Escapism

I saw you at the Central Station today. In your hoodie. Oblivious of the crowd. Enchanted, not by a broccoli forest, but by your smartphone.

My brain saw you before my eyes did and it gently steered me to the right to avoid a collision. Although my heart missed a beat, my step didn't falter and I continued to Moderna Museet.

I watched the exhibitions, sculpture after sculpture. And I wondered about what we choose to perceive. Social realism is not my thing. "I get enough of that in reality" I say when friends want me to watch a Roy Andersson movie. I also hide behind my camera, preferring not to see myself, unless reflected in some shiny object. It's a way of life. I try to not stay in the moment.

I suppose we' humans are good at not talking about the elephant in the room. We rather pretend to be saints and look the other way. Or ghosts, omnipresent but not really interacting. Nowadays, we can even let technology help us select what to focus on through augmented reality. Perhaps I should develop some Google Glass software that identifies people who are likely to make you miserable and gives you a nudge in another direction. I think the market is bigger than just me.

You didn't see me. I don't think you ever saw me. Saw. Me. I didn't want to see you. Not the real you. So, what did we see in each other? Perhaps we were just means for self-expansion and self-supression. What I do know, is that the elephant is still here.

We Never Went to Arthur's Seat

I've just finished watching the film One Day. It wasn't my choice and as I suspected, it hit a little too close for comfort. Still, I think it was a great movie with lots of truths in it. Or maybe not.

In one recent episode of Philosophy Bites, Peter Lamarque talks about the claim that great works of fiction often contains important truths about what it is to be human. He does not think so.

As an example, he uses Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and its famous beginning: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

I think the point he tries to make, is that we should look for the truth and real knowledge elsewhere and see fiction as providing other values. What is called "deeper truths" revealed in literature are perhaps things we need to think about and pay attention to, but perhaps they have no black and white answers and maybe it doesn't matter. For example, there's been no study investigating if happy families are more alike than unhappy ones and I don't think anyone would like to really know for sure. I suppose his book, The Philosophy of Literature, is not to be considered as fiction.

For a constructivist, of course, there is no truth, or perhaps more to the point, many truths. Perhaps we should develop the concept of "true truth" further, in accordance with the Cloud Atlas. Maybe then we can find the way to universal truths. Or at least the way to Arthur's Seat.

A Time For Everything

I go to the local library a lot. Last Saturday a book in a display caught my eye: "Cottage Dreams" ("Torpardrömmar" in Swedish). A very philosophical, down to earth and beautiful book about what it's like to live in a small, old, red cottage in the Swedish countryside. The wooden house and its creaking doors and smokey fire places. The surrounding woods with glades, lakes and tall trees whispering in evening. The sunny garden with ancient flowers, fruit trees, weeds and vegetables. The shy wild animals and the hungry although affectionate domestic critters. The smooth linen cloth descending from the blue fields long ago.

The very last chapter is about time and how everything changes, but also returns. Although I'm not a Christian, I very much appreciated the quote from Ecclesiastes 3:

"There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:

a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace."

To Be or Not To Be

Hynek Pallas wrote a review of the new Xavier Dolan film "Tom at the Farm" in todays SvD. A phrase caught my eye. Actually a quote from another critic: Carl-Johan Malmberg. He said it about Dolan's previous film "Laurence Anyways" and it really hit me. 

Malmberg said that this film was about the question of how we can be to the one we love what we want to be to ourselves (in Swedish "hur få vara för den man älskar den man vill vara för sig själv"). 

I don't think I'll get the answer through watching any of these movies, although I'm sure they are good. However, I'm glad they brought me such a precise and true question.

Colour Hermeneutics

What comes to my mind when reading professor Jeana Jarlso’s article about how memories impact our impression of colour is that there is a kind of hermeneutics involved. Similar to how we must take into account the social context and intentions of a writer (any writer, not only those involved in the text that happened to go into the collection called The Bible) when interpreting a text, we need to apply the same perspectives when looking at a picture.

In 2001, I visited the Sistine Chapel and saw the restored paintings for the first time. As Jarlso points out when quoting the historian Michel Pastoureau, it is difficult to really know what the painting looked like when new since so many are different from then. We now have electric light instead of candles. Colours change with age and we don’t know if Michelangelo, Botticelli and the others intended for us to have another experience of the frescos than when they were fresh.

How do we remember colour? Was my first home really that blue? When did my mother’s hair turn from blond to white? And what colour do we really refer to when we say we’re feeling green of envy? That is, what colour did Shakespeare refer to? 

Fairphone - An Idea Worth Spreading!

Fairphone started in 2010 as a project of Waag society, Action Aid and Schrijf-Schrijf, aimed at raising awareness about conflict minerals in electronics and the wars that the sourcing of these minerals is fueling in the DR Congo. The campaign and research into the complex supply chain ran for 3 years. In 2013, they established Fairphone as a social enterprise with the aim of designing, creating and producing a smartphone and taking the next crucial step in uncovering the story behind the sourcing, production, distribution and recycling of electronics.

Already the campaign is spreading around the world in media such as The Guardian, Financial Times, Huffington Post, The Verge, Computerworld, Svenska Dagbladet and Der Spiegel. The plan is to manufacture 20.000 phones in the first batch and as of today 11,868 people have preorded one. Of course, they use smart story-telling techniques to get their message through. Which is probably one of the reasons Fairphone has been picked up by TEDx Amsterdam.

It can be argued that given the vast amount of components in an advanced electronic device it is impossible to develop a phone that is completely fair from a people-planet-profit perspective. However, I think Fairphone is definitely a big step in the right direction. Not only do they focus on sourcing material from non-conflict countries, worker welfare and the product life-cycle, but they also try to make it last longer by using an open technical design. In addition, the pricing is transparent. It is also an interesting example of social enterprising. Simply an idea worth spreading!

Pictures Don't Lie?

Recently I visited the Fotografiska museum in Stockholm. The major exhibition was Ruud van Empel's "Pictures Don't Lie" with stunning although eerie pictures. This is how the museum describes his work:

"From hundreds of photographic fragments, he compiles images that are genuinely lifelike in their appearance but conjure up a world that has never existed in this form. This paradisaical world is primarily populated by children, as the symbol of innocence, which is one of the major themes of his work. Despite their astounding beauty, these works are far from unequivocal, there is something not quite right: what is real here and what is not?" 

Even as an amateur photographer, you need to decide to what extent you want to manipulate your pictures. With a vast array of tools you have all kinds of options, from Picasa to Photoshop and beyond. Since the camera and you do not record the same image, is it really to change the picture if you want to enhance the blue in the sky afterward so it becomes the colour you remember it "really" was?

However, already in choosing motives and angles we add our opinion to the picture. So maybe the questions is not whether a picture can lie but who's story it tells? Which story do you want to tell?