Institute for Lateral Research

Mind the map

2005-05-10T13:42:00.000-03:00

Critical Geography is a field of study dedicated to the analysis of the unequal relationships reflected in our use and understanding of geographic spaces. ACME is an electronic journal that features writing on this subject. I'm not sure if it is still publishing, but there are many articles from back issues archived on the site.

Psychogeography is another really interesting tool for thinking about how we interpret the world around us. A product of the Lettrist and Situationist Movements, psychogeography is a subjective, non-scientific examination of our relationship to space, often through a technique called mental mapping. Mental mapping depicts the way we relate one location to another and combine this ego-centred understanding with our "objective" knowledge of geography.

This type of mental mapping is analogous to (and might even be seen as an extension of) the brainstorming technique that is also sometimes also called mental, cognitive or concept mapping, in which concepts and questions are explored through the creation of diagrams that describe the relationships between related ideas. This background image for the Institute for Lateral Research is an example of this, and the site itself is based on the same principle.

Maps may seem inherently visual, but an interesting paper by a psychologist at the University of Surrey on creating practical maps for the blind explores the non-visual aspects of both cognitive and "real" maps.

Looking around the world

2005-05-05T12:21:00.000-03:00

Theme parks, food courts, fashion and film are just a few of the ways we demonstrate our understanding of the world and other people in it. They are, in a sense, maps of what we think our culture means, and what we find most interesting, desirable or confusing about the cultures of others.

This is the idea at the heart of postcolonial and postructualist social critique: that the ways in which we pursue, organize and put to use our knowledge about the world and the other people in it really says more about us than it does about the apparent objects of that knowledge.

Here is a short and lively paper along these lines by critical theorist Louis Marin, with the compelling title "Disneyland as Degenerate Utopia".

Here, on the other hand, is a lesson plan from National Geographic that demonstrates how one culture's ideas of what other cultures are "made of" are passed along. This is how ideas become ideology.

Dan Graham's rooftop installation for the DIA Chelsea in New York, Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube functions as an elequent illustration of the problem of "objective" perception. As you look through its reflective glass panels, your view of the world around you is filtered through your own reflection, which varies in its intensity as the light changes.

Yum Yum: a serving of cultural imperialism

2005-03-30T13:07:00.000-04:00

In the years before widespread international travel and global migration, World's Fairs and other exhibitions were a place where one could sample the cuisine of far-flung places. From 1885 to 1887 Knightsbridge, London was home to a "Japanese Village". Among its visitors was W.S. Gilbert, who visited its shops and tearooms while writing the libretto for the Mikado. The drawing above of the character Yum Yum is Gilbert's own. These are some of the denizens of Knightsbridge village:

Now, even small and medium-sized North American and European cities are home to restaurants that serve food that until recently would have seemed unimaginably exotic.

But cultural exchange through food is an unequal phenomenon, one that reflects the global migrations of people, money and ideas. While the global sushi boom may pose a threat to ocean ecology, it is unlikely to be labelled as cultural imperialism. American fast- and convience-foods on the other hand are widely perceived as symbols (and agents) of world domination.

Chinese multidisciplinary artist Zhang Hongtu's Kekou Kele Bottle captures this concern beautifully:

A brave new world of food and drink

2005-03-23T19:36:00.000-04:00

In one way or another, food has always been an important part of the World's Fair. Visitors to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1903-04 in St. Louis were among the first to enjoy ice cream cones, hot dogs, candy floss, iced tea and puffed rice (although in the case of the latter, "enjoy" may not be quite the correct term). Some believe the hamburger as we know it was also unleashed at that fair, by a Texan named Fletcher Davis.

There's a nice essay on the British Film Institute's site on the fair as it relates to Vincente Minnelli's 1944 film Meet Me In St. Louis.

A second essay on the BFI site reveals that not everyone was welcome at this "celebration of the human family". It would seem that karma fuels the widespread misconception that esteemed African-American agricultural scientist George Washington Carver invented peanut butter – another food introduced at the 1903-04 Fair.

