The spirit of life

Over the last few weeks, I was spending increasingly more time on the TED website looking up talks on design issues. It was then that I came across a few projects, absolutely stunning in breadth, undertaking and purpose, so much so that I thought I’d put it up on the blog.

The first one’s called ‘We Feel Fine’, a joint project by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar. It plots the emotions of many people from all around the world through diagrammatic and statistical depictions. The design is beautifully simple and easy to understand and can give you a good idea of what’s happening in the lives of people around you. It rounds of the whole attempt by providing interesting and bizarre metrics. You can find the site here and the TED preview here. (Another interesting attempt that runs along the same lines is ‘I Want You To Want Me‘.)

The second one is an even more vast project both in terms of the kind of man power and technology that went into making it and what it hopes to achieve. It’s called the AlloSphere – a large hollow sphere that it is fit with a large host of microcontrollers connected to a supercomputer. What the AlloSphere does is that it generates various designs, constructions, materials and phenomena on an atomic scale which is then projected as a digital image onto the insides of the sphere. A bridge running along a diameter permits up to 20 people at a time to bear witness to breathtaking views that science devoid of creativity cannot hope to present to us at all. Like JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, the director of the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE) at UC Santa Barbara, says: “imagine architects standing in the sphere and seeing microstructures and atoms arranged in space – what if they could come up with a new construction material?” [paraphrased]. Again, here‘s where you can find the TED preview.

The last one is a complete revolution in its own right and I think many people will agree when I say it’s the Gapminder by Hans Rosling. The statistics chapter in mathematics you chose to willingly forget while in school because it made you sleep in a snap – Rosling changes all of that by drawing old graphs in new ways. His sports-person commentary also adds to the pace of this lecture as he plots countries and ideas onto digital graph sheets. Find the TED talk here.

What these 3 ideas did was open me up to another idea that world is changing like no other. Like Thomas Friedman puts it, “the world is flat!” He couldn’t have been more right. This world is no longer curved around the edges and you and me are no longer strangers. With Jonathan Harris’ ‘We feel fine’, I’ll know what you’re feeling some 1000 miles away as soon as you know what I’m feeling. Kuchera-Morin’s AlloSphere will open up technology that you and me never thought we could have access to. And before you know it, Hans Rosling will have it up all on a giant graph and tell everyone what we did, what we could have done and how well we did it.

The world is no longer yours or mine, no longer subject to one war in one region amongst one group of people contending for one piece of information.  It has been globalized by just ideas. The world is ours, subject to our war that involves our people contending for the control over all information.

Art for the sake of art

Splattered all across the internet are numerous hosts of opportunities, each one varying from the most inconsequential of tasks to the most momentous. Each user is met with a barrage of questions and answers when a web-page is opened or a website explored, all of which prompt us to think, ideate and perform. Today, with everyone being brought in to assist, perform and lead, all subjects of the arts and sciences have at least one disciple. However, in this plethora of half-opened windows, the very fundamental art of communication is itself partially ignored when I see that there don’t seem to be any coordinated efforts to keep the writer writing and the editor editing. In all that is considered fun, writing has lost its place amongst the people; even though there are enough readers, there are not, in sufficient numbers, those who wish to satiate them by writing anything of quality unless it is for the sake of money. I don’t know if I should blame it wholly on the lack of encouragement or on the saddening inherent disinterest that today’s youngsters seem to be bred with. I am sure that the question of personal motivation, for no other reason than self-satisfaction alone, can be extended to many other fields of study and, of course, business, but I want to concentrate on the writer but it is the one topic I feel most strongly on. Moving on, I would like to bring in the topic of arts. As the name suggests, the arts encompasses everything that is human by nature – everything that bears a bit of us in it, everything that defies uniformity by bearing aloft the torch of hope that is personality and creativity. The moment we permit an individual to exchange it for money, the creation becomes a commodity. Although I am not here to battle materialism through commoditisation, I believe that such a piece of art that has solely been created to make money out of is not a piece of art any more. I say that if you want to call yourself an artist, you must do so only if you have performed for the sake of art itself. If you want to call yourself a writer, then you will be a true one only if you write for the sake of writing itself. If you have not done so, you are but a businessman, and there will definitely dawn a day when you will lay down your pen and shelve all your paper because you are now rich enough; does that possibility speak anything of creativity at all, or does it speak of riches? Our creativity is for ours to wield, yes, but it must be considered worthy enough if it has been utilised solely to deliver unto mankind the meaning of uniqueness and nothing else. Everything that we think of, every word that we write, every mood that we dictate, is an expression of ourselves. Our presence will then no longer be ripples on water, destined to fade, but markings set in stone. People around us will know that we existed, and they will know not in the remembrance of how rich or poor we were, but in the memory of our deeds. If we were to leave ourselves behind when we pass away, we should know now that we are capable of doing so unblemished; we should understand that there are more ways to show that we helped than in the creations of our desires.