Earth's Habitat Change
Pouchulu architect
6 : New Slavery
The following are six essential commands to recover our Habitat:
First, to abandon car-based urbanizations in cities: walking, bikes and trains will save what's left of the landscape; sport cars are great, for intercity travel, in the countryside. Second, to avoid plastic packaging and plastics in habitat, clothing, tools, toys and furniture, except in specialized instrumentality applied to scientific research and machine parts. Third, to use analog machines and techniques, they are recyclable and more ecological, they produce better objects, employing more people: real prints and photos, real sounds, full of harmonics and not mere sterilised flat pixels. Fourth, to get food from areas close to where we live. Fifth: to keep away as much as possible from digital electronic communication devices like, for example, what is known as "social networks": run by organisations that have filed you in order to profit, monitor and handle your life. Sixth: to recover our freedom.
The Sixth command is, indeed, the most important: to become aware we must recover our freedom, to act, pointing in that direction.
It refers to a factor that has transformed society in such a "electrifying" way, so violently that we are not conscious about how dramatically life of most people has changed. I refer to the .... of our subconscious. Internet is indeed a fascinating technology, literally in-your-hands; at some point soon, it will be inside the body of many. It is, of course, developing wrongly. Internet originally in the 60's connected the US Army, later in the 70's it started to link US Universities, and it eventually became public in 1990. It ended up as an infinite global rubish bin, wrapped and filled with data of all kind, images and banalities powered by people's ego. It is transforming humanity in a new species of slaves at all times controlled and acknowledged by anonymous "entities".
We must not allow "to be filed, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered". The great Irish-American actor, writer and visionary Patrick McGoohan (1928-2009), who shared with me a common friend, referred by Orson Wells as "one of the big actors of our generation" created, acted and directed in 1968 the British series "The Prisoner", anticipating most of the dangers of "modern" electronic society:
Spying technology through collected private information (core of the virtual world) is destroying an important principle of humanist civilization, represented in the right to think, the right to respect our privacy, the right not to follow the crowd; ultimately, freedom.
The obstacle of this new "slavery" status is that the subjects (most of us) are not really conscious about the destination to where we are pointing. A massive, silent migration is taking place, and not only in the youngest generation: from reality to virtuality. Most children are unable to distinguish trees or flowers varieties. They not only completely ignore basic principles of geology or astronomy, to take two core disciplines that used to be part of the High School or Secondary School hundred years ago; sometimes they cannot even guess how food is produced and indeed, they cannot set a fire or cook. Most children never went to the countryside and have no idea how difficult is to produce grains or food in general.
The detatchment from Mother Nature is almost total now: when kids visit a rural place, the majority of them are unable to perceive, observe or smell; much less to associate or to understand emotional or ecological cycles: they spend the day connected with their mobiles phones. More and more tourists are seen with their devices, filming for hours their holiday trips... but looking at the screen, not at the landscape. This is tragic, it also means we started to relay on devices to keep our memories of life. While looking at the screen we ignore the scent, the fresh country air, moist and humidity. Regarding habitat, tourism and travel have became a terrible, disgusting activity when practiced in historical places. Global tourism can be worst than wars. Destructive, dirty, noisy, a large proportion of tourists left rubish everywhere, they look for a few minutes around and follow the tourist guide to the next stop, what did they learn in the trip? not a thing. The attitude of mass tourism is pathetic. In recent years, tourism is also related to 'extreme' sports.
Only sensitive people can learn something while in holidays; it becomes more and more difficult; we are at all times surrounded by the average tourist who cannot understand or even relate with a foreing land, with its local people. Millions of internet travel websites instruct how, where, what to do within hours in a particular destination, and unfortunately people cannot realise that the best way to know a place is to walk and even "getting lost", exploring in silence, interacting with its inhabitants, observing, learning. Programmed tourists are very dangerous. Not to mention "influencers". Tourism made the world not just smaller: it is destroying its mysteries. Historical places like Venice are being attacked by frentic tourists. How far we are from the times of Le Grand Tour.
Pouchulu's Wörlgtor, (dead end refuge), study from Travelling Visions, Torcello, Italy, 1999. Black pencil on Canson.