By the time of the 1964 World's Fair in New York, the snack food industry - in particular the soft drink industry - was firmly ensconced among the world's giants of commerce. Witness the achitectural marvel that was the Coca-Cola pavillion:

Other pop pavillions included Pepsi Cola and Seven-Up. One might have been forgiven for mistaking the soda makers for oddly-named countries.

Big Arc, big harvest

2005-03-15T19:18:00.000-04:00

The most elegant harvest tribute I've ever seen (unfortunately not firsthand) is the 1990 Grande Moisson on the Champs Elysées. Thousands of pallets of live mature wheat were brought into central Paris, laid out on the street between the Place de la Concorde and the Arc de Triomphe, then harvested by hand by hundreds of "peasants".

House of plenty

2005-03-10T20:52:00.000-04:00

Cosimo Cavallaro's cheese house (see previous post) may seem bizarre and outré, but consider its relationship to a particular form of American vernacular architecture: the corn palace. After all, the Cheese House was part of Powell, Wyoming's cheese festival and was executed in association with the town's chamber of commerce.

The Mitchell, South Dakota Corn Palace (for which new corn murals are commissioned every year) is the only extant example of this type of building, but it was not the first. Late 19th century North America was obsessed with agricultural fairs and expositions. Exhibitors were eager to provide proof of the miraculous bounty produced by their regions, so they erected monuments not only to their harvests, but from them.

In addition to Perth, Ontario's Mammoth Cheese, the agricultural exhibit at World's Columbian Exhibition of 1893, in Chicago, featured a breathtaking and diverse collection of walk-through cornucopias. Among them were a Moorish-style tribute to corn and sugar-beets from Nebraska, a sort of wheat-sheaf baldaquin from Minnesota, and Pennsylvania's cozy fireside scene, pictured above. One of Canada's contributions was this ethereal display of Ontario fruit under glass:

Compared to these elaborate installations, the CNE's Food Building seems like fairground conceptualism :

The uses of cheese

2005-03-06T15:40:00.000-04:00

Art has been made to embellish and promote cheese, and art (of a sort) has been made as a tribute to cheese. (For more on the story behind the mammoth cheese of Perth, Ontario, click here).

But has art ever been made out of cheese?

In a word: yes.

Argentinian Pop Art sculptor Marta Minujin has covered a Venus figure with little processed cheese cubes.

Montreal-born artist Cosimo Cavallaro has applied melted cheese to some unlikely objects, including boots, a suit jacket, Twiggy, and an entire house and its contents in Powell, Wyoming.

He has since moved on to ham, but that's not really germaine to our current discussion.

For her 1992 installation "The Cocktail Party", multimedia artist Sandy Skoglund covered a room, furniture and people with cheezies.

Not strictly cheese, perhaps. Not really food either.

Art in the name of cheese

2005-03-03T19:20:00.002-04:00

Sharp eyes may have recognized Brooke Shields in the Breck ad pictured in the previous post. She was one in a series of American beauties who launched their careers shilling for the shampoo brand. In the US, the Breck ads were iconic and, though the shampoo is no longer, the saccharine artwork that sold it lives on at the Smithsonian.

On the other hand, no American celebrity or celebrity-to-be has ever, to my knowledge, endorsed cheese. At least not at home. Even Minnie Mouse had to cross the Atlantic to put her seal of approval on a product that she couldn't be better suited to sell. And I suspect she did the work without the knowledge of her US employer.

If you've read Clotaire Rapaille's case study on cheese marketing [see the end of the previous post], you wont doubt that the French love of cheese exceeds even the North American love of flowing, silky, hygenic hair. And for as long as the French have been putting soft-ripened cheeses into little wooden boxes, they've been tenderly adorning them with beautiful works of art.

Charles de Gaulle famously wondered whether a country that boasted 246 cheeses could be goverened. I wonder what he would have thought of France's roughly 25,000 cheese label collectors. Le Tyrosémiophile is a monument to this wonderful form of ephemera. The site is in French, but simply click on "par thèmes" to view the amazing collection by theme or "par départements" to view them by origin. Don't miss the "artistiques" category, where you will find, among others, this Surrealism-inspired Camembert label:

Oh, and the cheeses are pretty nice too. Visit France Fromages and never look back.

