Taking Liberties: Exhibiting rights and flights

February 25, 2009 by Emma Ridgway · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Emma Ridgway

NASA first stereoscopic 3D images of the Sun The British Library often makes good exhibitions and the current show Taking Liberties is excellent – if you have any interest in life, other humans or have any curiosity about anything then you owe it to yourself to go (if you can’t make it to London, check it out online). It closes this Sunday (March 1 2009). At a time when there is so much talk about the hopes and fears for our future socially, economically and environmentally – the material presented in Taking Liberties maps out how ethical ideas, such as freedom of speech, equal votes and human rights, are continually fought for and the exhibition produces a thrilling sense of the vitality and courage of human agency through the ages.

The accompanying events series has included a discussion asking “Can we tackle climate change without dictatorship?”, which is available online. (It is illustrated by Nasa’s image of the earth that Stewart Brand petitioned for public access to back in 1966). But some things can’t be experienced online. Between the BL displays, which include items from Magna Carta to Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man to works of Mary Wollstonecraft and The Good Friday Agreement, are oversized interactive posts that bleep too loudly for no apparent reason, but are fun nonetheless. Laws of Forests, 1225 (Copyright © The British Library Board)
I can’t remember the “citizen number” on my wrist-band but at the end of my visit my opinions were plotted against other visitors and I was firmly one of the crowd (I was quietly disappointed). Well versed in the problems of survey bias, I concluded that this implied that my political understanding sits within a fairly narrow demographic of visitors to BL, who do not find multiple choice quizzes demeaning, who like interactive displays and are not self-conscious about being noisy in exhibition spaces (aka bleeping students).

But people do miss out when they don’t go in for such gizmos. Exhibitions are sites for self-education, so good interactive displays are fun because they draw you into playing with ideas and thinking critically in a relaxed way. That’s my idea of fun. And I am not alone. My recent visit to Washington DC’s National Air and Space Museum was certainly enhanced by watching the new 3-D film (specs included) of the sun’s magnetic actives. As the Heliophysicists narrating the film explained, understanding the ‘weather’ behaviour of the sun is of new importance to the human race as we increasingly rely on satellite technology in our everyday lives – it was fascinating.

Of course, museums are far from neutral in the knowledge they present and exhibitions in every field (whether art, science or history) are created as a way of making convincing arguments through objects in public space, much as a books do through text.

The Air and Space Museum featured in the film War and Peace / Jang Aur Aman (Anand Patwardhan, 2002, 130 mins) screened recently at Tate Britain (13 February). Patwardhan’s documentation of nuclear war threats in South Asia included an interview with the curators of the D.C. museum explaining that their planned display of Enola Gay (the first US plane to drop atomic bombs on Japan) was ‘reduced’ due to political pressure not to reflect unfavourably on military technologies and the extreme civilian deaths they caused. Such decisions patronise the viewing public as well as compromise the intellectual rigour of the institution. Having one’s imagination ignited by the space missions in a museum is not adversely affected by acknowledging the horrors of war – the human mind is built for complexity. The dominant tendency to mistake the need for coherence for a oversimplification of ideas, values and actions fundamentally undermines people’s wonderful capacity for understanding complex ideas on lots of different levels.

Back within the bio-sphere, it’s worth remembering how truly significant our values and actions are. As Taking Liberties makes clear, our rights and freedoms are made up of small steps for man, and huge leaps for mankind.

Top image: NASA first stereoscopic 3D images of the Sun, Footage taken using a twin Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft, 2007

Centre image: Laws of Forests, 1225 Copyright © The British Library Board
“Magna Carta, the ‘Great Charter’, gained its name when it was reissued in 1217 with another lesser charter known as the Charter of the Forest. While Magna Carta spoke mainly of the rights of the barons, the new Charter also addressed the rights of ordinary people. The Charter of the Forest restored the traditional rights of the people, where the land had once been held in common, and restrained landowners from inflicting harsh punishments on them” From the British Library website

Lower image: British Library ‘Taking Liberties’ exhibition banner

Tags: Add new tag, british library, enlightenment, freedom, rights

The catalogue that changed the whole earth

January 19, 2009 by Emma Ridgway · 4 Comments
Filed under: Emma Ridgway

In the beginning, Stewart Brand created the Whole Earth Catalog. And the earth was without the web, google or blogging (which the Whole Earth Catalog is credited with inspiring). Steve Jobs described it as “an amazing publication… one of the bibles of my generation… It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions”. And now that modestly titled journal, which drew together the passions, insights and enthusiasms of experts and amateurs from 1968 to 1972 and beyond is finally available online for free: http://www.wholeearth.com/about.php

Whole Earth Catalog was premised on a notion of social progress that Brand and others believed would happen through engaged individuals working in decentralized networks to build their own environments. (There is more to it than that, but this is a blog). And the catalog provided ‘access to the tools’ to make this possible, and enough evidence of people transforming their own lives that it generated a great self-belief in its readers. For many of their increasingly huge 1970s readership, it was their first introduction to sustainable technology and alternative energy. This was counterculture that has become mainstream.

For those at Whole Earth Catalog, technological innovation was the route to a better future via shared knowledge and a profound commitment to ecology. In the 2009 online version, you can flick through the magazines and scroll through the cover art of that and related publications, which range from the dynamic cartoons of Robert Crumb to photographs of the earth from space. In fact, Nasa’s now-famous images were only a rumor until Brand successfully petitioned for it to become public in 1966, led by his belief that it would be a social good for humans to see the earth as one whole.

That so many fascinating resources of the past are available online today is a true gift. The delight of historical material (by which I mean anything that is more than 30 years old - harsh I know, but where do you draw the line?) is that you can re-examine the context of the then-new ideas and sense the energy of the vision. I’m not advocating nostalgia. What is exciting about the past is what it tells us about now and the future. Without being able to imagine past events in context and recognise why people chose to do what they did, it is not possible to understand the role of individual human agency in social change, which is what is needed to generate visions of the future.

I am aware that this is obvious to many, but I feel it needs to be explicitly restated within the arts and other areas at the moment. A self-inhibiting short-term thinking has become the fashion, which is characterised by a faux-cool cynicism, trimmed with reactionary views that are passed off as thoughtful criticism but that belie a fatalistic lack of faith in human potenial. (I’ll spare you more idiosyncratic metaphors). What is great about people like Stewart Brand is that they generate substantial change in the world – and the excellent thing about human potential is that all people can be great - whenever they realise it and actively choose to be so.

Since Whole Earth Catalog, Brand et al have moved and changed with the times and continue to stay several steps ahead in their thinking. Now that people have a good conception of the whole earth, his current collaborative project, The Long Now , sets out to transform peoples understanding of time so that we can think more ecologically. Titled by Brian Eno, The Long Now ranges from 8000bc to 12000ad (the logic being that ‘now’ refers to days: yesterday, today and tomorrow and ‘nowadays’ refers to decades: the last decade, this decade and next decade). Ecology is a fascinating for many reasons and it demands complex, holistic, joined-up ways of thinking about the relationships of living things to each other and their environment. And the arts are very well suited to engaging with this complex, exploratory form of enquiry into what it is to be human. Whole Earth Catalog and The Long Now are trail blazers in what is possible.