sohinitheexplorer - Tumblr blog

[sohinitheexplorer]

Why should we stop making art with synthetic resin?

Most of the resin you see all over the internet…it looks…. interesting. I went to research some things in google trends and the graph shows the google searches related to resin art from 2018 till now and as you can see…it significantly spiked up (Google Trends, 2022). Yes, I mean it looks interesting. I play a song created by and artist called Woah Dude: “it cost that much cause it takes me freaking hours, it cost that much cause I don’t have super powers…you need to pay for my skills cause exposure doesn’t pay my bills. It cost that much cause it takes me freaking hours (I am singing this)” (Woah Dude - YouTube). Resin for DIY crafts is a polymer based thermosetting liquid plastic that comes in 2 parts 1) as a vehicle and 2) as hardener when mixed together with a bunch of different elements it cures and hardens into a solid block (Resin | chemical compound, 1998). It is essentially a transparent substance but we can always moderate its opacity according to what our creativity calls.

5-minute crafts is the biggest DIY based content publisher in the world. It is YouTube’s 13th most subscribed channel with 77.7 million subscribers all over the world (Wikipedia Contributors, 2019). More than 48.8% of their content revolves around resin, plastic and silicon-based art. And it is safe to say that a lot of similar DIY content creators with a considerable amount of influence are producing similar kind of content.

So, I was naturally curious, why is that? Why are people are consuming a lot of media that revolves around a plenty of health and safety risk and ecological damage? Why is it made to look that attractive and what happens to that piece of beef when it’s dipped into a vat of immortality, spoiler alert: it still rots, resin is useless.

Let’s start to look at some chemical properties:

1)     Resin is water resistant and this is why it was invented to protect water facilities in place of metal piping’s because they would understandably get corroded and resin lining will deter any type of chemical reaction (Erickson, 1961) or at least that was a wide public perception around that time because it is not true at all now. Studies have shown resin over the time becomes a carcinogenic material just as asbestos and is a known marine life pollutant.

2)     Its plastic; its transparent. Artists and creators like the fact that its’s transparent. So, it can “cover” and “protect” a lot of fragile art and paintings and prevent it from damaging. The reason I am using air quotes is because that is also not at all true. Resin chemically bonds with applied object in a way that it becomes practically impossible to remove the protection layer without destroying the very prized creation. It also negates the possibility of having any kind of sensorial exploration of the object because resin essential closes all pore to stop oxidation. There is also an element of exclusivity. Excluding from epistemological interaction.

3)     But I want to focus at its third property; resin as an art medium. Sometimes artist use it portray a feeling of suspension like a flower that never sheds a petal, or a piece of glitter that is floating mid air or like a river that is frozen in time. The medium is also used for sculpting a molding objects and forms. Some of them are functional most of them are useless and dangerous. They can also be used as diffusing object to play with lighting in art. And since the refractive index of resin is 1.50 -1.80 which is near to water that is 1.30… (Su, Fu and Pan, 2002) it makes resin reflective it gives a look of gloss and shine.

4)     Resin also nature wise is a very corrosive material to human skin and lungs because it works under the pretense of an exothermic reaction and there have been many reported accidents ranging from 1st to 4th degree burns on skin and fumes that cause silicosis and cancer in the lungs (Health Effects from Overexposure to Epoxy, 2022). As you can also see in the label there are a lot of protective warnings and list of side effects.

Now there are certain words from my previous statement I wanted to highlight and unpack because I think it draws a “clear” picture of what I want to express in my presentation.

First is exploring the aesthetic of transparency. Transparency is a qualitative description of an object. There are a lot of well documented studies that highlight various points about why we are starting to like transparent aesthetic more and more these days. It starts from post modern era where artists and architects started this movement called structural expressionism where the viewer of the object or in this case a building is able to see the details and construction of the building post production (arhimanisharma, 2020). The viewer can get a sense of knowledge and context of method and structure. This also stems from the fact that a lot of past architecture has been ornamental and feudal and the architects want to show inner workings of an organization essentially stripping away all the visual hinderances and ornamentation that is taking feedback from the public that was expressing a lot of lack of trust in various governing bodies and politics (arhimanisharma, 2020) .... Now we also like transparency because we are in age of overwhelming amount of information and surveillance and are constantly “encouraged” to show all side and aspects of our (Hall, 2007) life -that’s a LinkedIn joke. A suspended object in transparent resin gives the viewer an experience of observing something from all the directions. Funny thing, you can do the same exercise, it just requires a pair of working eyes and a hand that can pick up and turn an object in different ways and you don’t even have to pollute the earth for it.