Decoding hair to sell soap

2005-02-28T16:09:00.000-04:00

Thinking about hair and its various cultural and social associations made me wonder how the advertisers of hair products navigate this difficult semiotic terrain.

A bit of digging led me to Dr. G. Clotaire Rapaille, a former student of Lévi-Strauss who puts his background in structuralist anthropology and psychiatry to work for corporate marketers, through his company Archetype Discoveries Worldwide.

While Rapaille's ideas are grounded in a type of theory that would strike contemporary anthropologists as pretty old-fashioned, they seem to work for the purposes of advertising, which is a hit-or-miss form of cultural communication at the best of times.

Dr. Rapaille's approach is to collect the earliest personal memories of focus group participants with regards to a type of product. He then examines these personal narratives for recurring themes. By analyzing these themes, he "decodes" the collective emotional references of the product in the context of a given culture.

He was once asked to come to the rescue of a British shampoo manufacturer's failing Japanese ad campaign. A pdf of his "case study" can be downloaded here.

I first heard of Dr. Rapaille in a Frontline documentary on contemporary advertising, called "The Persuaders", in which he gave a very entertaining and convincing account of why a French cheesemaker's commercials were failing miserably in the US, and how he helped to turn the situation around.

You can watch the documentary here. Dr. Rapaille is featured in segment 4, "The Science of Selling". His case study on the cheese problem (which is better written than the shampoo one) is here.

Funny feelings about hair

2005-02-22T18:50:00.000-04:00

Hair’s importance as a cultural symbol and as an object of shame and wonder has been widely discussed in the literature of anthropology and psychology. No one gets a BA in anthropology without reading (or at least pretending to have read) Sir Edmund Leach’s 1958 essay “Magical Hair” and maybe even Christopher Hallpike’s “Social Hair”, written in 1969.

But contemporary Dutch sculptor Chrystl Rijkeboer (a detail from whose 1999 installation Love is the devil appears at the head of this post) sums up the situation pretty nicely:

…hair has symbolic significance: beauty, strength, health, attraction, etcetera. The moment it is separated from the human all these factors turn around, hair is considered dirty, unsavoury and dead.

The use of hair in contemporary art is often contrived and facile. It’s a readily available material that guarantees a visceral response in the viewer. Rijkeboer’s work stands out, though. The most recent work on her site is from 2003. I wonder what she’s been up to since then.

I like Hrafnhildur Arnardottir’s (aka Shoplifter) work too. This Icelandic artist uses hair – mostly synthetic, I believe – in sculptures ranging in form from Ikebana to braid murals. She is also responsible for the elaborate hairpiece worn by Bjork in the photos for her album Medulla.

She may be referring to a traditional Icelandic artform. It turns out that hair craft also has a history in Iceland. Sigridur Salvarsdottir learned the skill of haircraft from her mother. If you happen to be in Rekjavik before March 13th, you can see her work on exhibit at the Gerduberg Cultural Centre.

A little something to remember you by

2005-02-20T20:43:00.000-04:00

While 19th century British colonials were doing everything within their power to obliterate Aboriginal culture in Australia, Victorians throughout the Empire were engaging in some surprising hair crafts of their own.

Victorians tirelessly sought ways to keep non-working women occupied, and among them was this remarkable activity. Ladies braided, wove, looped and tied the hair of family members and loved ones into elaborate jewelry, keepsakes and tableaux. Large pieces might incorporate the locks of multiple generations into a kind of combination family tree and memento mori.

Here's a link to Missouri cosmetologist's site about her impressive collection of antique hair wreaths.

Here's an annotated genealogical wreath from the collection of the Millicent Library in Fairhaven, Massachusetts.

You may be surprised to learn that while endangered, this art is not extinct. The Victorian Hair Artists' Guild carries on the craft.

A few yarns from down under

2005-02-18T16:46:00.000-04:00

[A formatting note: from now on, all posted images will be linked to their sources. Clicking on an image will open its page of origin in a new window.]

NPR's Soundprint has an archived Australian Broadcasting Corporation "documentary" called Knitting With Doghair. Woven through the piece is an outlandish tale of a Catalonian Jewish dogfarmer who made a fortune from the fine canine fiber she produced. Among its many high points is a revisionist etymology of the Yiddish word shmata. A little later, an expert appeals to would-be doghair knitters to select projects that reflect the spirit of the breed from which the yarn was spun, "don't use a whippet's hair to knit a footstool cover!"

