Wednesday, June 22, 2011

The war you don't want to see

After watching John Pilger’s The War You Don’t See’ I realise just how much of an image dominated species we are. War’s are horrible, everyone knows this, and yet until we are shown the images we never fully grasp how bad ‘horrible’ actually is. In one piece of footage, which I’d actually seen before but without the context given was previously not moved quite as much, a helicopter gunship circles a group of 8 civilians, two of which are Reuters journalists, the gunner is given permission to fire and does so, the bullets explode on impact and the camera pans as those running are gunned down, the camera zooms out and the street is filled with bodies, ‘nice’ says the gunner staring at the 8 bodies, that he has just mutilated, strewn across the street. This video was shot in Bagdad in 2007 and released by wikileaks in 2010. To quote Julian Assange ‘This tape for me, and the other people involved, made ‘nice’ a dirty word. We couldn’t see ‘nice’ anymore when a whole street covered in carnage is ‘nice’.
This tape and the quote shows just how stupid, morally corrupt or just plain fucked up in the head those who join the military are, but these people aren’t the exception, they are just like you or me. Just before this footage is shown Julian Assange explains that ‘this is not a sophisticated conspiracy controlled at the top. This is a vast movement of self-interest by thousands and thousands of players all working together and against each other’. The way I see it the problem is not that there are evil puppet masters in charge or that the Military-Industrial Complex has taken over the world, which both may be true, the real problem is human nature.
We are all selfish, greedy and irrational. Wherever humans are to be found suffering is not far away. Perpetual wars pervade Africa and the Middle East, oppression and poverty is rife throughout Asia. The world is fucked and we in the West continue to ignore it because we selfishly put our own interests before those of others. We wallow in our materialistic consumer societies and ignorantly fail to comprehend that our unsustainable lifestyles are built on the suffering of others.
It’s been over 60 years since the phrase ‘ghost in the machine’ was first introduced and since then there has been nothing but further suffering and destruction. The cold war may be over but the self-destructive ‘ghost’ is still very much present. Looking at the world as it is today I do not actually have any hope for humanity.
My reason for living is that I feel, and hope, that within my lifetime I’ll see the change that needs to happen next; the end of humanity. ‘The end of humanity’ might have a rather destructive and nihilistic tone to it, and although I do believe that destruction is one possibility, my hope is that humanity will end not with the destruction but rather the transgression of the species into something more advanced. Within our lifetimes the evolution of humanity beyond what it is now into something more rational does seem very much within the realms of possibility. Especially when you consider how much our knowledge of the world has grown in the past 50 years.
I know that my sphere of influence on this planet is very small, even perhaps negligible, so I mainly just try to sit back, relax, do whatever I can to make the world a better place and enjoy the ride.
The flowchart of zen (admittedly a rather apathetic and unproductive way of looking at the world, but still worth considering when everything seems too much.)

(Perhaps this is a more productive flowchart to look at when you're down)
Peace

Saturday, June 11, 2011

Ceci n'est pas la réalité


‘I’m sure everyone out there agree
that everything you see ain’t really how it be.’
(There are so many great lines from this song it’s ridiculous)
To understand the facts of quantum physics, as much as is possible anyway, is to fully understand these lines. Put simply we do not fully know what ‘reality’ is. At a quantum level all matter can be said to be either a wave or a particle, or rather both. Obviously nothing can quite be two things at once, which is what the experiments show us, so what these results do prove is that our models are somehow flawed. There are many things, indeed most things at a quantum level, which don’t make sense.  It’s funny that it is actually this complete disillusionment with reality is actually the main source of hope for me. I am an atheist and a misanthrope, I lean towards nihilism but my hope keeps me in the light of existentialism (nihilism is a dark place which should avoided as much as possible).
It is because ‘a man that knows something knows that he knows nothing at all’ that I have hope for the future. We have learned a lot about the world over the past 100 years and the rate of our advancement is ever increasing. Reality at the moment seems pretty grim. The world is full of suffering, but it is hidden from us, we are all deluded as to the nature of reality due to our imperfect brains (this I have learned through readings in psychology, and experienced through my taking of some serious drugs). But I have hope that in the future these problems will be solved.
For now my goal in life is to make the world a better place in order to increase the chances of my hopes eventuating. Part of this, I now know, is to make people see that the world we live in is actually a corrupted paradigm. Rampart materialism has warped how we see the world. Just as we don’t see a jumble of shapes that make the image of a pipe ‘this is not a pipe’, we do not see the world for what it is, with all its beauty and wonders and all its horrors and ugliness. What I want people to understand is how we view the world is always through subjective eyes; ‘this is not reality’. I feel that this concept is often expressed well in music, hip-hop in particular, but it is hard to show in art and design. Surrealism is a style which lends itself well to showing how warped our world views are and I quite like it because of this. I’m not sure how much other people ‘get’ it though. They see crazy images and just think ‘that’s cool, that’s interesting’ and like most art the masses fail to ever grasp the ideas behind the expression. As such most people often fail to take anything meaningful away from it.
(much can be taken away from the ambiguity of surrealism. image source)