Second is durability. Resin artists love the concept of permanence. But I am wondering why do we like concept of durability? Studies have shown that because it mirrors with our need to live a very long life most of it looking like a 20-year-old in 60s (Youth is Currency: Why We’re Afraid to Age, 2022) and so we want our object to last as well. Let me ask you something…. if life of an organic object doesn’t end in freezing like that… why do we feel like it’s our personal responsibility to deny the organic object the fortune of going through the process of decomposing and going back to earth? Why does this piece of beef gets wasted like that. Any organic object dies as it gets subjected to a tremendous amount of heat due to Resin’s exothermic reaction so after freezing it looks dead and ugly…then what’s the purpose? Bro suspension? More like damnation.

3) Third word is Reflection/gloss or shine. As we see in life in general there is an acute need in the commercial world to make everything look nice and shiny…from our cellphones to our teeth we always need to see the cartoonish bling where we can see our face in. The explanation for this phenomenon is also layered. First is, it is a class thing. Shiny things always express someone’s affluence and let’s be honest the concept of blingy white teeth was invented in the late 1930s (teeth as a fashion statement., 2022), it was an aesthetic choice more than a medical one. Shiny things also represent the newness of any object like something is still untouched and not contaminated. And the last layer is we human being are evolutionarily evolved to look for fresh and clean source of water to use as a resource and looking at some of the reflective art reminds us of that and is why we feel more attracted towards it. So maybe the problem is, we are all thirsty (Silvia et al., 2017). I don’t know much but I am pretty sure that we are also running out of drinkable water pretty soon (courtesy of anthropogenic climate change) (Is the world running out of freshwater? | 2022) so maybe we cannot really fight our inclination to like clear aesthetics by drinking through it.

Articles upon articles have been published about how to create resin-based art and establish a full running business on it. But at what cost? I did the math and with each rising centimeter of deep pour plastic more 5,000 years get added…. that’s the time taken for it get decomposed. So, for a 10 cm block it will take 50,000 years for it to get decomposed. That is from ice age till now. And mean while the object will pollute the air, the soil and the marine life in carcinogenic ways. Most of the plastic waste of first world countries get dumped in third world countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Malaysia (Fates of plastic waste: Where does our plastic waste go? 2021). So now poor countries have to fight through oppression of poverty, colonization and carcinogenic waste too. Before going I want my presentation to end with this song I wrote.

it cost that much cause it takes me just 3 braincells, it cost that much cause I’m high on fumes as hell…you need to pay for my sins cause exposure doesn’t really Earth kill. It cost that much cause freezing a toenail is noble (I am singing this).

Bibliography

 •          Google Trends (no date) Google Trends. Available at: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2018-01-29%202022-11-29&q=resin%20art (Accessed: 29 November 2022).

 ·       Woah Dude - YouTube (no date) www.youtube.com. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/c/woahdudestudio (Accessed: 8 December 2022).

 •          Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "acrylic compound". Encyclopedia Britannica, 20 Jul. 1998, https://www.britannica.com/science/acrylic-compound. Accessed 29 November 2022.

 •          Wikipedia Contributors (2019) List of most-subscribed YouTube channels, Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouTube_channels.

 •          Erickson, C.R. (1961) ‘Uses of Epoxy Resins’, Journal (American Water Works Association), 53(12), pp. 1457–1460. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41257060 (Accessed: 29 November 2022).

 •          Su, W.-F., Fu, Y.-C. and Pan, W.-P. (2002) ‘Thermal properties of high refractive index epoxy resin system’, Thermochimica Acta, 392-393, pp. 385–389. doi:10.1016/S0040-6031(02)00124-7.

 •          Health Effects from Overexposure to Epoxy (2022) WEST SYSTEM. Available at: https://www.westsystem.com/safety/health-effects-from-overexposure-to-epoxy/#:~:text=Repeated%20skin%20contact%20with%20resins (Accessed: 29 November 2022).

 •          arhimanisharma (2020) THE STRUCTURAL EXPRESSIONISM OF ARCHITECTURE, AR Details. Available at: https://ardetails.home.blog/2020/06/22/the-structural-expressionism-of-architecture/.

 •          Hall, R. (2007) ‘Of Ziploc Bags and Black Holes: The Aesthetics of Transparency in the War on Terror’, The Communication Review, 10(4), pp. 319–346. doi:10.1080/10714420701715381.

 •          Youth is Currency: Why We’re Afraid to Age (2022) www.youtube.com. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItE2mzGkutI&ab_channel=naomicannibal (Accessed: 30 November 2022).

 •          teeth as a fashion statement. www.youtube.com. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i10v-5a9X0M&t=402s&ab_channel=MinaLe (Accessed: 30 November 2022).

 •          Silvia, P. J., Christensen, A. P., Cotter, K. N., Jackson, T. A., Galyean, C. B., McCroskey, T. J., & Rasheed, A. Z. (2018). Do People Have a Thing for Bling? Examining Aesthetic Preferences for Shiny Objects. Empirical Studies of the Arts, 36(1), 101–113.