Architects, as a committed institutional body related to solving problems of living, urbanity and art, no longer exist. Architects used to organise society. A well developed city can structure our life beautifully. Collectively, we decided to ignore the perspective of future paradigms. Of all traditional professions, ours used to work in reality in a silent way, improving urban life, institutions, public spaces and art, travelling, all was part of a magnificent repertoire of activities related to sociability and progress. But when cars, marketing, advertising and consumerism -designed and exposed by technocrats- started to kidnap our professional spirit, that noble reality vanished. Modern civilisation, till the late 19th and early 20th century was, somehow, an intrinsically well balanced existence between us and nature: architecture was a link between man and the Universe. Dear colleagues, we have to prepare a long-term plan in order not only to re-organise our existing urban settlements, but also to create new towns in feasible regions, with the assisance of wealthy individuals and with the help of reliable communities. We must re-educate people. Architects should become (again) educators of urban life. He must become leaders in environmental and habitat issues. Architecture teaching must be dramatically renewed, taking notice not only of the five commands mentioned above -which should be applied from now on, every day- but paying attention to children's education regarding nature and architecture. In that delicate combination lays a future feasable habitat, and it is possible.
Pouchulu's Wörlgtor (detail), study from Travelling Visions, Torcello, Italy, 1999. Black pencil on Canson.
When children are educated about Habitat on workshops (not virtual classes) they become aware of Nature; this is the first objective of the Organic way of thinking. They start to understand their role in Nature. We are not more than a link in a long chain of inter-related life forms, we all depend on each other. For long time, religions made us believe that Nature and us were different things; that we are above nature. In reality, everything we produce (a tool, clothing, a car, a spaceship, an atomic bomb, a house) is part of nature, not that different from extensions made by any insect, bird or mammal. Ours is just more complex. In that sense, there is no difference between 'natural' and 'artificial' things. All we do is part of Nature, we are not supernatural. If you believe in God, what we do is indeed part of Nature. Thinking the contrary -and the two main monotheist religions have been promoting us above Nature for two millenia- could be interpreted as a slightly arrogant attitude. This is, perhaps, one of the reasons why, as a collective intelligence, we ignore the consequences of our Habitat destruction: we think we are not part of the Earth.
It is amazing why, thanks to virtual communication, children and now first and second generation of adults that grew up with digital media, became apparent experts in every topic. But only a few can describe how a seed grows, how a flower blooms, how a tree evolves, how planets, moon and sun are aligned on one plane when watching up the sky; only a few can handle tools. It is almost impossible, for someone who ignores the cycles of nature, to even start thinking about the problematic of Habitat. Digital information, even more, digital news (which is not information in the sense of what you learn from a book, that can induce us to reason) has flooded our mind with useless images, violent, sadistic movies, sounds, music, noise, faces, news, characters, people looking for accidents, killings, terror, madness, advertising, robotic politicians. The barrier between private and public life has dissappeared. Social networks is about low instincts, about ego. Our human conscience has been obliterated by our subconscience, our ID¹ rules again. People spend more and more time in front of Internet screen (TV is gone, it was not the same thing), there is neither space for thinking nor for reasoning. This planet is being obliterated, abducted from reality. Our friends used to be made of flesh and bones; now kids have virtual friends, who never met in reality. Adults make business with people they never met. Robotics are taking over our factories. Body language is being replace by emoticons. Solitary people look for love on a screen. Sometimes I wonder if that is a 'natural' consequence of our evolution-involution or something beyond explanation is happening. The world I knew a few decades ago and the one my parents and granparents knew, was fascinating because it was real. The marvelous of reading about Venice was imagining it... and then, eventually, travelling. Our future Cities will not be virtual. People will have to relate to reality.
Note ¹: ID is a hidden part of the mind where innate instinctive impulses and also primary processes are manifest.
Go to the next chapter, here.
1 - 2 - 3 - 4- 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 - 17 -
Contact
To contact Patricio Pouchulu press here, or send an email to: architect@pouchulu.com
More information available in Deutsch, English, Español & Français at: www.pouchulu.com
