Amulets at the Pitt Rivers

An amulet is "anything worn about the person as a charm or preventative against evil, mischief, disease, witchcraft, etc" (Oxford English Dictionary). For more of the 5000 amulets the Pitt Rivers Museum has archived go to the website Small Blessings.

Beyond Nationalism: Honorable Medals and Infographic Olympiads

In the earliest modern Olympics humans excelling in the arts also received gold, silver and bronze medals.

When the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was founded in 1894 with the French Baron Pierre de Coubertin's hopes that men should be educated both physically and intellectually (competing in sports not wars), the arts were part of the games too. Five artistic competitions were introduced and architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture oeuvres inspired by sports would combat for gold. After 1954 this event fizzled, replaced by the slightly less competitive cultural olympiads.

The 8-Bit Games!

Anyways, I agree with Coubertin: I like critical minds more than I like nationalism, so it's nice to see all the creations that have emerged from thinking about sportive prouesses not just as physical competitions but as signs of global realities that should be challenged. For instance Gustavo Sousa has come up with these simple infographics using the Olympic flag's five rings to illustrate data from each of the five continents - from Coca Cola sales, to total populations and CO2 emissions per capita. And the Guardian reported on a team from Imperial College and the Royal Statistical Society determining in real-time the actual amounts of medals won for each country in relationship to GDP or population... so for instance while China may have officially won 24 medals, in relation to its GDP it has a petty 0,95, and while Columbia has 2, according to the study it has won an honorable 4,59.

And all the rest...

Cul-de-sac de l'Évolution: Carcharodon Megalodon

Requins, peur, mort, myths et chasse:

Animals and Humans: What is Art, What is Beauty?

The topic and works of the Grand Palais' current exhibition seem worth a visit. Displayed slightly lower for the child in all of us, the exhibit goes over the European art scene's take on animals. In the words of the curator Emmanuelle Héran, it gathers all art depicting animals and touches upon a variety of ideas -- the cultural norms of beauty (why is a toad ugly and a horse honorable?), or the role human historical developments since the 16th c. had on our relationship to animals (for instance if during the colonial years the endless discovery of new species meant animals were symbols of bountiful imagination, today the predicament of their extinction is underlying all of their artistic portrayals). There's art, aesthetic theory, human and natural history to produce this:

Beauté animale : présentation de l'exposition by Rmn-Grand_Palais

And my favorite little creatures - birds - are represented by the iconic Dodo, whose myth is complexified here:

La véritable histoire du Dodo by Rmn-Grand_Palais

"Effectively it's a museum about everything, everywhere, ever": The New Cambridge University Museum of Anthropology and Archeology

Sylvia Plath, front-doors, humanity, Totem poles, objects made 1.8 million years ago, Captain Cook, death, sex in Ancient Rome, snakes and ladders and other things in the Cambridge University Anthropology and Archeology Museum's collections.

Death and the Virtual Platforms that Make You Look Alive Forever

Hundreds of Facebook users, bloggers, and twitterers die a day. What agency do their profiles, still present on these virtual platforms, have on the living? Do their web-based identities ease the mourning process or make it more difficult? Could the virtual be the only space where the dead and the living co-exist with similar materialities?...

The Atlantic just published a great interview of Patrick Stokes, a philosopher working out of Melbourne University about these ideas. Best quote from How Facebook Lets You Live Forever (Sort Of):

"we really have continuing moral duties to dead people even though they don't exist anymore; they exist as objects of duty. That's something Kierkegaard talks about, the fact that we have these duties to dead people, like the duty to remember them, or the duty not to slander them, and so forth. We live with this very profound ontological ambiguity with dead people: they both absolutely don't exist anymore, and yet they exist as these people that we have to love and care about."

North Korean Mourning, Dance and Song (a Western Fascination)

"The smartest, most crevest, most physicarry fit, but nobody seems to rerarise it" dictator just died.

The Colour of New York's Troubles

In this very very witty and pretty graph by artist Andrew Kuo one can read smart data with a New York City biased twist.

Coloured Water, Tape and Glass Cups: NPR Explains Seven Billion Humans

Found at flowingdata

Tweeting About an Earthquake: Techno-Cynic vs. Techno-Philosophically

The Twitter blog has two time-based mappings of the Tweet flows coming in and out of Japan, to and from the world around March 11th's earthquake. It makes for eloquent visuals on factual matters such as, where networks of information gather and exchange, how technology enables humans to decimate information in seconds and what areas are excluded from these connected hubs (large parts of Africa); or helps you draw more anecdotal multiple hypotheses such as Hawaiians use Twitter more than Alaskans, more Hawaiians have Twitter accounts than Alaskans, Hawaiians have more empathy towards earthquake victims than Alaskans, Hawaiians like Japanese people More than Alaskans,  there are more Hawaiians than Alaskans, etc...