 •          Is the world running out of freshwater? | News (no date) Wellcome. Available at: https://wellcome.org/news/world-running-out-freshwater.

 •          Jain, Akshat, editor. “Fates of Plastic Waste: Where Does Our Plastic Waste Go?” PLASTIC RECYCLING: DECODED, Centre for Science and Environment, 2021, pp. 15–17. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep37920.7. Accessed 30 Nov. 2022.

[sohinitheexplorer]

Exploring the feelings and themes of Eco-Anxiety through a Paul Schrader film

Extreme fearful feelings towards awareness of the fact that our current environment that sustains our life will destabilize and collapse right in front of us is known as ecological anxiety (Practical Action, 2022). It is a quiet heavy feeling to experience and live with. Most of the people who experience eco-anxiety are young people belonging to from ages 16-25 years with racking up to whopping 60% in statistics (Thompson, 2021). One of the big reasons for this phenomenon is anthropogenic climate change (NASA, 2019). It is safe to think that this is a systemic problem and it is not going to get fully eradicated by small number of people changing their lifestyle choices like subscribing to vegan diet or living a zero-trash lifestyle. This is a systemic issue (Climate Queen, 2020). A system created by the preceding generation Y and baby boomers…. A huge chunk of which are climate change deniers (Ballew, 2019). We live in the system created by them, we are raised by them, we learn how the world works from them and we perpetuate the same actions after them. the empirical evidence for climate change is so on the face (The Royal Society, 2013) that we as a young generation are trying to break the cycle of not thinking about climate change, however we have a very long way to go.

These are some of the similar themes you can observe in a Paul Schrader film that was made in 2017 called First Reformed starring actors Ethan Hawke and Amanda Seyfried. Paul Schrader is a renowned American film director, film critic and screen writer and he has made thought provoking films like Taxi Driver, The last temptation of Christ around the themes of theology, spirituality, morality and human spirits. First Reformed was his meditation on his environmentalism and depicting the series of events in the film with a lens of compunction. I assume that is coming from a generational baggage since he was 70 years of age back then and being citizen of a country that is the definition of capitalism. The film is regularly posed with a question “will god forgive us?” implying that if there is a god, they have created a beautiful world for us to be in and we are actively destroying it through our evil machinations. The film is made in 1.33:1 aspect ratio to get the visuals of human bodies more in the frame. The camera work has a lot of rested medium long shots in the film with slow pans and nothing abrupt. It also has very meditative VFX sequence that represents the state of human psyche during a prayer. There a is a scene in the film (time stamp) 10:16 to 21:48 encapsulating a dialogue between a war veteran reverend and an environmental activist that deeply affected me as an 18-year-old young person. The conversation touched subjects like reproductive rights in the midst of climate change, role of indigenous people in fighting with big corporations and their martyrdom in the process, generational guilt of contributing to problematic government, despair of problems that our coming generations are going to face as consequence of the actions of previous generations, futility of fighting wars that have no moral justification and thoughts of self-harm induced by ecological anxiety that every young person is facing. The activist later proceeds to take his own life and the reverend is left to meditate on what he just witnessed and that provokes him to think and talk about climate change and is later faced with the patronizing dejection which then motivates him to take his own life. This film magnified the state of spirit that goes through eco-anxiety.

Of course, this is a heavy topic to think and talk about. There are several contemporary psychologists that have a platform and audience where they have addressed this issue and how to cope with it and I will mention some of the links below. I feel like healing is a two-way process in this case. We have to cope with trauma and the perpetrator- industries and technologies need to heavily regulate themselves. I want the coming generations to experience the extraordinary joy of living in Earth, prospering here, falling in love here, creating and sustaining life here.

References:

·      Eco-anxiety (2022) Practical Action. Available at: https://practicalaction.org/eco-anxiety/?gclid=Cj0KCQiA4uCcBhDdARIsAH5jyUlD5d5RCOK7A2EfeRH9IaYQPASiHG3-t7HA3IEhpLU5tPEST2C1CToaAuExEALw_wcB (Accessed: 14 December 2022).

·      Thompson, T. (2021) ‘Young people’s climate anxiety revealed in landmark survey’, Nature, 597(7878), pp. 605–605. doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02582-8.

·      NASA (2019) Scientific consensus: Earth’s climate is warming, Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet. NASA. Available at: https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/.

·      ‌ Tackling The Climate Crisis Requires Systemic Change, Not Just Individual Action (2020) Green Queen. Available at: https://www.greenqueen.com.hk/tackling-the-climate-crisis-requires-systemic-change-not-just-individual-action-ccnow/.

·       

Ballew, M. (2019) Do younger generations care more about global warming?, Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Available at: https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/do-younger-generations-care-more-about-global-warming/.

