#08 What Am I Looking At?
Trends are sweeping the planet the same as a wave travels across the stadium on sporting events, cafés look the same no matter where you travel and AI is live translating our conversations.
I write this newsletter to structure my experiences and ideas around creativity. It’s mainly a personal exercise in writing, but I’m sure there is something for you as well.
My name is Juho Vesanen and I’m a co-founder of Veli Studio. I’m also editing the studio’s annual passion project Attraction Magazine – a printed and online exploration dedicated to the appreciation of visual curiosity.
#08 What Am I Looking At?
This entry is once again inspired by an essay (and film) in Emergence Magazine titled Counter Mapping:
Jim Enote, a traditional Zuni farmer and director of the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center, is working with Zuni artists to create maps that bring an indigenous voice and perspective back to the land, countering Western notions of place and geography and challenging the arbitrary borders imposed on the Zuni world.
There is this great moment in the companion film where Jim says:
One time I showed my mother some aerial photos. Her first response was “I’m not a bird.” She said that that is not how she looks at things. “What am I looking at? I don’t know what I’m looking at.”
This seemingly bizarre notion made me think about all the other things in our world that are standardised to a point, where they serve a general purpose so vigorously that any uniqueness is deemed as an anomaly and therefore excluded. We are so used to this and for a good reason, none of the normal things in the world that we are used to would work without some form of standardisation. And while there is some co-existing standards, like the imperial and metric systems, there is a standardised conversion method that can be applied when moving from one to another.
Even the International Space Station has its own standardised time zone (time in space, what a fascinating concept)
Imagine a world in which people are born on other planets and live in settings that need them to reconsider basic ideas like day and night. With the distinct patterns of light and darkness encountered in these new frontiers, the adoption of a 24-hour clock, as established on Earth, might become arbitrary and inconsistent. A curious detachment from the origins of these traditions may result from generations of colonists on these planets adhering to timekeeping systems that appear to be disconnected from the planetary rhythms they live in.
-Billeh Scego (article here)
The countless benefits of standardisation are obvious, but so are the negatives. When you add the globally interconnected social networks on top of our standard-loving minds, we become a petri dish for homogenised thinking. Trends are sweeping the planet the same as a wave travels across the stadium on sporting events. Cafés look the same no matter where you travel and AI is live translating our conversations so there might not be any reason to learn new languages.
That’s why this essay about the creation of indigenous maps was so heartfelt and it highlights the importance of art in a very concrete way. It made me smile 🌞
That’s it for now, thanks for reading!
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Things that friends are currently bringing to reality ⤵︎
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