But these maps also hint to the ways humans cope, even maybe internalize information in an age where 30% of humans are connected to the internet. In my mind there are two ways to see it: either as a techno-cynic, technology enables people to appropriate content without needing to process it, Twitter is a mean to brag about being part of networks of people in the know; or more techno-philosophically, technology is simply an extension of a 'natural' human trait, by which humans partake in collective trends and happenings rather superficially to simply be social humans. In either versions the information itself becomes second to the process of sharing - be it someone famous' death like Jobs's (6,049 tweets per second), a pregnancy (Beyoncé's baby got 8,868 tweets per second after her MTV video performance) or an earthquake, the actual occurrence matters less than the amount of people that could be interested in the news, and hence the amount of humans the tweeter could impress or connect (be) through.

 

All Together Now

Let's all email: rememberingsteve@apple.com

DJ Medhi, Layton, Winehouse: A Dead Famous Person or The Collective Ritual

The death of famous people does something funny to the common people left behind. It's not quite like loosing a friend with whom you've actually talked to, established a reciprocal relationship with, it's more like loosing a collective notion, idea or product embodied by a human. 

Obviously everyone agrees that death is a sad event - it's difficult for humans to conceive of their own mortal nothingness - but when it comes to celebrity deaths it generally turns out to be this really great opportunity to connect with all the living people left behind. Over and over again similar things occur: facebookers change their facebook statuses quoting their last words (Jack Layton), tweeters tweet #allmythoughtstothefamily (DJ Mehdi), bars play their music again (Amy Winehouse), the highest-grossing documentaries of all time are produced (Michael Jackson), prices skyrocket (Lucian Freud) and solo shows sell out (Alexander McQueen); and all this with the best indications that they were simply geniuses, that success and death are anecdotal.... 

Overall a virtuous circle gets established through general mobilization: everyone wants to partake in this collective mourning or performative event where the famous person's death and life get washed-down, simplified and commodified into a tasty digestible narration. Unlike those that are still alive, famous dead people can't disappoint. Unlike those that are still alive, famous dead people get closer to home and in a sense become more alive than when they were actually alive.

Consuming a famous dead person is both an attempt to belong to and by those left behind and an honest mechanism of panic in front of oblivion.

Hence, because DJ Mehdi died earlier this week, as a way to confront death and in the hope to be part of a collective CBC played this - I never knew he produced it, but Tonton Du Bled was a huge hit when I was 15 keeping it real in Sèvres:

Commemorating 11/11: Canada's Public Poppy Pins versus France's Private Day Off

In Canada the only thing that flourishes in late-fall are small round red objects on people's suits, blouses and coats. 

They are poppy pins and coming from a country (France) where November 11th is considered a 'jour férié civil' where everything shuts down entirely, there's something strangely awkward about remembering the slaughter of millions for centimeters of mud in the Flanders with a dollar pin. 

On the one hand there's this material red and black felted object cluttering the clothes people wear in public spaces for three good weeks. While loaded with military and nationalistic values, these red dots resonate as things with which to remember and 'commemorate' those dead for the present and consequently a mean to acknowledge and create a collective sense of unity.

And on the other hand there is the 'invisible', and yet just as ritualized and obligatory day off. A whole private twenty-four hours to do anything but the routine. If it is officially a time to reflect about meta-matters of finitude and sacrifice, it isn't lacking it's material manifestations either, such as the flowering of every memorial monument, the presidential speech, televised national ceremony and paper coverage (that, as long as I can remember, always dealt with how many French poilus were still alive- a question that no longer has a numerical answer since le der des der, Lazare Ponticelli, died in March 2008). 

If, in the Canadian case there is an obligatory 'bowing to poppy fascism' and on the other, what Adam Gopnik describes as "the French attitude toward any crisis," to pretend that it isn't happening, both of these rituals are associated to remembrance. If nonchalant dignity of the French and the exposed pride of the Canadian are different ways to remember to remember, to be remembered to remember and more importantly to pretend we can never forget, in the end, if both are actualized through diverging performances, both are animated by the shared and essential fear of forgetfulness, which is so intrinsically human.

The Summer at the Cottage