Psychologists on how to cope with Eco-Anxiety:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=996QKlEdT58&ab_channel=TEDxTalks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B07DLgzOQEg&ab_channel=OurChangingClimate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f52LJJFBCLc&ab_channel=TED

[sohinitheexplorer]

Absurdity of packing Cucumbers

The shrink wrap on these cucumbers keeps them fresher for longer.(Tas Country Hour: Fiona Breen)

I need to solve a problem, I want to increase shelf life of the food I buy, but I want something 1) Non-reactive, 2) Protective, 3) Insulating, 4) Cheap and 5) Convienient. I think plastic shrink wraping is perfectly fitting all the criterias however I think is taxing on the environment."You've got to weigh up the differences between plastic waste and food waste," (Why wrapping fruit and veg in plastic could actually be good for the environment, 2019). But the question is....cucumbers already come in a packging...why do we want to pack it again?

Today I will discuss about how I see this object presented as an attitude. Attitude; a precise way of thinking or feeling about something. In my research I realized that this object can symbolize many things. So, I will start with the symbol of when humans stopped foraging food and started cultivating it, as cucumber do not naturally exist on their own in nature…bitter gourd is what we should think about.

Cucumber is a distant cousin only zestier. You can also say, bitter gourd is a wisecrack philosopher and English cucumber is a Kardashian phenomenon. One is good for you, the other is junk food with the gap of 9 million subscribers. Circling back to the attitude part…why did I use this word?

Because I saw the object representing the yuppie side of human attitude. “I will not orient my life according to how things work I will orient the work of things according to my life because my dad didn’t say he loves me enough times. My question is fairly simple. Why does MHRA thinks it is okay to wrap individual English cucumbers in plastic for the consumers? Isn’t there any other sustainable alternative?

I found out four reasons:

1) Protection from bugs and bacteria and create plastic wasteland castles around the world. 2) Retain moisture in cucumber as it slowly evaporates in the refrigerator as if the cucumber will never rehydrate if kept in lukewarm water for 10 minutes. 3) Insulation and isolation from extreme temperature change…. you know funny coincidence the naturally occurring waxy rind does the exact same thing and we don’t even have to burn our fossil fuels for it. Only if we do not wash it right after harvesting. 4) The fruit looks good…I mean its not like we are trying to court a cucumber …it’s definitely used for eating.100%.

I want to draw your attention to a few questions with this demonstration.

1) Why do we want our fruits to look like shiny spotless toys? 2) Why do we want to increase the shelf life of the food rather than radically changing the quality of life we are living? 3) Why doesn’t the MHRA discloses the embodied energy behind every single produce we buy? 4) What is the philosophy of problem and solution then?

In the end I will leave you with some problematic stats to look at.

1) Manufactured English cucumber are nutritionally the most inferior species of cucumber to have(Cucumber, 2020). 2) Each year nearly 973.5 tonnes of single use plastic is thrown out by British residents just by consuming English cucumber, that is equivalent to 1 full cargo ship’s volume and weight (List of countries by cucumber production, 2022). 3) Cucumbers are one of the easiest fruits to grow and harvest and salad bush cucumber species is the most nutritious to consume(TIMG, 2021).

Refferences:

• Why wrapping fruit and veg in plastic could actually be good for the environment (2019) www.abc.net.au. Available at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2019-03-25/fruit-and-vegetable-packaging-in-supermarkets-and-food-waste/10925374. • Cucumber (2020) Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucumber.

• List of countries by cucumber production (2022) Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_cucumber_production (Accessed: 16 November 2022). • TIMG (2021) 3 Great Cucumber Plants To Grow This Year - For Eating Or Pickling!, This Is My Garden. Available at: https://thisismygarden.com/2021/01/cucumber-plants-to-grow/ (Accessed: 16 November 2022).

[sohinitheexplorer]

A mindset manifesto

Fellow comrades,

On this unceremonious occasion I ask you to disillusion yourself from the perpetual sedative mindset induced by guerilla consumerism. I know the states of technology, the media and the government feel like they are disabling, surveilling and robbing us dis-respectively. I am familiar with that wrist slitting feeling. However, we have to accept the fact that…this was an over sight and we made the wrong choice of choosing inept products, platforms and people to represent us, think for us, choose for us.

