Tag Archives: art

More than human

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Decorative imageIn his recent book, ‘The Place of Tides’, James Rebanks writes ‘the age of humans will pass.  Perhaps the end has already begun though it may take a long time to play out’.  I grew up when nuclear armageddon appeared to be the major threat to the future of life on Earth and it remains a major threat, especially given current tensions between nations.  However, other threats have gained prominence including both a massive asteroid impact, on the scale of the one that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, and climate change, which caused the largest mass extinction, killing 95% of all species, about 252 million years ago.  The current extinction rate is between 100 and 1000 times greater than the natural rate and is being driven by the overexploitation of the Earth’s resources by humans leading to habitat destruction and climate change.  Humans are part of a complex ecosystem, or system of systems, including soil systems with interactions between microorganisms, plants and decaying matter; pollination systems characterised by co-dependence between plants and pollinators; and, aquatic systems connecting rivers, lakes and oceans by the movement of water, nutrients and migratory species.  The overexploitation of these systems to support our 21st century lifestyle is starting to cause systemic failures that are the underlying cause of the increasing rate of species extinction and it is difficult, if not impossible, to predict when it will be our turn.  In his 1936 book, ‘Where Life is Better: An Unsentimental American Journey’, James Rorty observes that the most dangerous fact he has come across is ‘the overwhelming fact of our lazy, irresponsible, adolescent inability to face the truth or tell it’.  Not much has changed in nearly one hundred years, except that the global population has increased fourfold from about 2.2 billion to 8.2 billion with a corresponding increase in the exploitation of the Earth for energy, food and satisfying our materialistic desires.  A recent exhibition at the Design Museum in London, encouraged us to think beyond human-centred design and to consider the impact of our designs on all the species on the planet.  A process sometimes known as life-centred design or interspecies design.  What if designs could help other species to flourish, as well as humans?

References:

Rebanks, James, The place of tides, London: Penguin, 2025.

Rorty, James, Where life is better: an unsentimental journey.  New York, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1936.  (I have not read this book but it was quoted by Joanna Pocock in ‘Greyhound’, Glasgow: Fitzcarraldo Editions, HarperCollins Publishers, 2025, which I have read and enjoyed).

Image: Photograph of Pei yono uhutipo (Spirit of the path) by Sheraonawe Hakihiiwe, a member of the Yanomami Indigenous community who live in the Venezuelan and Brazilian Amazon. One of a series of his paintings in the ‘More than Human‘ exhibition at the Design Museum which form part of an archive of Yanomami knowledge that reflects the abundance of life in the forest.

Emergence of ideas leading to a lack of deep insights

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Decorative imageIn Surrealism, which emerged after World War 1, artists attempted to allow the subconscious mind to express itself and resulted in illogical montages or dreamlike scenes and ideas.  Some surrealists championed the subconscious because they thought it would release society from the oppressive rationality of capitalism.  Anna Wiele Kjaer of the University of Copenhagen has suggested that instead our subconscious has been colonised by capitalism and is being shaped the endless of streams of disconnected images flowing from our phones, which are as incongruous as any surrealist montage.  To decolonise our subconscious and to replenish our creativity many of us need a digital detox involving time away from our electronic devices [see ‘Digital detox with deep vacation’ on August 10th, 2016] allowing our brains to switch into mind wandering mode for long uninterrupted periods [see ‘Mind wandering’ on September 3rd, 2014].  Cormac McCarthy has described how ideas struggle against their own realisation and come with their own innate scepticism that acts like a steering mechanism for their emergence from our subconscious.  He also suggests that all ideas come to an end when they lose lustre becoming a tool, perhaps as a theory, strategy or plan, and you can no longer entertain the illusion that they hold some deep insight into reality.  Many of my thoughts never coalesce into an emergent idea but remain as illogical and disconnected as a surrealist montage and the few that do emerge don’t provide deep insights into reality that I recognise.

Sources:

Anya Harrison, Another Surrealism, 2022

Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger, Pan MacMillan, 2023.

Jackie Wullschläge, Surrealism at 100: does it still have the power to disrupt?, FT Weekend, 27 January 2024.

Image: Ceramic tile by Pablo Picasso in museum in Port de Sóller Railway Station, Mallorca.

Merseyside Totemy

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The recent extreme weather is perhaps leading more people to appreciate the changes in our climate are real and likely to have a serious impact on our way of life [see ‘Climate change and tides in Liverpool‘ on May 11th, 2016].  However, I suspect that most people do not appreciate the likely catastrophic effect of global warming.  For example, during the 20th century, the average rise is sea level was 1.7 mm per year; however, since the early 1990s it has been rising at 3 mm per year, and sea levels are currently rising at about 4mm per year according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  It is difficult to translate  statistics of this type into a meaningful format – the graph below helps in recognising the trends but does not convey anything about the impact.  However, I am impressed by a new art installation on the Liverpool waterfront by Alicja Biala called ‘Merseyside Totemy’ which illustrates the percentage of each of three high-risk local areas that will be underwater by 2080 if current trends continue: Birkenhead (centre of photograph), Formby (left) and Liverpool City Centre (right behind tree) [see www.biennial.com/collaborations/alicjabiala].  Perhaps using data for 30 years time rather than 60 years would have focussed people’s attention on the need to make changes to alleviate the impact.

Figure 1 from

Figure 1. Time series of global mean sea level (deviation from the 1980-1999 mean) in the past and as projected for the future. For the period before 1870, global measurements of sea level are not available. The grey shading shows the uncertainty in the estimated long-term rate of sea level change. The red line is a reconstruction of global mean sea level from tide gauges, and the red shading denotes the range of variations from a smooth curve. The green line shows global mean sea level observed from satellite altimetry. The blue shading represents the range of model projections for the SRES A1B scenario for the 21st century, relative to the 1980 to 1999 mean, and has been calculated independently from the observations. Beyond 2100, the projections are increasingly dependent on the emissions scenario. Over many centuries or millennia, sea level could rise by several metres. From https://archive.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/faq-5-1-figure-1.html

Horsepower driving ambition

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A photograph of 'Physical Energy' in Kensington Gardens - a sculpture of a man on a horseWalking across Kensington Gardens in London last week, on my way to attend a conference on Carbon, I came across the sculpture in the picture.  It is ‘Physical Energy’ by George Frederick Watts (1817 – 1904), which really confused me because I automatically started thinking about the sort of energy that is associated with horsepower.  Horsepower is a unit of power (energy per unit time) developed by James Watt (1736 – 1819) to evaluate the output of his steam engines.  The plaque below the sculpture calls it a ‘sculptural masterpiece; a universal embodiment of the dynamic force of ambition’ and states that the artist described it as a ‘symbol of that restless physical impulse to seek the still unachieved in the domain of physical things.’  So, while the connections seemed obvious to me, it would appear that Watts was not inspired by Watt.

The conference was interesting too.  There were delegates from all over the world presenting research on a wide range of topics from new designs of batteries to using carbon as an sorbent for toxins, carbon-based composites and self-assembly of metal-organic meso-crystals.  Two students that I have supervised were presenting their research on establishing credibility for models of the graphite core in nuclear power plants and on algorithms for identifying the surface morphology in samples of graphite.