Tag: borders

04/02/2015

First thought for a new project

Initial project

Scope: empathy, encouraging not to be selfish/ egocentric
– borders between people
– fear of difference
– zone of comfort
– blind / ignorance of what is happening around you
Outcome: reflect on our place within our society, mankind and environment
– break physical and psychological borders
– open to others
– break the feeling of ultra-powerfulness : we can’t see it all

Next project: widening scope / look at another aspect

I push people to reflect on personal questions (borders in mind, or where a single persons is allowed to go…) Now reflection on the fact we are part of a whole (Analogy with childhood/teenage hood when you gradually increase you awareness of the world around you)
– consequences of our actions/inaction/behaviour
– butterfly effect, long term consequences
– looking a bigger picture
– larger scale
– longer term

I came across this idea after looking at a new TED talk by Matthieu Ricard (see dedicated post and video)
He is saying that we are on “the edge of the planet” and this edge is the boundaries of the planet

My context would be his video, to raise awareness of our right, duty and power as an individual to act for a greater good and a better future:

We are at a turning point / point of no return of what the earth can provide
– We have a choice and duty to educate ourselves to act and behave in a more sustainable manner.
– Encouraging people to feel the harmony of our ideal sustainable relationship with earth and the disharmony of our current relationship with it.
– Break the borders we constructed between us and the planet

Proposal

Create an instillation of turntables representing the different continents, one turntable=one continent. On each a vinyl playing instrument(s) symbol of this continent. They all turn at different speed: speed = energy consumption of the continent (if we were all living like we do in Europe, we would need 2.5 planets to sustain, it would be worth in US… so for us the speed will be x2.5). Then you would have cursor to answer simple question to calculate how many planet we would need if the rest of the world population was living like ourself. It would modify the speed of these disc. The goal would be to try to make the planet be in harmony (all the disc turning at the same speed to hear the music).

Tutorial notes

Should look at

Sahra Sharma / re-calibration
nuclear clock
Tom Schoflieldart.com / neurotic armagedon indicator
entretags – timebots – family clock
Miyajima tatsuo – work with time
Sophie Calle – work with memories

The first proposal might be too consensual. We all will never have the same right, same way of living. Do we want a homogene society, like we all are clones ? But in the same time it is not right that some have the ability to consume in 1 hour what other will in a month or more ? How can we find a balance between equality (the state of being equal, especially in status, rights, or opportunities) and equity (the quality of being fair and impartial: equity of treatment.)

Equity, as we have seen, involves trying to understand and give people what they need to enjoy full, healthy lives. Equality, in contrast, aims to ensure that everyone gets the same things in order to enjoy full, healthy lives. Like equity, equality aims to promote fairness and justice, but it can only work if everyone starts from the same place and needs the same things.

It is worth looking at this video of Hans Rosling about energy consumption and the inequality in the world.

We all live with different temporality as well.

Is fast wrong ? (slow food ≠ fast food)

harmony is difficult to define – it is not only fast and slow

Time and territory
When you look linear you miss direction and possibilities
Always in a narrative structure
How to find synchronicity
Try to find a moment where it is possible to detect synchronicity – can be very brief – loss of a moment = tension

I should look at some granularity – detail – personal detail – build a personal reflection

Think about the setting of my research:

empirical knowledge
interrogate the system
give to an test group something to study them
think about ethic
provocation ?

My Map app

I created a new app called Mymap, working on the concept to expend our territories and encourage to reflect on all the place we will have to discover in our life, as well as the one we will never see.

De Certeau argues that the act of walking selects and fragments the space traversed; it skips over links and whole parts that is omits. Moreover it can “be traced on city maps in such a way as to transcribe their paths and their trajectories. But these thick or thin curves only refer, like words, to the absence of what has passed by. A spacial order organises an ensemble of possibilities and interdictions, then the walker actualises some of these possibilities. In that way, he makes them exists as well as emerge.” [3]. It is what the app is doing: revealing the choices taken, the places visited or the path used, while the rest is hidden behind a white layer.

This is the mockup of my idea.

In my head it was quite a simple idea (coming from a person who don’t have any experience in coding yet) but in application it has been quite difficult and several iteration of the app had been necessary.

