A Healthy Lifestyle Strategy for Cavemen
Lessons you learn from comics: The flip-side to the physical relief (brought to us by technological advancements) is an increased cognitive load.
What is Next Nature?
With our attempts to cultivate nature, humankind causes the rising of a next nature, which is wild and unpredictable as ever. Wild systems, genetic surprises, autonomous machinery and splendidly beautiful black flowers. Nature changes along with us.
Posts Tagged ‘Back to the Tribe’
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Illiterate Kids Learn to Hack Tablet Computers with No Outside Help
The One Laptop Per Child program is experimenting with what at first seems to be the lazy way to philanthropy: dropping off tablet computers in remote Ethiopian villages and then simply leaving. Could illiterate children learn not only how to operate the Motorola Zooms, but teach themselves to read? According to Nicholas Negroponte, founder of One Laptop Per Child, the results were astonishing:
“We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.”
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Modern Flint Tools
Stone tools are the most ancient evidence of our ancestor’s ingenuity, proof that we’ve been augmenting our bodies for millions of years. These flint tools by Ami Drach and Dov Ganchrow update our prehistory with modern materials and techniques. Each knapped tool is scanned and then outfitted with a form-fitting 3D-printed handle. In marrying the most basic fabrication technique with one of the most advanced, Drach and Ganchrow’s project demonstrates how modern technologies return us to the tribe.
Via Design Boom.
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Close Personal Friend
Here’s one for the retro-trendwatchers. This 24-minute self-directed film was made in 1996 by artist-writer Douglas Coupland as a portrait of postmodern culture. Soon after it was abandoned and forgotten, yet if you watch it now it is striking how the film anticipates contemporary phenomena like social media and self-branding. You may want to spend 24-minutes on this Close Personal Friend.
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Gravebook
Your last poke. Our peculiar image of the week was created by Han Hoogerbrugge.
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Twitter Followers as Currency
Imagine what you could do if you had one million Twitter followers. You would be so rich! Now seriously: Are followers becoming an alternative currency? Perhaps, although we are still awaiting the day that you can walk into a bakery and routinely buy a loaf of bread with your Twitter following. Scratch to win. Or if you don’t believe in lotteries, you can simply buy one million twitter followers for only $8295.
Image by Julian Bleecker.
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Walter Benjamin on Film and the Senses
During the late 1930’s the philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote its widely influential essay ‘The work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility’. While describing a general shift in the arts and their perception and warning about the possible exploitation for political purposes his work examines carefully the medium, especially photography and film, and its sensual aspects.[1] He attributes a tactile and palpable quality to film that elevates the medium and stresses its meaning for the human collective.
Benjamin formulates a historical task of film, ‘which is to gain control over technology and its effects.’[2] For him, film is an exercise for the senses to adapt ourselves. It were the ‘successive changes of scene and focus’ that were ‘a true training ground’ of modern perception.[3] Film thus corresponds to the changes that each passerby experiences in big-city traffic.[4] On the one hand the ‘filmic stimuli transcend the category of purely optical impressions’, on the other hand they stay safely or visually enframed in the screen.[5]
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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.
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Lowtech Plastic Surgery
So this is what you get when artists Lucyandbart practice their low-tech plastic surgery techniques on visitors of the MU gallery in Eindhoven. We are clueless on whether it was actually their objective to end up in the blend between tribal Africa & Beverly Hills. Peculiar image of the week.
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Amazon Tribe lacks concept of Time
A study, in Language and Cognition has shown that time does not exist as a separate concept for the Brazilian Amondawa – an Amazon tribe first contacted by the outside world in 1986.
The Amondawa language lacks the linguistic structures that relate time and space. There is no word for “time”, or indeed of time periods such as “month” or “year”. Furthermore, the people do not refer to their ages, but rather assume different names in different stages of their lives.
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Featured Page #08: McLuhan’s Tweets
During the coming weeks, we present a selection of our favorite pages from the Next Nature book. This week a page that is an homage to Marshall McLuhan, who is one of the most inspirational intellectuals for us. What would he have tweeted, had he been able to engage with this ‘social’ medium in our time?
As the new media theorist would say, “the medium (is more important than) the message.” Twitter may be text, but it’s really an oral and auditory system in disguise: instantaneous, encompassing, and social. As McLuhan would argue, micro-blogging is just another symptom of a society moving back to the tribe. The quotes on this page are adapted from “The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan,” © Playboy Magazine, March 1969. Here are a few:
ElectricMan – Marshall McLuhan
For the past 3,500 years, the effects of media — whether it’s speech, writing, printing, photography or television — have been overlooked by social observers …
42 years agoElectricMan – Marshall McLuhan
Most people cling to what I call the rearview-mirror view of their world.
42 years agoElectricMan – Marshall McLuhan
Now man is beginning to wear his brain outside his skull and his nerves outside his skin.
42 years agoElectricMan – Marshall McLuhan
Man becomes the sex organs of the machine world just as the bee is of the plant world, permitting it to reproduce and evolve to higher forms.
42 years ago………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Featured here are pages 424-425 from the book Next Nature: Nature Changes Along with Us. More information about the book can be found here.
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How People spend their Day
No, you aren’t looking at a graph of the Earths geological layers. The layers in this visualization represent an average of how thousands of Americans spent their day.
