestoelen Paradijs runs through November 27.
October 30 2011
Ancient man impacted environment already
The human environmental impact on our planet is hardly underestimated nowadays. Scientist agree humans are to blame for Global Warming – some are already dreaming up scenario’s of geo-engineering to undo the damage. Untouched old nature is almost nowhere to be found anymore besides perhaps some small areas on the South pole, in the deep sea or if one looks up at the stars – although the brighter ones may well be satellites. “We were here”, is written all over. So when did the writing begin? Much earlier than thought.
According to the common perception the human impact on the environment is fairly recent and thought to have started in concert with the 19th centuries industrial revolution. Presumably, in earlier times humans lived in harmony with their environment. That popular romantic view however, is increasingly being challenged.
HUMAN ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT BEGAN MUCH EARLIER THAN THOUGHT
Various evidence exist that humans already in the Stone Age, wiped out many animal species in places as varied as the mountains of New Zealand and the plains of North America. Around 2,000 years ago, when the aboriginal Polynesians arrived in Hawaii, over half of the native species of birds became extinct. Some even argued humans are to blame for the extinction of Neanderthaler man.
And the crime scene continues: According to a recent book on the Human Impact on Ancient Marine Ecosystems, edited by Torben C. Rick and Jon M. Erlandson, early human influence wasn’t limited to the extinction of other species: people already influenced whole eco-systems tens of thousands of years ago. People who lived on California’s Channel Islands as much as 13,000 years ago left behind piles of shells and bones, called middens, that offer clues to how they altered their landscape. The Anthropologists found shell middens full of sea urchins, implying that the sea urchins became abundant when hunting depleted the sea otters that prey on them. In turn, the sea urchins would have severely damaged the underwater forests of kelp on which they fed. “Human influence is pretty pervasive,” one of the authors, Torben C. Rick, said in an interview with the New York Times.
Luckily not all the effects of early inhabitants were negative. “When people in the Channel Islands hunted otters, they presumably ended up increasing the abundance of shellfish. The researchers also cite systems of walls and terraces that people in the Pacific Northwest built to trap sediment and create habitat for clams, which they harvested and ate.”
CATALYSTS OF EVOLUTION
These discoveries of early influence of humans on the environment might shed another light our position in nature. Unlike other animals, mankind has never been placed in an environment to which he is specifically equipped. While other animals have specific organs, skills and reflexes that enable them to survive in their proper environment, people are cultural beings by nature.
So, instead of feeling fundamentally guilty about our influence on our environment and finding ways to limit and undo our footprint we might as well take pride and responsibility in who we are: catalysts of evolution. That may sound bombastic, yet this does not mean we are controlling the universe – quite the contrary. In our attempts to cultivate old nature, we cause the rising of a next nature, which is wild and unpredictable as ever: Nature changes along with us. For better or worse, we can be sure of one thing: we will get the nature we deserve.
Image: Banksy. NYTimes article: Ancient man hurt coasts, paper says. Time article: Did Humans Kill Neanderthalers? Related: Exploring Next Nature, Join the Neolitic Revolution, Doggerland – mapping a lost world, If the implications of Global Warming were fair, Humans to blame for global warming.
October 07 2011
Mapping the World through Facebook
This world map is drawn using Facebook connections only. It was created by Paul Butler using connections between 10 million Facebook friends. The result is a remarkably good approximation of most continents and even the borders of some countries appear. China and Russia, however, seem to be missing in the Facebook empire.
October 04 2011
Resizing Daddy
A little girl gets angry at her father, and uses her index finger and thumb to make a pinching motion. No, she’s not trying to hurt him. She’s using iPad sign language to say, “I want you to be smaller.”
PCs and cell phones required restricted motions, mostly clicking and typing. In contrast, the recent slew of computers, tablets, and smart phones utilize more expressive motions: swiping, flicking, squeezing. These gestures may enter the vernacular of common signs, like waving and shoulder shrugging, just as internet terms like ‘lol’ and ‘brb’ entered everyday language.
All great apes stick out their hands to beg for food, but only humans pinch if their friend won’t share.
Image via Gawker
September 24 2011
Jet Powered Barbecue
At first sight it seems plain wrong to roast your burgers on this utterly technological machine: barbecuing is supposed to be a nostalgic low-tech activity that brings us back to nature and sooths our inner caveman.
Yet although we, 21th century people, consider barbecuing a more natural way of cooking food than our everyday microwave, at some point in our human history – most anthropologists estimate around 250,000 years ago – cooking food on fires was a radically new technological achievement: a handy technique to extend our stomach and predigest our food before it would enter our body.
