Mammo-rama

Mother Nature has a growing catalogue of images of herself done up in style - weird, snarling, matronly, demure - you name it. We think we'd now include this video.

(Thanks, biologist Stanford Chen, for alerting us to this!)

There are so many ways a Westerner can celebrate Nature. Maybe a solstice festival. A sustainably-farmed-pig roast. A salty ship's-bow reading of Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us. Or you could, employing your famous-actress mad skills, your eyes wide like a doe's, dress up like a hamster and birth, then munch on, your babies. We are not sure we want to show this video to our young children. We are very sure we watched it more than once. We're laughing. We're thinking about the heft of biology, the efficiency of the food chain, how glad we each are not to have a loose cannon hamster mother. We're also chagrined, shifting in our seats; we're just as red in tooth and claw as she is, that wonderful teacher of biology, fuzzy Ms. Rosselini. 

Mother Nature's debut as a character in the western world began as early as the 3rd millennium BCE, on Mesopotamian writing tablets which personified Nature as creative and nurturing, suggesting a feminine side. Greek pre-Socratic philosophers then summed up the entirety of the natural world's phenomena in the word physis, and presented the idea of Nature as a singular entity. The one, feminine icon began to take hold, but medieval Christians couldn't allow her dominion over everything (that's God's job) and conceded only Earth as her stomping grounds. Then, the Enlightenment. The explorers, the naturalists, the academics - all wanted to dig in and examine Nature, taxonomize it, tame it and translate it, sounding their barbaric YAWPS over the rooftops, but you can't do that to God's property. So Victorian scientists utilized enough sexual metaphors to once and for all draw a neat line betwixt Mother Nature and God and created a feminine domain, ready to be studied and exploited. Linnaeus, taxonomer extraordinaire, when describing reproduction, talked about trees and shrubs "donning wedding gowns" before their "nuptials." Adjectives including "chicks," "foxes," and "old hens" became common ways to describe women...and so on.

Jump to 1972. Mother Nature's starring in a television commercial, flowers in her hair, holding a tub of margarine.

When she mistakenly praises the contents as her own, lovely, natural butter, an offscreen narrator rudely disabuses her of this notion, revealing the identity of the tub in hand - Chiffon Margarine. She responds by meting out some punitive thunder and lightening, along with the trademarked slogan, “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.”  

Given the state of Earth (we'll not get into specifics, but merely hail back to the popcorned seat from which we first saw on screen a raucous version of the Desert of the Real)... Mother Nature, mammas, mamalia, it's all food for thought, i'nnit?

inclined to decline

Cornelia Konrads' sculptures - made of found, local, natural materials - hover in midair. They have been described as "playful links" between worlds, invoking "the possibility of an entrance or the removal of a path, depending upon one’s interpretation of the direction... " 

Land Art by Cornelia Konrads, via Colossal

Konrads is an artist, with a background is in the philosophy and culture of science. This dual history seemed appropriate to us when we first saw her work, mostly because of this philosophy-of-science-favored question: how do you know whether a thing (the intelligence of a species, the universe...) is becoming or declining? The question warrants a pause for breath, to watch the thing hovering in mid-air.

Humans tend to fetishize objects that oscillate on our timeline, simultaneously decaying and giving every indication that they are historic in nature, and yet becoming more vibrantly alive with meaning, flourishing as they move into the future. We adore them - relics, restored ancient buildings, artifacts, time capsules. The last on that list is fascinating, and a bit embarrassing. The International Time Capsule Society estimates that there are approximately 10,000 time capsules in existence world wide. We bury these vessels deep in the earth, deftly certain that our message is the right one to send into the future, hopeful that it will be of interest, or help. The lists of time capsules are emblematic of how we see historic significance, and time. The global list includes:

A July 15, 1979 was found in Vulkanny, Russia, in 2012 under a statue of Lenin, containing messages to 2024's "socialist society."

An 1834 time capsule was discovered in 2009 under a statue of Miguel de Cervantes in Madrid, containing a guide, and four volumes of the 1819 edition of Don Quixote.

The largest time capsule in the world, a 45 ton vault, is buried in Seward, Nebraska. It was created by Harold Keith Davisson, a local store owner (and now celebrity) who had it buried under a mound of dirt on the front lawn of his home furnishings and appliances store, and filled it with over 5,000 items, including a pair of bikini panties, a man's aquamarine leisure suit with stitched yellow flowers, and a brand-new Chevy Vega, "the cheapest car he could find." When his time capsule's ranking was later threatened, he built another vault on top of it, and put a car in that one as well.

