Technobiophilia: The innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes as they appear in technology
derived from 'Biophilia': The innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes (Wilson, Edward O. Biophilia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. p23.)
Almost forty years ago, geographer Yi-Fu Tuan used the concepts of ‘carpentered’ and ‘noncarpentered’ to distinguish between natural and built environments. He said “The carpentered world is replete with straight lines, angles and rectangular objects” whilst nature and the countryside “lack rectangularity”. He believes that these differences can have a powerful impact on the way we perceive and measure our environments. (Tuan, Y.-F. (1974). Topophilia. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. pp. 75-76)
I've been thinking about the fact that one of the problems of cyberspace as a biophilic space lies in its dependence upon rectangularity. We are squeezed into cyberspace through carpentered screens on hard-edged devices. However, Sharp’s Touch Wood SH-08C cellphone is an attempt to address that problem and last year they promoted it with this mesmerising video*. Sadly the phone is only available in Japan and in a limited edition. Intriguing though. Read more about it at Geek.com.
* Ironically, the machine featured in this video is actually highly-carpentered (!) but in a biophilic kind of way. See what you think.
Many thanks to everyone who came to my Professorial Lecture last night. We had good conversations afterwards, and there were some interesting comments on Twitter too - see #technobiophilia
I've uploaded the slides here, and audio will follow soon. I've added two more slides at the end with some links I used in the lecture plus a brief bibliography for those interested in finding out more about biophilia.
It's a chance to think about how we feel at home in cyberspace and will probably be more of a brainstorm than a straight presentation. #thehomeandtheworld
Henry David Thoreau's 1854 meditation on living beside Walden Pond, near the town of Concord, Massachusetts is regarded as a crucial element of American national identity. His plan was to live alone in a house he built himself, a mile away from any neighbour, and to earn his living by manual labour, so he retreated to the woods in 1845 and remained there for twenty-six months. Since the publication of Walden, its lyrical nature writing has been used in rallying cries against the incursions of technology. As a result, Thoreau has become something of a poster-boy for withdrawal from the technological life despite the fact that by the end of his experiment, according to historian Leo Marx, he seems to have come to the conclusion that the realization of the golden age “has nothing to do with the environment, with social institutions or material reality” and that therefore “the writer’s physical location is of no great moment” after all. [1]
So Thoreau's attitude to technology may have been far more ambivalent than many might imagine. In fact he might well have appreciated a new project under development at the University of Southern California where Tracy Fullerton and her team are working to bring Walden right into the computer. 150 years ago Thoreau wrote “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach”.[2] At USC they are creating a videogame which simulates his experiment by “allowing players to walk in his virtual footsteps, attend to the tasks of living a self-reliant existence, discover in the beauty of a virtual landscape the ideas and writings of this unique philosopher, and cultivate through the gameplay their own thoughts and responses to the concepts discovered there.” And all in a real-time 3D environment which replicates the geography of Walden Pond and the surrounding woods and where the designers aim to “reinforce the messages of Walden” by embodying the actual experiment in a game which encourages the player to exercise reflection and insight.
Ambitious but very exciting. I'm really looking forward to trying it out when it's ready.
A while ago I was invited to contribute to In the Flesh, a collection of essays about the body edited by Kathy Page and Lynne Van Luven. Each writer could choose their preferred limb, organ etc. I selected the pancreas, and I'm blogging about it here because it compared the virtual bodies we use in cyberspace with the invisible inner workings of our physical selves. The result was an essay called "And Inside, Silence" and it begins like this:
I spend a great deal of my time online, which means I sit down a lot while my body does nothing much at all but type, think, and shuffle around on an office chair. There was a time, when the World Wide Web was young, when I and quite a few others lived the life of the mind through the Internet and were so entranced by it that we dared to hope the brain would transcend the body. Through the power of virtuality and imagination we connected in the deepness of cyberspace. Then, years before the noise and colour of places such as Second Life, text-based virtual worlds such as LambdaMOO drew us into deep silence. On those screens there were no pictures. Words typed on a plain black-and-white screen represented your entire self. It was there that I forgot my body and learned to be virtual, where the most physical thing I ever did was put my hand against the glass at a moment when someone else was doing the same on the other side of the world, and our imaginations filled in the rest.
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