First I thought it would have been possible to make a reverse heat map: instead of having colours appearing on a layer on top of the map, it would make transparent the white layer. In practice what was possible is to draw a white layer on google maps by giving the points clockwise then removing polygons from this layer by giving the point anticlockwise. It created a lot of different issues: closing the route every time we created a new point: drawing the territory and not the route; superposed polygons resulting on re-masking the map…

The solution came up with the discovery of hulljs. Using a complex algorithm, it draws around the GPS points the route.

The app uses phone gap, a free and open source framework that allows you to create mobile apps using standardized web APIs for web platforms as well as mobile app with the same code. The language is Java Script. To store the routs (even is it not possible yet with the current version) HTML5 Local Storage will be use. Google maps API, Cordova plugin geolocation and the GPS of the phone are used as well.

I am already thinking about a future version of the app. I would like to make the map appearing in different shade of colours: for example the area you use all the time (’your territory’: going to work and back home for example) would be tinted in red, whereas the one you visited only once would be blue. it would allow a better understanding of the territory.

For complementary informations about the app (interface, calculus of the opacity), or more references have a look to the slides of my presentation and my research .

11/11/2014

Revealing map (project proposal)

For this idea I also looked into the concepts of ‘creating your own border’ and ‘staying in your confort zone’, however, this time on ow to expend our territories and encourage to reflect on all the place we will have to discover in our life.

For that, I want to create a mobile app: it will be a white page when you start using it for the first time, then the map will reveal itself when you went somewhere physically.
I tried to make a visualisation of my idea in this short animation:

In my head it is quite a simple idea (coming from a person who don’t have any experience in coding yet 🙂 but we already told me that it is not as simple and I am worked I will not be able to make it on time for the 13th of december.
One way I think it might be possible is to make a reverse heat map: instead of having colours appearing on a layer on top of the map, it would make transparent the white layer.

The second stage of this project (depending how difficult it is to do the ‘simple’ idea), would be to make the map appearing in different shade of colours: for exemple the area you use all the time (’your territory’: going to work and back home for example) would be tinted in red, whereas the one you visited only once would be blue.

26/10/2014

My thoughts

Please give me your feedback on my ideas, and if you have any thoughts how I could develop them or in which direction I should go. Any comments are welcome. (see the pages with the mind map My thoughts)

The different themes I am looking at for the moment are:

BORDERS

on 2 different aspects:

– inequality between people: because you are born in x or y country you can’t move freely (visa, border…) Why do I have some right than other people doesn’t have? How this is right ? Also, by doing that, is not increasing the desire to see what is forbiden? When you are not allow to do something you might try harder to make it possible.

– creating your own border by staying in your confort zone. It can result to refuse to see in the other side of the road how people are living or even your neighbour ? and I am not talking (yet) about situations in other country or continent, where it can be so far from the reference framework that it is difficult to identify to the situation or living condition.

My feeling is that it is very easy to stay on a routine, ‘bury ours head in the sand’. It allows us to not called into question our behaviours and the impact of our actions in the society.

Is developing empathie, be open to others would help to create a better word ? Experience, relate and understand others could help to be more open on the world surrounding us (on different scale) and try to ‘be in the shoes of someone else’. In a sense brake the borders we create.

DISCONNECT

To experience, relate, understand others, and reconnect with the self, I believe that it is important to be able to ‘disconnect’: from the technology, from the consumer society, from ‘always more’ and ‘always faster’.

EQUALITY

I am a bit obsess with this idea that we are all human, all made of 70% of water, all the same in a way. In contrast there is this huge inequality on the planet where world’s richest 1% own 40% of the world’s wealth. it is related with the first idea developed in ‘border’.

Maybe equality between people could maybe take place in the ‘between’ places, passage, connections, non spaces.

HAPPINESS

This is the big question: How to have a good life? Is happiness living well and doing well? Should it be our goal in life and how to get there? Yet, my position on these questions is that to have a good life you should act in coherence with the values you are believing in. You should go out of the confort zone to live new experiences, and learn from it what is essential for you and bring something positive out of it. It can be as simple as coming back from work by another route, try to observe the word with open mind and a sense of detail…