Cooking is perhaps the greatest example of how that what was once a technological achievement may be naturalized over time – up to the level that we don’t recognize it as technology anymore and think of it as part of our nature. Think about it next time you place a burger on the grill, or in the molecular food printer for that matter.
Image source.
September 22 2011
Sin free for just €1.59
For just £1.19 ($1.99, €1,59) you can download an app for your iPhone which offers tips and guidelines with the sacrament, “the perfect aid for every penitent” as the description reads. This, on itself, is not so special. There are dozen of apps which help you to confess, though this is the first which is officially approved by the Catholic Church.
The app allows users to keep track of their sins, and guides them through the sacrament (where Catholics admit their wrongdoing through). The app is launched shortly after Pope Benedict XVI gave the advice to embrace digital communication. Although he adds: “It is important always to remember that virtual contact cannot and must not take the place of direct human contact with people at every level of our lives.”
Hopefully there will be a ‘Pocket Pope’ app in the near future.
August 29 2011
Ghosts with Shit Jobs
Click here to view the embedded video.
This trailer for the mockumentary Ghost With Shit Jobs shows a could-be-future in which the role of the West and the East is reversed. Very good timing I would say.
More on: ghostswithshitjobs.com. Via NRC Next
August 26 2011
Why Handwriting Must Die
Associate professor Anne Trubek argues that handwriting will soon be history, because writing words by hand is a technology that’s just too slow for our times, and our minds. A copy-paste summary from her essay:
“Handwriting has been around for just 6,000 of humanity’s some 200,000 years. Its effects have been enormous, of course: It alters the brain, changes with civilizations, cultures and factions, and plays a role in religious and political battles.”
“Most of us know, but often forget, that handwriting is not natural. We are not born to do it. There is no genetic basis for writing. Writing is not like seeing or talking, which are innate. Writing must be taught.”
“Proclaiming the virtuousness of one way of forming a “j” over others is a trope that occurs throughout handwriting’s history. For instance, early Christians jettisoned Roman scripts they deemed decadent and pagan. ”
“In the American colonies, a “good hand” became a sign of class and intelligence as well as moral righteousness.”
“Only wealthy men and businessmen learned to write.”
“It was not until the beginning of the 19th century — a scant 200 years ago — that schooling became universal. Then, handwriting was finally taught to American schoolchildren.”
“For many, the prospect of handwriting dying out would signal the end of individualism and the entree to some robotic techno-future. But when we worry about losing our individuality, we are likely misremembering our schooling, which included rote, rigid lessons in handwriting. We have long been taught the “right” way to form letters.”
“It took the printing press to create a notion of handwriting as a sign of self.”
“Handwriting slowly became a form of self-expression when it ceased to be the primary mode of written communication.”
“When a new writing technology develops, we tend to romanticize the older one. The supplanted technology is vaunted as more authentic because it is no longer ubiquitous or official. Thus for monks, print was capricious and script reliable. So too today: Conventional wisdom holds that computers are devoid of emotion and personality, and handwriting is the province of intimacy, originality and authenticity.”
“Typing in school has a democratizing effect, as did the typewriter. It levels the look of prose to allow expression of ideas, not the rendering of letters, to take center stage.”
“The moral of the story is that what we want from writing is cognitive automaticity, the ability to think as fast as possible, freed as much as can be from the strictures of whichever technology we must use to record our thoughts. ”
“A system that can become streamlined through specialization and automaticity has more time to think.”
“This is what typing does for millions. It allows us to go faster, not because we want everything faster in our hyped-up age, but for the opposite reason: We want more time to think.”
“When people hear I am writing about the possible end of handwriting, many come up with examples of things we will always need handwriting for: endorsing checks (no longer needed at an ATM), grocery lists (smartphones have note-taking functions), signatures (not even needed to file taxes anymore). These will not be what we would lose. We may, however, forsake some neurological memory. I imagine some pathways in our brains will atrophy.”
“Then again, I imagine my brain is developing new cognitive pathways each time I hit control C or double click Firefox. That I can touch-type, my fingers magically dancing on my keyboard, free of any conscious effort (much as you are looking at letters and making meaning in your head right now as you read), amazes me. Touch-typing is a glorious example of cognitive automaticity, the speed of execution keeping pace with the speed of cognition.”
“Do not worry. It will take a long time for handwriting to die, for us to have the interview with the “last handwriter” as we do today with the last living speakers of some languages. Even the revolutionary Greeks took a long time to change habits. After they created the Greek alphabet, they spent 400 years doing nothing with it, preferring their extant oral culture. Handwriting is not going anywhere soon. But it is going.”
Read the entire essay.
Related Your grand-grand-parents new media, New Media 80.000 BC, Turning Brain waves into tweets. Via Anne.
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