Here’s a short looping animation, just in time for the Remembrance Day for Lost Species – I’m taking part in a pop-up exhibition tonight at Baumhaus Berlin, organised by Jenni Ottilie Keppler, together with other illustrators, poets and sculptors. ‘Huia (exquisite corpse)’ deals with cultural memory, and builds on two existing interpretations of the huia – which was one of three native New Zealand wattlebirds. The huia was driven to extinction before photography was prevalent, and before audio recordings could be made of its song. (The last confirmed sighting was in 1907.) The artist J.G Keulemans’ 1888 illustration of a huia pair appeared as a plate in Walter Buller’s A History of the Birds of New Zealand. His illustrations of native birds have become iconic representations, much reproduced in New Zealand and around the world. Keulemans was based in London and did not travel to New Zealand. Although he had done some work in the field, he mostly worked from stuffed skins – dead specimens, sent to him from around the world. The audible ‘bird calls’ are human imitations, recorded with Henare Hāmana in 1949. As a young man, Hāmana was familiar with the huia and had also been part of an unsuccessful search team in 1909. His whistles are created from 40-year-old memories. This animation that results is also a rather unreliable interpretation, hence the name ‘exquisite corpse‘ – its movement is based merely on videos of the Tieke, a surviving (though endangered) relative of the huia, which I’ve never seen in the wild. Further reading: Wikipedia’s Huia article is fascinating, particularly this section: “While we were looking...
I was invited to tell a story last night at Agora Rollberg – a budding community space in the old storage hall of Neukölln’s Kindl Brauerei. The event was bringing together practitioners of open source collaboration, and Alice & Simon, two of the organizers, suggested that I share how I got started down this road. I guess most people start out in open source with software, but my experience was a little different – so this is what I shared with the group: Around 10 or 11 years ago, in my hometown of Auckland, New Zealand, I was in need of a place to live, and heard from a friend about a beautiful old house with a large garden, available to rent, not far from town. With only a little embellishment, I told the landlord that I was a responsible young professional, as I had a stable job working for for a reputable firm (at the time I was the production runner on the [ahem] critically-acclaimed TV show Power Rangers). I also told the owner that I already had the perfect group of other responsible young professionals, keen to move in with me. So they let me have the house, and suddenly I had two weeks to find at least 8 housemates to share this huge place with me. Somehow, thanks to helpful friends and the magic of MySpace, it happened, though responsible young professionals these were not. I had found 8 guys and one girl, who stretched the entire spectrum from unemployed to underemployed. We had members of three different bands, with 12 guitars and two drum kits...
Today has been a day of worrying about what went wrong, what everyone could have done better, how we could have stopped Trump. But we’re not going to stem this angry tide of populism simply by picking better opponents, or trying different election strategies. Our struggle for an educated, empowered democracy has to be about building something new. The breadth of change required makes this is an ominous task, achievable only through concerted effort from many people working in parallel on many different points of the system. Because democracy does not mean ‘Politics’ or ‘Elections’. Democracy does not mean a single choice between flawed candidates once every few years, it’s something that needs to be built in to every sector of society. Every system we interact with should give us information and agency, rather than isolation, coercion and inequality. We need as many people as possible to get involved in building new approaches. Working to improve our society does not always mean marching in the streets (though it’s important to support and protect those who do). You can do it in your job, amongst your friends, and through decisions of how you spend your time and money. So what are we doing now, and what can we do? Can you dedicate at least some of your time to making the field you work in more democratic, more inclusive, more transparent, more evidence-based, more sustainable, more distributed? Can it be reshaped to empower and educate people as they interact with it? Are you aware of the structural inequalities which exist in your society, and are you trying to do something...