Humans and technology have an ancient bond. Now the concept of humans with regards to technology has almost become a ship of Theseus…how much are we an organic species if our day-to-day functions now entirely depend on some kind of technology that is so evolved from the invention of wheels. After thousands of years, now we have come to a stage where we have started to think about the concept of transhumanism for all the wrong reasons. I am not a philosopher to determine right from wrong in the case of evolution however, I think transhumanism is a stage of elevated being that has extended their capacity on functioning as a human in a broader way…in an elevated way. The way transhumanism discourse is taking place now is human ability and capacity measured against a very stringent scale of productivity that is profitable. Human that is no longer human for capital. With the means of resources that orphans indigenous people of their existence, that mutilates mountains and forests, that pollutes earth. All because we let someone manufacture an economy that has no shame in hiding all of its ineptitude- Capitalism the distant cousin of feudalism. Have we learnt nothing from Macbeth? Let’s take a look at the technology of mass manufacturing. This is done to solve problems like, inconsistent quality of products, investing too much in labor capital, involvement of too much time, making products for higher cost. In return this introduced problems like separation of the workers from the means of production, mass unemployment, sweat shops in third world countries, cheap labor working in inhuman conditions, annihilation of labor unions, hyper individualistic economy, conspicuous consumerism, class inequity gap, carbon emissions due to unregulated production of goods and services, unregulated globalization and wasteland castles. Now in the service industry human productivity is incentivized to generate greater wealth and, in this case, technology is not aiding for a better life but for a “convenient” one. the Invention of analytical arithmetic is supposed to enhance human life by meditating on how things work rather than enslaving us to be endlessly productive…and for what? Life under capitalism is examination of how we live and perform our life.

Speaking of performance, generation Z is the most surveillance generation of all time. Every random interaction is documented, every insincere comment is recorded and used against you. Every device listens and voyeuristically watches you. You know what that does to a human psyche? Always having this subconscious awareness of some one is watching you makes living life a performance. We start to become inauthentic version of ourselves, having in authentic interactions and relationship solely based on the performance you have been living all your life. A sincere retrospection this case becomes a performative meditation which for that later you have to come up with great justification to do that. In this fast paced performance evaluated world, it is almost an act of rebellion to stop and think and listen to your authentic self and live in your own truth.

Governing bodies want to surveil us because of our safety and security instead of making administrative and systemic change to lower the crime rate. We constantly want to capture and document our life instead of living it because we do not want to forget somethings and most of all if we didn’t show it…we didn’t do it. The products watch and listen to us carefully because they want to help us and show us the most relevant advertisements to buy from because the companies love its consumers. But we are not just consumers… its just being a consumer is the most profitable part of us. But that is how the world wants to define us. It has made easy for us to be virtuous by having a digital existence. Companies can greenwash all they want and buy as much offsets as much as they can. In this difficult time real objective truth has become a mythical creature that we all want to see and experience.

 All of this can be improved, we just have to wake up from the sedatives we ingested in the form of senseless governing and ruthless capitalism. we have to radically ideate how we want to live our life. living it unethically is not a simple choice....its a crime. Choose well.

[sohinitheexplorer]

Making a meme out of serious sentiments

Anthropogenic climate change and its devastating effects on the planet are empirical facts (IPCC, 2022) about us human beings. Climate scientist, environmentalists, indigenous community and people who care are taking this situation very seriously because they cannot ignore the blatant truth anymore, it’s writings on the wall with forest fires, oceans rising, multiple species extinction, pandemics and other catastrophes. To make matters worse majority governing bodies of the world are not taking these factual inputs as seriously as they should because it’s somehow “profitable” for them (Morton, 2022). I don’t even think this is an intelligent move to be honest, you have to be cognitively impaired to manifest this deplorable situation into reality. So today I will talk about the philosophy of Carbon Credits and it’s glaring flaws.

Carbon Credits are documents which can certify the allowance of how much carbon is supposed to be emitted by a particular industry and these documents can be traded in the market according to market’s supply and demand situation (Kenton, 2019). This is supposed to incentivize major carbon polluter industries to cut back at their emissions. However, the major problems associated with this temporary solution policy are:

1) The documents I referred to earlier, they are way cheaper for a firm to buy than make a significant change in the production process. Now the cost in USA is $3.20/tonne of carbon emission (Climate Trade, 2022). According to the economist, for real change to happen the cost should be $100-150/tonne (Economist, how do carbon markets work? 2021 and Why Carbon Credits and Offsets Will Not Work, 2021). In simple terms instead of solving the problem they are trying to throw money on it and that leads to our second problem.

2) “These changes have not only saved them money, but have also created carbon credits, which can be sold for huge profits. As an example, a company in China spent 5 million to build an energy-producing incinerator, which generated 500 million dollars of excessive profit through carbon credits. While rewarding carbon-reducing technologies makes sense, a 495-million-dollar profit is over the top!” (Why Carbon Credits and Offsets Will Not Work, 2021)

3) It gave birth to a whole new green washing industry that will reduce carbon emission on behalf of the companies by planting new trees called carbon offsetting, not even considering the fact that with carbon emission there also a huge depletion of fossil fuels and planting trees will never solve that (Childs and Zylva, 2021).

