I saw the Turner Prize Winning Sleeper over the weekend while in Liverpool, along with the other Prize nominees. It consists of a two-and-a-half hour film of Mark Wallinger wandering about an empty German gallery in a bear costume. They gave the prize to the wrong person, though. I think it should go to whoever writes the blurb that goes on the wall by the exhibits. It helps if you mentally insert 'man dressed as a bear' at the end of each sentence, just to remind yourself. For Sleeper, we are told:

Mark Wallinger’s work is noted for its succinct social commentary and political resonance. [Man dressed as bear...] His early work explored the values of contemporary British society, in particular national identity. His focus subsequently expanded to address themes of death and religion. Despite dealing with such expansive themes, his work is often characterised by a lightness of touch that belies the serious and multifaceted nature of the subject matter.

Sleeper records a live performance in which the artist, alone and dressed in a bear suit, occupied Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie for ten consecutive nights. The museum’s location enables a diversity of themes to converge, creating a uniquely complex and unsettling work. [Man dressed as bear...] The bears in the nearby historic Zoo are doomed never to reproduce, the possibility of their procreation in captivity preordained and controlled by man. Fortified by a culture of surveillance and paranoia, Berlin during the Cold War was physically, politically and socially divided. The ‘sleepers’, or double agents, blended into their surroundings by sporting plausible disguises. Wallinger, a Briton in a foreign city, disguises himself as a bear - the heraldic emblem of Berlin - an appropriation in which he becomes both ‘bear’ and simultaneously not ‘bear’.

Wallinger has described how the idea of a divided realm exists within his subconscious, shaped by a German fairy tale in which a prince is transformed into a bear. In Sleeper the Marxist dictum in which history returns first as tragedy then as farce is wryly expressed. [Man dressed as bear...] Allegory, the repression of memory, and the mutability of national identity combine to offer a meditative exploration of the language of representation, as well as an examination of the nature of perception itself. [Er... Man dressed as bear.]

I remember the exact moment I first heard 'the map is not the territory': going past Nuneaton town centre, of all places, in my brother's car, probably twenty years ago now.

The term seems to have originated with Alfred Korzybski, a 19th / 20th century straddler, a Polish scientist and founder of 'general semantics'. He seems to share some common ground with Hayek's 'Sensory Order' - that our nervous systems and language structure are the maps we must navigate by. The Wikipedia article above suggests he'd thought a great deal about what this meant for how we should act personally.

Why are Saturn's rings flat? I was reading / gawping at the utterly stunning Cosmos over the weekend, and found the inklings of an answer. This site seems to confirm it: because particles and objects in many random orbits will eventually zoink each other out of their opposed planes, becoming more inclined, until eventually everything settles into one stable arrangement. Does it count as being an emergent phenomenon then?

Doubt I'll make a habit of this, but here's some of today's links... gosh, it's like an actual weblog!
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George Monbiot in the Grauniad on Cormac McCarthy's the Road:

The schedules are crammed with shows urging us to travel further, drive faster, build bigger, buy more, yet none of them are deemed to offend the rules, which really means that they don't offend the interests of business or the pampered sensibilities of the Aga class. The media, driven by fear and advertising, are hopelessly biased towards the consumer economy and against the biosphere.

My e-mails end with a signature quote from R. Buckminster Fuller: 'you never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.' It's a little absolutist; there are definitely situations where fighting the existing reality is the way to go. But I still think its a very powerful, useful idea.

Why? Here are some situations where building a new model would be a challenging prospect. There's Russia under Putin, where the FSB, successors to the KGB, 'control the Kremlin, the government, the media and large parts of the economy—as well as the military and security forces.' Many ex-Russian states have similar oligarchies. There's Iran's Revolutionary Guard - again a huge conglomeration of international military and economic power under the banner of 'IRGC business enterprises' (and now a designated terrorist group according to the US.) There's, of course, the Mafia in Italy: the piles of rubbish building up in Naples over the summer made clear just how tight their hold is on local services. I'd like to see their local council service tender process. The UK has the occasional little protection racket, but we're not really in the same league.