The data was collected by the American Time Use Survey, which NY Times translated into this interactive map that allows you to see the differences between various groups like employed, unemployed, men, women, Black, White and Hispanic.
Would be fascinating to compare the graph with a day in the life of a caveman – the hunting & gathering type. Surely there would be less time watching TV & movies back then, but how about household activities? Traveling and Socializing? We wonder how the border between work and leisure worked for them and whether they were active during the same ‘office hours‘.
Related: Time pilots us, Office Rebellion, Supermarket – our next savanna.
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Rural Energy: From Kerosine to LED
While for most of us, happy blog readers, access to electricity is taken for granted, things are quite different in developing regions of the world. In India for example, over 65% of the population still lives in rural villages where electricity supply is very limited. If an electricity grid is at all available, it is typically very unstable.
Since electricity is known to be an engine for development, it makes sense to bring electricity to the rural villages of India, however, these rural areas cannot rely on the top down grid-electricity solutions. Local energy generation and concepts for distributed energy networks are more promising.
Marcel van Heist, designer and recent graduate at the Next Nature Lab at Eindhoven University of Technology went to India with the goal to introduce distributed energy solutions in rural areas. After investigating the established Kerosene based energy models, Marcel came up with an alternative based on solar powered LED lamps built from locally available materials. Here’s how.
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Neither Warfare nor Dumplings Are Innate to Human Nature
In Ngogo, Gombe and elsewhere in Africa, bands of male chimpanzees regularly make organized raids on neighboring troops and batter their enemies to death. These grim, warring chimps have been held up as a compelling argument for the role of violence in humanity’s evolutionary past. The premeditated violence of male chimp society forms the basis of naturalist E.O. Wilson’s argument that warfare, just like social grooming and opposable thumbs, is a trait that humans and chimps have inherited from our common ancestor. War, in his view, is an innate and unavoidable aspect of human nature.
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Featured Page #03: Tomorrow’s Fossils
During the coming weeks, we will present a selection of our favourite pages from the Next Nature book. This week the thirs one in this series: Tomorrow’s Fossils.
Ode to the car in 40 years’ time? A future Museum of Obsolete Objects? Inspired by Stonehenge while living in England, Jim Reinders, an experimental American artist, originally built Carhenge in Western Nebraska as a memorial to his father. Created in 1987 with the help of his family, it is now a free tourist attraction. It uses 38 vehicles, including a 1962 Cadillac, to mirror the position of the rocks that comprise Stonehenge.
England’s ‘natural’ past, an idealized place of agrarian idyll and legendary deeds, is transported to contemporary America. Reinders argues for the mythological resonance of the automobile, both as a continuation of past traditions, and as a progenitor of myth itself. As much as we live exclusively in next nature, we look to old nature, and old culture, for context. Will vintage gas-guzzlers prove as enduring as Stonehenge’s boulders?
Past Perfect
Certain technologies, already obsolete in our time, may be as inscrutable in the distant future as long-extinct species are to us. When presented as a natural part of the geological record, a cellphone or a Playstation controller becomes a rare oddity. The skeletons of videogame and cartoon characters are just as disorientating, conjuring a life (and death) for the patently fictional. Yet these imagined artifacts recognize the same premise: the fossil record of our species will not be distinguished by our bones, but by our technologies.………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Featured here are pages 56-57 from the book Next Nature: Nature Changes Along with Us. More information about the book can be found here.
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Archaeologist Finds Ruins of ‘Friendster’
Last month internet archaeologist Dr Maxwell Fry stumbled upon the perfectly preserved ruins of an online community called ‘Friendster’. Remember, that predecessor of Facebook, which might share the same fate? Surely, future archaeologists can’t wait to dwell on your ‘timelines’ dear tribe members.
Created by The Onion. Via Beyond the Beyond (repost).
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Humans Caused Mass Extinctions Before There Were Even Humans
Humans and other hominids have a reputation for bringing about mass extinctions. Homo erectus has been blamed for the disappearance of many African carnivores, our ancestors likely caused the Pleistocene extinctions, and modern humans are currently embroiled in the midst of the sixth great extinction event.
New evidence indicates that hominids have been causing significant extinctions far earlier than ever thought. Australopithecus afarensis, of Lucy fame, has been implicated in the disappearance of 23 species of carnivores that prowled Africa around 2 million years ago. Omnivores and small to mid-sized carnivores all bowed out at the same time tool-using A. afarensis showed up, leaving only hyper-specialized carnivores such as lions and hyenas.
Lars Werdelin, of the Swedish Museum of Natural History, theorizes that Australopithecines were such efficient scavengers that they knocked out any species that relied on part-time carcass theft. Groups of A. afarensis with stone tools likely were enough to scare away civets or large, predatory otters that competed for meat. This finding is all the more the remarkable becuase Australopithecines’ brains and bodies were only slighter larger than those of modern chimpanzees. Human-style social living and tool use, it seems, have made us top competitors from the beginning.
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Ronald van Tienhoven – Techno Animism
Once upon a time animism ruled people’s beliefs: both organisms and objects were imbued with a conscience. Artist Ronald van Tienhoven states that as technology closes the gap between organisms and objects, a new form of techno-animism arises.