4) The real threat of establishing production part of the industry offshore where there are less strict laws and cheap labor…a perfect situation for profit and incalculable loss of the local community and ecology and by extension the earth. (Economist, how do carbon markets work? 2021) because the pollution is still taking place and the emission levels are ever rising.

my question is, why are we still not seeing this rampant misuse of laws and regulations as a punishable offense. Why are we not holding these industries and by extension these governing bodies accountable for the crimes they have committed against our ecology. Instead of penalizing these industries we are incentivizing/encouraging them to be less problematic which we are sure they are not motivated to do so…as if they are some kindergarten children whole need a standing ovation for doing something bare minimum. We don’t need to infantilize these technocrats for anything…they are slowly digging our graves. According to google “an image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by internet users, often with slight variations”.

Unfortunately ontologically speaking, the people that largely have a control over our lives are making a joke…a meme out of our helpless situation. And it’s not even funny. IT NEVER WAS.

Refferences:

• IPCC, 2022. Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [H.-O. Pörtner, D.C. Roberts, M. Tignor, E.S. Poloczanska, K. Mintenbeck, A. Alegría, M. Craig, S. Langsdorf, S. Löschke, V. Möller, A. Okem, B. Rama (eds.)]. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, in press. • Morton, A. (2022) Australia’s carbon credit scheme ‘largely a sham’, says whistleblower who tried to rein it in, the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/23/australias-carbon-credit-scheme-largely-a-sham-says-whistleblower-who-tried-to-rein-it-in. • Kenton, W. (2019) Carbon Credit, Investopedia. Available at: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/carbon_credit.asp. • Climate Trade (2022) What influences carbon offset pricing?, Climate Trade. Available at: https://climatetrade.com/what-influences-carbon-offset-pricing/#:~:text=Carbon%20credit%20supply%20and%20demand&text=According%20to%20the%20authors%2C%20global (Accessed: 7 November 2022). • The Economist, How do carbon markets work? (2021) www.youtube.com. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5ych9oDtk0&t=1s&ab_channel=TheEconomist (Accessed: 7 November 2022). • Why Carbon Credits and Offsets Will Not Work (2021) Forestecologynetwork.org. Available at: http://www.forestecologynetwork.org/climate_change/credits_%26_offsets.html. • Mike Childs and Paul de Zylva, 2021, A dangerous distraction – the offsetting con | Policy and insight policy.friendsoftheearth.uk. Available at: https://policy.friendsoftheearth.uk/insight/dangerous-distraction-offsetting-con.

[sohinitheexplorer]

My expression in detournement.

I made some detournement posters to express my political leaning and explore what I can do with the concept of digital activism. So far... I like it a lot.

#Detournement

[sohinitheexplorer]

Recuperation of the leftist/conservationist aesthetic in mass media

Recuperation in simple terms is commodification of cultural elements by corporate industries, elements that are rooted in social cause activism. This manifests in different forms like, a well-known Indian (a colonized country) traditional maximalism brand SABYASACHI collaborating with an international fast fashion brand Hennes & Mauritz (a Swedish-European brand) for profit thus commodifying sentimentality of Indian culture through most unethical means possible (Mahajan, Fashion and law journal, 2021). 

Today I will talk about more subversively insidious affectations of recouperation, the annexation of leftist graphic design aesthetic for pleasure and profit.

Let’s look at the history of minimalist design. It originated in the post-modern era, where the artist moved from feudalistic expression of maximalist picturesque paintings to surrealist/Bauhaus/dada art movements that were rooted in political activism and raising awareness about social issues (Novin, 2010). Now minimalism has become its own brand by with the help of multinational companies adopting the style and making a disingenuous use of the aesthetic to attract consumers and make some profit (Steinhauer, 2020) as it is widely known that leftist ideas always win the culture war (Dollinger, 2007) so the right wing has to find a way to own it, commodify it and capitalize it.

Second is dreamy muted gradient graphic design aesthetic. This aesthetic was created in the post-modern era by the American rebels and the hippies as well who supported the causes like LGBTQ+ rights, AIDS medication, The Rainbow coalition etc. and now it has become #1 graphic design trend for companies to recreate to make their brand look “cool” and pro those social cause (Olsen, 2021).

We can see more of this example, like Amazon.com a brand that is now infamously known for mistreating its labor organization…the result of which was Christian Small standing in the public eye as a leader of contemporary American labor union (Sainato, 2020) also SELLS Che Guevara T-shirts and merchandise to people. This current situation just made me feel like recuperation is fraudulent marketing and detournement a defamation joke. A subtle difference between a harmful and harmless joke.

Refferences:

• Bauhaus women 2022, Zoran Cardula, Boredpanda.com Bauhaus Women: To Celebrate The 8th Of March, I Created 16 Illustrations Dedicated To Significant Women In History https://www.boredpanda.com/author/zoran_cardula/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic

• Covington, R. (2006) Marie Antoinette, Smithsonian. Available at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/marie-antoinette-134629573/.

