Soapbox Post

“It will be a long time before we forget the threat that lies smouldering under an Icelandic glacier. Or its lesson that even in the 21st century, our lives are still at the sufferance of nature.”

New York Times Editorial on April 18, 2010

In my own, humble understanding of the world – the one I try to convey to my child – this sentence is obnoxious. Unfortunately it makes a lot of sense for it to be written in a newspaper! It represents the assumption that we are in control of Nature. While it’s difficult for me to understand how our human relationship with the rest of the world can be understood in these terms, it’s an all too common idea. We have mathematics, we have technology, we have models, we have established laws that Nature – and indeed society – should obey…and therefore we should be able to tame Nature’s ‘threats’! As recent events have shown, however, we clearly don’t have sufficient models and knowledge to tell us how much ash an aeroplane engine can take. It appears that we merely pretend to tame Nature’s ways without knowing how our own creations work: the hot debate right now is the flaws of modelling and over-precautionary decisions they led to (see, for instance, this commentary by Jerry Ravetz).

Not so long ago I read another story about flying: a journalist travelling to New York from Europe was describing the reactions of a passenger in business class who had been given the opportunity to test out Internet use in the air. The passenger was delighted until, after five minutes of use, the system went down and he lost his connection. He got angry and insulted – more or less - the whole universe. Ten minutes beforehand he hadn’t even known that the technology existed; five minutes after he’d tested it, the technology was already taken for granted.

I see these two stories as related.

The volcano in Iceland has stopped hundreds of thousands of flights. Many people have had to stop, change their plans, look into other ways of communicating, improvise, and explore different ways of moving around - or indeed have been forced to not move around. The volcano has been an opportunity to stop, pause, and wonder about the things we take for granted. It has caused us to think about technology, models; about the objects that co-habit our everyday spaces, without being questioned, some silent, some with their own noise, but all of which we get used to and understand as part of the world’s order.

That passenger in the flight to New York does not make time to have time. But the volcano has forced this time upon us! When else do we take the time to look into our gestures, our quotidian gestures, and understand that they do not come from instinct, but that they were taught? To consider that what we think is natural, and take for granted, probably is not? What does it take for us to pause? And reflect?

What other volcanoes, earthquakes, floods do we need to start thinking about Time?

I recently commissioned a short movie intended to reflect on time – the time we don’t use to think about our place, time, gestures. The film was intended to be subtle, unusual. It seeks to explore, through an appeal to the senses, the things we do not realise: we often pass through the world as automata, as if what we do is what has to be done, as if there were a hidden order that we follow. We too seldom question how we use time, how we use our gestures.

Time, do you have time?

Youtube version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiSbNV0sGEk