Soundprint episode (requires RealPlayer)

Apparently I was a little quick to judge human hair's usefulness in spinning. Aborigines in central and northern Australia have a tradition of spinning hair - sometimes in combination with other fibres, including down and feathers - into string called Wirriji, which has both practical and ceremonial uses.

The painting above relates to a story in which an ill-fated lover sings a love song while he spins some Wirriji. According to Aboriginal Art Online, in central Australian Aboriginal artwork, "a sinuous line can mean a snake, running water, lightning, a hair-string girdle, native bee honey storage, or a bark rope."

Well. We're back to where we began.

Humanity and its dog

2005-02-16T20:03:00.000-04:00

A DNA cable scarf is the perfect gift for anyone who's had their genome mapped. Or anyone whose pet's genome has been mapped.

What more suitable commemorative object could there be than a double helix knitted with yarn spun from the lustrous, gene-laden hair of the very organism whose chromosomes have been unravelled?

You need only send the fibre here.

In 2003, genetic researcher J Craig Venter moved on from decoding his own genome to mapping that of his dog, a standard poodle named Shadow. Shadow's hair would probably be better suited to spinning, but I'm sure that someone at the J Craig Venter Institute's laboratories could address that inequity with a bit of mitochondrial cut-and-paste.

When the US government went looking for a dog to map, they chose a boxer named Tasha. Like Venter, boxers do not have hair that is well-suited to spinning.

Researchers at the Veterinary Genetics Laboratory at the University of California at Davis are using Tasha's genome as the basis for a universal library of canine DNA. They are soliciting oral swabs from each of the world's 500 distinct dog populations.

Prospective donors can apply here

Humans have spent thousands of years making Canis familiaris the most diverse species on earth. Nowhere is this diversity more gloriously displayed than at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, which took place earlier this week in New York.

Spirals beget spirals

2005-02-15T16:04:00.000-04:00

Today boingboing posted a link to BBC story about a newly published online archive of the papers of pioneering biochemist Francis Crick. Crick and his partner James Watson developed the double-helix model of the DNA molecule. Among Crick's papers is this 1953 sketch, which bears a passing resemblance to the drawings of Robert Smithson:

Link to Crick papers

Crick, Watson and Maurice Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their work concerning DNA and its role in cellular reproduction.

There's a nerve-wracking game on the Nobel website that teaches you a thing or two about DNA. There's another, much more sedate game relating to the subject of chirality, a geometric property of spirals and helices.

DNA game
Chirality game

While it's unlikely to net her a Nobel prize, molecular biologist and knitter June Oshiro's DNA scarf pattern is a very nice illustration of chirality.

DNA cable scarf pattern

Of moss and men who fell to earth

2005-02-14T18:56:00.000-04:00

There's something affecting about the story of the Ohio State University biology department's moss experiments that were salvaged from the wreckage of the Columbia Space Shuttle. Some of the moss samples were useable, despite having plummeted 64 kilometers to earth.

In the absence of light and gravity, it seems that common roof moss (Ceratodon purpureus) grows in a clockwise spiral pattern never observed in other space-grown plants.

Link to the Nature story.

This beautiful spiral and its backdrop of untimely death reminded me of Robert Smithson.

Smithson rose to prominence as a minimalist sculptor in the late 1960s but eventually became best known for his astonishing earthworks – large scale sculptural reconfigurations of the landscape. Spirals were a recurring form in Smithsons work; he favoured a counter-clockwise direction for his.

The website maintained by his estate includes an excerpt from Smithson's film documenting the creation of the his best-known work, the Spiral Jetty (1970) in the Great Salt Lake, Utah. The sequence was shot from a helicopter as it traced the path of the jetty from overhead. Smithson is heard reciting the coordinates and composition of the sculpture as we are drawn closer the spiral's centre. The artist's pride in his accomplishment is evident, but the film is also strangely prescient: three years later, Smithson was killed when his plane crashed while he was surveying the site of his Amarillo Ramp

Click on the film's title on this page to see the excerpt.