Regarding Duologues amazing new music video: By now you’ve probably heard that tiny mites live in your facial pores and that your guts contain about ten times as much bacterial genes than human genes. Although it’s probably not what he meant, John Mayer had it right: “Your body is a wonderland.” We’re all distinct ecologies, each worlds unto ourselves, a little like the whales that die, and sink, and feed a reef of animals for eighty years or more while lying on the ocean floor. It’s all about the scale. In 1966 the visionary author Stewart Brand campaigned the US government to share its images of Earth from space, and when it finally happened two years later, that holistic view erupted into minds across the globe, the catalyzing and iconic cover of the Whole Earth Catalog, and organizing archetype for then-still-green (in two ways) ecological agendas. That same year, Powers of Ten was made, a film that took its viewers on the long zoom from a picnic blanket in Chicago to the outer reaches of our universe. The relativity of scale had reached our public mind, ignited our imagination. Yet we’re still amazed to think that every body is itself a landscape, alien to everyday perception. If you were copied and then shrank to one one-millionth of your size, you wouldn’t recognize the skin you stand on as your own. Our bodies only feel like home within one frame of reference. Now add to this the figure-ground reversal we’re experiencing as we quantify the body with our 3D scanners, turn lives into transmedia collabs with social media memorials, and blend the real and fake in virtual reality. “Portrait, or Landscape?” means much more than vertical or horizontal, these days. It’s about which angle we decide to take on self as subject or environment – depending on the situation. channel3.globalish/relativity-of-scale-your-body-is-a-wonderland/
Posted on: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 18:01:03 +0000
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