The UK website If You Could is the project of design firm HudsonBec and asks this question: if you could do anything tomorrow, what would it be? This week’s print series answers the question with wonderful prints from Rob Ryan and Jason Munn.
If You Could : Print Series : August 2008
Stone Age embrace: A remarkable triple burial -- containing a woman and two children who were 5 (left) and 8 years old, their limbs entwined -- was discovered at the Gobero site during the 2006 field season. Pollen clusters found in the sand indicated the three had been buried on top of flowers. The skeletons showed no sign of injury and had been ceremonially posed and buried, along with four arrowheads. The image appears in the September 2008 National Geographic. (Credit: Mike Hettwer (c) 2008 National Geographic)
This morning I’ve been reading stories in the New York Times, Science Daily, and National Geographic, all based on the findings of Paul Serno and his colleagues and presented in a paper on PLos ONE. They tell of people who lived and died in the Sahara when the Sahara wasn’t dry, and the articles gave me that awe-filled, castles-in-the-air feeling that was so much more common in childhood, when the whole arc of human history seemed to whoosh up and past like a train.
Says John Nobel Wilford in the Times article:
A girl was buried wearing a bracelet carved from a hippo tusk. A man was seated on the carapace of a turtle.
And in the photo above, two children reach out to their mother for thousands of years.
Whoosh.
“…it preserves a small zone for the playful, the useless, and the unauthorized.”
–Matt Greenfield, writing in The Valve about Ramsey Scott’s “Even the Hardy Boys Need Friends: An Epistolary Essay on Boredom.â€
The quote above refers to Wayne Koestenbaum’s practice of assigning his grad students a two-page “lyric essay” each week in lieu of a final paper. This was common practice in my own graduate program at New School University, where I studied under people like David Lehman, Laurie Sheck, David Trinidad, and Susan Wheeler. I remember that one of the “essays” took the form of a collage about Wordsworth poem.
But I fear it was my own common practice through my whole education, even when more traditional essays were warranted. For better or worse, I could never figure out how to obey without also resisting.
“Power is no longer measured in land, labour, or capital, but by access to information and the means to disseminate it… Unless we design and implement alternate information structures which transcend and reconfigure the existing ones, other alternate systems and life styles will be no more than products of the existing process.
Our species will survive neither by totally rejecting nor unconditionally embracing technology – but by humanizing it; by allowing people access to the informational tools they need to shape and reassert control over their own lives.”
–Radical Software, 1970
Some experts say that people tune things out for good reasons, and that over time boredom becomes a tool for sorting information — an increasingly sensitive spam filter. In various fields including neuroscience and education, research suggests that falling into a numbed trance allows the brain to recast the outside world in ways that can be productive and creative at least as often as they are disruptive.
BENEDICT CAREY, “You’re Checked Out, but Your Brain Is Tuned In,” nytimes.com, 8/5/2008