• Novin, G. (2010) A History of Graphic Design: Chapter 16 - Minimalism, A History of Graphic Design. Available at: http://guity-novin.blogspot.com/2010/03/history-of-graphic-design-minamalism.html. • Stephen J. Dollinger (2007) reader.elsevier.com. Available at: https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S0191886907000682?token=7F05B456C8B3E63E68D0BC6B206D1D241A04837707C7B537684AFC1B482959DA5433799D2B60318E9545848BD67C662E&originRegion=eu-west-1&originCreation=20221106060629 (Accessed: 6 November 2022). • Ospaaal.com Posters - Artwork by the Organization of Solidarity of the People of Asia, Africa&Latin America (no date) www.ospaaal.com. Available at: http://www.ospaaal.com/. • Intersectional Environmentalist (2019) About. Available at: https://www.intersectionalenvironmentalist.com/about. • Chocolate packaging (2022) www.behance.net. Available at: https://www.behance.net/gallery/80431511/Laroch-Chocolate-Packaging (Accessed: 6 November 2022). • Olsen, B. (2021) What is Rainbow Capitalism and Why is it Harmful?, LGBTQ and ALL. Available at: https://www.lgbtqandall.com/what-is-rainbow-capitalism-and-why-is-it-harmful/. • Sainato, M. (2020) ‘“I’m Not a robot”: Amazon Workers Condemn unsafe, Grueling Conditions at Warehouse’, The Guardian, 5 February. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/05/amazon-workers-protest-unsafe-grueling-conditions-warehouse.

[sohinitheexplorer]

Unfavourable framing of the Climate Change discourse in the news and it’s affectations.

Climate change is a phenomenon that refers to the ecological disturbance due to massive shift in temperature of the atmosphere of our planet. I cannot stress enough on the fact that this is happening for real. Studies showed that only 42% of Americans still think that anthropogenic climate change is a conspiracy theory (The Economist -Why don't Americans believe in global warming? 2008). However, the data that scientist have gathered over the years does not lie. According to United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) we need to take strict and severe actions to control our carbon emissions this year to avoid experiencing further heatwaves, fires, floods, rising sea levels, and ecosystem destruction and other elements of a horrific but real nightmare (IPCC, 2022). Still there some are news outlets running a very profitable disinformation campaign against the real state of earth; framing a completely different picture that is consumed by 90% of the American population’s notion that this climate change phenomenon is not anthropogenic to begin with (Wright, Weather.com, 2017). Mainly because huge news publishing companies like Fox News have always given platform to extreme right wing republican fossil oil guzzling trump supporters to explicitly talk about climate change on the national television (Nuccitelli, D. (2013), widely disinforming public so that it makes life a little bit more consciously convenient to live as an average American consumer. I know you might be wondering, why am I talking so much about some deplorable facts of a first world western country when I myself come from India. I believe because:

1) Climate change is not a country specific issue, it is very much an entire planet issue (What are the effects of climate change?, 2022) 2) Culture is United States of America’s biggest export (Farhi and Rosenfeld, Washingtonpost.com: Made in America, 1998). The endorsement of ideology culture from the USA has a deep impact on how Indians form their opinion on various global issues till now (Malviya Influence of western culture on Indian society, 2021). 3) Carbon emission from India has been rapidly increasing because of current fossil fuel industrial and ever booming Indian Silicon Valley and its semiconductor war (Oskarsson and Bedi, 2018).

In the coming years we have to see how we deal with the western disinformation influence and design policies that are looking towards sustainability to save ourselves from the getting smitten with convenient “empirical” commentary and simulatenously burning the planet away.

Refferences:

• Earth day illustration by Alex Nabaum

• IPCC, 2022. Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [H.-O. Pörtner, D.C. Roberts, M. Tignor, E.S. Poloczanska, K. Mintenbeck, A. Alegría, M. Craig, S. Langsdorf, S. Löschke, V. Möller, A. Okem, B. Rama (eds.)]. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, in press.

• Wright P. 87 percent of Americans unaware there’s scientific consensus on climate change. Weather.com; July 11, 2017. Available at: https://weather.com/science/environment/news/americans-climate-change-scientific-consensus

• Nuccitelli, D. (2013) Fox News found to be a major driving force behind global warming denial | Dana Nuccitelli, the Guardian. The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2013/aug/08/global-warming-denial-fox-news.

• What are the effects of climate change? (no date) Greenpeace UK. Available at: https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/challenges/climate-change/effects-climate-change/?source=GA&subsource=GOFRNAOAGA024K&gclid=Cj0KCQjwk5ibBhDqARIsACzmgLRZjpwQ03fliPmGoGySJS4iZzorfpY7hVIqf1ZMpBaOxNzo_VLiE_MaAt2ZEALw_wcB (Accessed: 6 November 2022).