Another way of trying to express this idea of the ‘corrupt paradigm’ is to show some of the ugliness in the world within the beauty of it. Like all great design goals this is not simple to do this and is best done subtly. What I dislike about contemporary architecture today is that it rarely meaningfully engages with the ‘ugly’ side of life. Ugliness is something we try to design out of our architecture; we cover it up or hide it away. By doing this we express our culture of ignoring our problems. I’m not sure if showing our failures or oddities in architecture will do anything to improve our ability to face them. But I am sure that by always hiding away our problems with gleaming facades of materialism both our architecture and our society will remain unsustainable.
A bit of surrealism in architecture, I love it. Trust the Spanish, who from Gaudi to Miguel de Cervantes (writer of Don Quixote) have always seemed to understand the irrationalities of our minds better than most.

In this world there are many very rational, functional and beautiful buildings, but as these buildings proudly show off our ideals our society continues to fail to live up to them. These buildings hide the truth that there is much wrong with the world. I don’t like highly rational design because it suggests that we are something we are not; rational. I don’t like highly monumental, formal and streamlined architecture (think Zaha Hadid) because it suggests our world is something it is not; all sorted out and magnificent.

I just wish more people would see something in the way of things.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Just as great architecture is our pride slaughterhouses are our embarrassment

Below is a letter I sent to the Prime Minister in a call to end live animal export from Australia. I doubt if she read it but I believe its a message that should be read by someone so I’ll post it here.
‘Whilst I applaud the government’s decision to finally take some action on this issue I appeal to you that much more has to be done. Attempts to train Indonesian abattoir workers and supply them with better equipment are commendable, but without continual monitoring of what is actually going on inside of the abattoirs the mistreatment and unnecessary suffering of animals will continue. 
The knee-jerk reaction of Government, industry groups and the Australian public in relation to the recent exposure of the live animal export trade to Indonesia brings to mind the words of Sir Paul McCartney ‘If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian’. The issues relating to live animal export have been known for years but as they remained overseas and invisible to all those who didn’t want to know about them, they remained unresolved. The only way Australians can truly know whether or not our animals are saved from the horrible deaths seen in the Animals Australia footage is if there is a complete ban on all animal exports. I would like to think that more regulation would be the answer but as the Animals Australia footage clearly showed the work of LiveCorp, which is directly responsible for stopping these types of atrocities, is clearly failing, sadly despite millions of government funds going to the company each year.
Whilst the footage of conditions in Indonesia was shocking the unfortunate truth is that conditions in many Australian abattoirs are not much better. A lack of monitoring, tough working conditions and poor training lead to similarly macabre mistakes being made on a regular basis at all abattoirs around the world. In England a reasonable solution has been found through the use of CCTV monitoring of abattoirs to ensure better practice. This simple, yet effective, solution was not introduced by the government there, but rather by a group of supermarket chains in the interest of reassuring their customers of reasonable conditions.
Why is it that Governments around the world are so bad at ensuring animal welfare? The live animal industry in Australia worth over $1 billion dollars a year. How can it be that this billion dollar industry is so poorly monitored and regulated that only when a few concerned citizens from Animals Australia report on it are the known issues in the industry responded to?
This Government, just like all previous governments, is letting Australia down on animal welfare issues and millions of Australian animals are suffering needlessly because of it. Cameron Hill and the Directors of LiveCorp, which for over 10 years has supposedly been working to improve industry standards, should be ashamed. The suffering continues as these eight men personally enjoy roughly 10% of LiveCorp’s millions in revenue each year. A lot needs to be done and a lot can be done, both in Indonesia and here in Australia.’
The two main points of the letter are that better monitoring and regulation is needed to end the atrocities that go in everyday in abattoirs around the world and that the companies whose job it is to do that monitoring and regulating, in this case LiveCorp, are failing in their duties.
This letter, and an entire campaign to end live animal export in Australia, all stemmed from a great report by Four Corners aired in May. (Click here for details) Subsequent to this report, and the backlash it created, live export to Indonesia has been temporarily banned.
The problems that plague this world are many and when contemplated fully leave one numb with misanthropic apathy. If one’s goal in life is to make the world a better place then surely the best way to do this is to try to reduce the amount of suffering that goes on here. Depending on how one defines suffering it’s fair to say that animal welfare issues are one of the biggest problems with our world at the moment. We are an inherently irrational species and I can accept this, but to accept this fact at the cost of the lives and wellbeing of millions of creatures is to prove just how selfish and ungrateful we are.
The successfulness of this campaign does make me happy, but still there is much to be done to improve animal welfare, in every country around the world. People continue to ignore the facts of where their food comes from, or goes in this case, until it is vividly and conveniently shoved in their face, as it was in this case. Until we're willing to look at and admit how horrible factory farms and abattoirs are we should not be allowed to eat meat.

How this post relates to architecture is that my interest in architecture stems from my desire to make the world, physically, a better place. The creation and continual use of abattoirs would have to be the most polar opposite of this idea I can think of. To make the world a better place the removal of horrible spaces, such as abattoirs, should be just as important, if not more so, than the creation of great ones.