We're fashioning a capsule ourselves, here in the OSLab. A small one. We'd be happy to hear of any items or words of everlasting wisdom you think we should include...and feel free to send us a car.

the eye of the (be)holder

still from George Méliès’s Le Voyage dans la lune

This week at OSLab we're thinking about what happens when we realize we're being gazed at (is there a loss of autonomy, a surrender to the other? are we only imagining the extent to which we are seen?) and the impact we have when we gaze (is it a normative gaze? do we construct a person as we view them?) We're jostling things about over here, trying to turn our lenses inward on...our lenses. You know the drill. We decided we can't say it any more clearly than this cheeky cephalopod did, when it stole a diver's camera and became the one holding the lens. (You'll want to watch full screen to see the subtitles, and odds are you'll be humming I Love You...Octopus when you're through.)

Unreliable Narrator

If a parasite sucks the blood out of your tongue until it atrophies, and then becomes your tongue, 

who, then, is doing the talking?

Cymothoa exigua, the tongue-eating louse,  from WTF, Evolution?

Historically, unreliable narrators have been somewhat less gruesome - more classic and captivating - Holden Caufield, Humbert Humbert, Huckleberry Finn (...though there is Alex in A Clockwork Orange). The term was coined by Wayne C. Booth in his 1961 The Rhetoric of Fiction, and its definition includes unreliability due to: ignorance, bias, psychological instability, self-deception, lack of worldliness, or deliberate deceit. It is a popular trope in post-modern literature and film, and because of its hip-ness reactions range from "it's way over-used and the effect is over-produced," to "it's a true representation of the range of selves within every human."   

The idea is intriguing - knowingly spending time with someone who is lying to you, allowing them to tell you their story. The one-sidedness of reading a book or watching a movie provides the right dynamic for this. You, on a comfortable couch, the perfect receptacle. The unreliable narrator, cozily embedded in their medium, the scoundrel you can safely love.

You can bound across a field of flowers into the situation because, dear reader, the unreliable narrator is reliably unreliable. Suspend disbelief, celebrate your fraudulent counterpart, created by an author just for you. It's our favorite kind of OSLab opening. There's an agreed upon space of tension, and maybe a nervous sort of co-creativity. Whatever is happening is real, and not real.

It's all in good fun, so there's nothing to fear.

"I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily – how calmly I can tell you the whole story.”

― Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart  

Proud, Thrilled, Happy

Baby Boomers reminisce about growing up during a time of wonder and exuberant national striving, where all Americans were united around the awesome goal of sending humans into space. But a 1969 opinion poll showed that only 53 percent of American adults were wholly in support of exorbitant moon-trip spending. Where did this story the Boomers tell, then, emerge from? First, it appears in the words they use to describe their experiences as eager, wide-eyed children during the beginnings of space exploration (by 1958, ray guns had replaced six shooters, and 50 percent of the $1.3 billion U.S. toy market was sci-fi-related). 

And second, it materializes in the words of the space enthusiasts, who's records thrive on a tenor of awe-inspiring exploration.  "It [the rocket] will free man from his remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet. It will open to him the gates of heaven." -Wernher von Braun

Sue Bean, Barbara Gordon and Jane Conrad, wives of Apollo 12 astronauts

The English language contains approximately 500,000 words. The average person uses 2,000 of them, and calls upon only 200-300 of them as regular standbys. (For reference, William Shakespeare used 24,000 words; 5,000 of which he only used once.)  The words we pay attention to as a culture are shifting constantly. In 1996 the English dictionary went online. "And we noticed that we learned a lot about the English language," said Peter Sokolowski, editor-at-large at Merriam-Webster, "about what words are looked up every single day in kind of a perennial way...after 9/11 (there was) an enormous amount of attention paid to the coverage and any news coming out of that story. And so we had this kind of concrete word of disaster, like rubble and triage in the first couple of days. And then words of explanation or of politics, like terrorism and jingoism. And then later, you know, four, five days later, we found that people were turning to the dictionary for what I would call philosophy, words like surreal and succumb..."

As we share verbal reactions, moving from the concrete to the explanatory to the philosophical, we are building a personalized representation of our world. The words we choose reflect our leanings, our deepest drives, and then, with them we re-invent. The next generation of space explorers are starting their journeys as young thinkers, science-lovers, experimenters. Many are already considering their small selves in relation to outer space. Is there a different, or even brand new, vocabulary we should be adopting to ensure they journey upward and outward with respect, awe, and imagination?  Should we take poetic license, urge them to pepper their search terms with metaphor? Stick to the scientific? A stunning combination of both? 

Here in the OSLab we think about how to ignite new ways of speaking...thinking...acting.  There is much to consider, and room to create, in the interstices.