• Paul Farhi and Megan Rosenfeld (1998) Washingtonpost.com: Made in America www.washingtonpost.com. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/mia/part1.htm.

• Shashank Malviya, Influence of western culture on Indian society (2021) Times of India Blog. Available at: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/readersblog/know-your-rights/influence-of-western-culture-on-indian-society-37332/.

• Oskarsson, P. and Bedi, H.P. (2018) ‘Extracting environmental justice: Countering technical renditions of pollution in India’s coal industry’, The Extractive Industries and Society, 5(3), pp. 340–347. doi:10.1016/j.exis.2018.05.003.

[sohinitheexplorer]

My introduction to the world of Digital Activism.

Today I learnt a little bit about a phenomenon called digital activism. In vague terms it is the process of standing up for a cause or advertising any kind of ideology that may help serve some kind of issue for the betterment of some kind of community......all done electronically. It is a revolutionary way of mass communication that helps people become aware of situations that they haven’t come across personally and can further influence them to take a certain course of action towards a particular cause or causes.

This whole discussion about led me to think deeply about what really is ACTIVISM?

Well this question has multifaceted answers and verbs to look forward to:

1) When we want to talk on behalf of someone in a way that brings light to their struggle so that people become aware of it, it is called ADVOCACY. For example, actor Ethan Hawke standing up for LGBTQ+ community rights.

2) When we want an audience to focus on what we want to say and stand for a cause, it is called DRAWING ATTENTION to the cause. For example, The Principles of Communism (1847) by Friedrich Engles is a small booklet that highlights worker rights and future of capitalistic worldview/economy and it’s dangers. He predicted the colonisation of India and China via rapid industrialisation.

3)When we constantly supply information to some kind of platform to shed light on a particular situation that needs to be fixed, it is called RAISING AWARENESS. For example, Rollie Williams a climate change activist made a YouTube channel to publish videos and content about climate change and pollution. Now he has a huge platform of approximately 3,89,000 subscribers who engage with his work constantly and are constatly motivated to be more eco friendly in their life and life choices.

4) When we want to approach a person or a party who is causing the genesis of the cause everyone is standing for with all the appropriate evidence, it is called HOLDING someone ACCOUNTABLE. For example, Christian Smalls is an American labor organizer known for his role in leading Amazon's worker organization on Staten Island, a borough in New York City.

5) When someone exercises the act of retrospection of their own actions and situation, in a way they become aware of a certain kind of systemic advantage. This is called PRIVILAGE CHECKING. For example, Hello, Privilege. It's Me, Chelsea is a 2019 documentary directed by Alex Stapleton and starring Chelsea Handler. The premise revolves around examining the concept of white privilege.

6) When we try to engage in a conversation that encourages changes in behavior of the person or part at fault, that is called NEGOTIATION. For example, Throughout 1928 in Colonial India, cries of “Simon, Go Back” rang out in every city which the British Commission visited. And eventually, Indians got their independence on 15th of August 1947.

7) When we want to communicate our activism through visuals or art, that is called SYMBOLISING. For example, Pink Venus and Fist were created by the feminist community of the contemporary era to symbolise feminism and female power.

And as I said, all this activism done electronically is called digital activism. I think the coolest part about digital activism is it allows the causes to gain momentum in a short period of time....without taking too much space....or barely any space since it is virtual however the impact is very real. I am an environmentalist, so I really appreciate the part that this all is very eco friendly...no by products no wastage of resources, I mean not as much as making posters on paper to yell about saving trees, or travelling in cars rallying about how we hate Trump while burning fossil fuels or, the most wasteful activity of making an effigy of OPEC founders to let them know about their catastrophic impact on earth's ecology and economy. That is what I care about.

References :

1) Ethan Hawke supporting LGBTQ+ cause; 2011 publish Human Rights Campaign Youtube Chanel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZO4KeFiXBik&ab_channel=HumanRightsCampaign

2) The Principles of Communism by Friedrich Engles (1847)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm

3) Rollie Williams Climate Town

https://www.youtube.com/c/ClimateTown

4) Christian smalls

Amazon fired Chris Smalls. Now the new union leader is one of its biggest problems. What’s next for the face of America’s new labor movement by Shirin Ghaffary  Jun 7, 2022. Photographs by José A. Alvarado Jr. for Vox

https://www.vox.com/recode/23145265/amazon-fired-chris-smalls-union-leader-alu-jeff-bezos-bernie-sanders-aoc-labor-movement-biden

5) Simon Go Back History

Opinion | 90 years later, India must send Simon back Columns By Arghya Sengupta Updated on Jul 19, 2019

https://www.hindustantimes.com/columns/opinion-90-years-later-india-must-send-simon-back/story-2V64TbLO9T7EdyutjcHTPL.html