The Electrosmog festival and our related projects are finished and wrapped up for 2010! Due to the extremities of time differences, I was only able to watch two of the live streamed discussions; the introduction / preamble which led into Global Views on Mobility and then Energy and Information.
The introduction itself I found interesting and felt a surge of pride as they mentioned the students at AUT in Auckland, New Zealand doing a series of projects for Electrosmog. Even in such a globalized world, it is still a nice surprise when New Zealand gets a mention being as physically small and isolated as we are.
Even though we'd been working on our projects, it wasn't until I watched this stream that I actually finally began to understand what the festival was all about. It is about addressing the issue of how to lessen the impact on the environment caused by traveling by asking the question of how do you bring people together without travel?
It is about trying to find an alternative to how we usually bring people together physically as there are more and more stories from around the world about growing pressure on local environments due to increased need for mobility.
They discussed whether the connected experience is not rich enough which is why we feel the need to physical travel to experience other people and places. Personally, despite the guilty conscience attached to the environmental impact of travel, I still feel the need to physically travel and experience the world. After studying art history two years ago, I have been wanting to travel to some of the galleries oversees to see some of the works for real as it is a completely different experience to seeing it as a small jpeg file on a screen. Having moved to New Zealand from Hungary when I was three, I also feel the need to go back home and visit my roots and my family. Digital interaction I feel is not yet advanced enough to even match these experiences.
However, social networking sites such as Facebook have enabled me to keep in touch with people I have met while overseas, or even those from past schools I may not otherwise interact with so digital technologies have opened these doors.
Looking at the bigger picture, they discussed the benefits the availability of technologies we now take for granted in the impact they are having on cities such as Nairobi. This technology has been embraced with services which allow people to pay bills through their cellphones.
Ultimately what I got out of this discussion (before I started to fall asleep - one of the inconveniences of time difference) was a better perspective of mobility; mobility for me means an OE in the future and a visit back home to reconnect with relatives, where for others in the developing world mobility is the ability to travel to the next city or getting a car on the road. So I think to be able to bring people together without travel, it is important for digital technologies to be more widely available and advanced so as to provide an experience which is more fulfilling to the human senses; we experience the world through five senses and of these, most (widely available) digital communication devices only fulfill visual and audial feedback. Systems which support haptic feedback for example and more realistic and immersive visual feedback will be more successful at bridging the geographical divide.
There are also benefits in going local as it is also important to stay in tune with your local culture and environment. I have however found through my experiences during the festival, previous travels overseas and digital interactions that while sharing your local culture also makes you appreciate and understand it more.
During the Energy and Information stream, the actual discussion of Electrosmog interested me; Electrosmog is the information that's in the environment, flowing through the space; it is the energy structure we produce. We do not fully know yet the effects on human life or plants and how much is too much. When cellphones first came out, there was the same sort of concerns of the waves they emitted and to some extent there is an element of sensationalism. The waves emitted by electronic devices contain more and more information so the frequencies are becoming shorter and higher, therefore less penetrating. Wifi will only go through a few walls and light waves which we are bathed in every day and are the source of all energy on earth and that only penetrates a sheet or two of paper.
This reminded me of a discussion we had last year around the concept of what if we could see different wavelengths? Waves which aren't visible to the eye make it difficult to judge how much we are exposing ourselves to some unknown. Take the example of light, we know that extended periods of time exposed to sunlight can result in sunburn so we can make judgments based on how much light we can see and want to expose ourselves too. When we can't see the waves emitted from electronic devices, we fear not knowing how much we are being exposed to and how it is effecting us.
We want more information in the atmosphere and this is the trade off to trying to minimize physical travel and replace it with digital alternative. There needs to be more awareness and reliable information available to subside fears without sensationalization.
Overall, taking part in the Electrosmog festival was a good experienced and introduced me to some new concepts and idea which I feel will be beneficial and impact on future projects.
The introduction itself I found interesting and felt a surge of pride as they mentioned the students at AUT in Auckland, New Zealand doing a series of projects for Electrosmog. Even in such a globalized world, it is still a nice surprise when New Zealand gets a mention being as physically small and isolated as we are.
Even though we'd been working on our projects, it wasn't until I watched this stream that I actually finally began to understand what the festival was all about. It is about addressing the issue of how to lessen the impact on the environment caused by traveling by asking the question of how do you bring people together without travel?
It is about trying to find an alternative to how we usually bring people together physically as there are more and more stories from around the world about growing pressure on local environments due to increased need for mobility.
They discussed whether the connected experience is not rich enough which is why we feel the need to physical travel to experience other people and places. Personally, despite the guilty conscience attached to the environmental impact of travel, I still feel the need to physically travel and experience the world. After studying art history two years ago, I have been wanting to travel to some of the galleries oversees to see some of the works for real as it is a completely different experience to seeing it as a small jpeg file on a screen. Having moved to New Zealand from Hungary when I was three, I also feel the need to go back home and visit my roots and my family. Digital interaction I feel is not yet advanced enough to even match these experiences.
However, social networking sites such as Facebook have enabled me to keep in touch with people I have met while overseas, or even those from past schools I may not otherwise interact with so digital technologies have opened these doors.
Looking at the bigger picture, they discussed the benefits the availability of technologies we now take for granted in the impact they are having on cities such as Nairobi. This technology has been embraced with services which allow people to pay bills through their cellphones.
Ultimately what I got out of this discussion (before I started to fall asleep - one of the inconveniences of time difference) was a better perspective of mobility; mobility for me means an OE in the future and a visit back home to reconnect with relatives, where for others in the developing world mobility is the ability to travel to the next city or getting a car on the road. So I think to be able to bring people together without travel, it is important for digital technologies to be more widely available and advanced so as to provide an experience which is more fulfilling to the human senses; we experience the world through five senses and of these, most (widely available) digital communication devices only fulfill visual and audial feedback. Systems which support haptic feedback for example and more realistic and immersive visual feedback will be more successful at bridging the geographical divide.
There are also benefits in going local as it is also important to stay in tune with your local culture and environment. I have however found through my experiences during the festival, previous travels overseas and digital interactions that while sharing your local culture also makes you appreciate and understand it more.
During the Energy and Information stream, the actual discussion of Electrosmog interested me; Electrosmog is the information that's in the environment, flowing through the space; it is the energy structure we produce. We do not fully know yet the effects on human life or plants and how much is too much. When cellphones first came out, there was the same sort of concerns of the waves they emitted and to some extent there is an element of sensationalism. The waves emitted by electronic devices contain more and more information so the frequencies are becoming shorter and higher, therefore less penetrating. Wifi will only go through a few walls and light waves which we are bathed in every day and are the source of all energy on earth and that only penetrates a sheet or two of paper.
This reminded me of a discussion we had last year around the concept of what if we could see different wavelengths? Waves which aren't visible to the eye make it difficult to judge how much we are exposing ourselves to some unknown. Take the example of light, we know that extended periods of time exposed to sunlight can result in sunburn so we can make judgments based on how much light we can see and want to expose ourselves too. When we can't see the waves emitted from electronic devices, we fear not knowing how much we are being exposed to and how it is effecting us.
We want more information in the atmosphere and this is the trade off to trying to minimize physical travel and replace it with digital alternative. There needs to be more awareness and reliable information available to subside fears without sensationalization.
Overall, taking part in the Electrosmog festival was a good experienced and introduced me to some new concepts and idea which I feel will be beneficial and impact on future projects.
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