Back to Three Toed Sloth again, this time to question it's applauding of this Abstract Factory post by Cog about 'the wisdom of crowds'. Not the book itself, mind you. Both think that:

"The wisdom of crowds" is a phrase precisely calibrated to mystify the thing it denotes. Consider the diction: "crowds", suggesting spontaneous, informal, natural gatherings; and "wisdom", suggesting a folksy knowledge born of experience, as opposed to, say, "intelligence", "cleverness", or "expertise". The phrase "wisdom of crowds" carries within it the seeds of the message that gosh darn it, if you just got those elitist social engineers out of the way, and let everybody alone to act on their common sense, everything would be just peachy. In fact, if you read the blurbs from the publisher's page, this is exactly the message that's being pushed --- if not by Surowiecki himself, then by his promoters, with his tacit assent.

Another thing about climate change (which, sadly, pushes me towards the 'Que Sera Sera' school of action): as a species, we're not built to deal with change on this kind of scale. Various despots may have made shouty commitments to a thousand year reign, but then they've failed. Its not so much collapse or survival that intrigues me. It's just that the kind of time the planet lives in is on such a different order of magnitude than anything we can grasp, either individually or as a community. It's as if the permanent resident bacteria on our skin started a campaign to to stop us showering next morning. A lovely piece of writing on the permanence of the planet's skin:

Such mountains surround us like some fundamental border between the homeland and the strange land. Life springs from them, flows out and down and away to the weary plains but they remain, altering at a slow pace that enables us to make them our symbols of permanence, if not of eternity. Sheep graze them bald. Their lower slopes are trenched by prairie-buster ploughs, then blanked over with the dark trees of government. A duke or a queen commands the servants to blast a scar of a track across the mountain's face so that the rich may lurch across it in the autumn and leave the grouse dying dabbled in their own rowan-red blood... The mountains are neutral about all this. We gut them for their congealed metals, rive off whole masonries of limestone or slate, tread their weaknesses into running sores that will never heal while our civilisation lasts... They are above it all.

The Guardian knows me so well! It talks here about their new initiative, Tread Lightly:

many people still have doubts about whether they can achieve much of an impact, and nowhere are these doubts aired so loudly as when it comes to lowering our carbon footprints. Like a dieter justifying one more chocolate biscuit, the excuses flow all too easily - why should I bother when China and India's emissions will engulf our own efforts? Why should I bother when the US refuses to sign up to Kyoto?

If a tree were planted every time a modern European politician uttered the phrase 'sustainable development', loss of forest would probably be a thing of the past.

From BBC News.

At some point during the next thirty years I'll recover from the trauma of all my hair falling out, and decide to grow it again - aiming for this kind of look, I think.

At that point, it will be time to take up two new hobbies that I've always felt will be a necessary accoutrement to such a life-stage: collecting original 18th and 19th century radical pamphlets and books, and star-gazing.

I am reminded of the latter because Google Earth have just bought out a new version of Google Earth that has a 'switch to sky' option. Oh my Christ, its amazing. I'm very fond of things that help the human mind get a little more grip on scale: Google Earth is a monarch among perspective-assisting devices. I can spend hours zooming from a house to the Earth, back to the house, to the Earth... well, maybe 'hours' is an exaggeration, but not much.

Now they've done the same for the sky. Switch to sky while looking at the UK to see how it looks above there. Find Andromeda, zoom in... find the American Nebula, and see just how many stars surround it. Pull back out again and see how millions of stars, each one an incandescent and unimaginably huge ball of nuclear light, resolve into a distant dust. Look at some of things Hubble has been seeing, like the oldest photo of the universe ever, not long after the big bang when galaxies were still young. Get a sense of how these fit in to what you'd normally see when looking up. There are a lot of stars up there. A lot. p.s. CRTL + L gives a reference grid: definitely helps with perspective.