Omnipresence – The CSPA

New metaphors for sustainability: the shopping divider at the check-out

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Monik Gupta, environmental blogger and researcher has guest blogged for Ashdenizen. Here he suggests a metaphorÂ in ourÂ series New metaphors for sustainability: the shopping divider at the check-out.

For me, thinking about sustainability, the object in the picture comes to mind. We come across it so regularly, however there is no word readily available to us to describe it (google suggests it to be termed ‘cashier divider’ by retail experts). Evidently, just like with ‘sustainability’, it is something very well known but much less engaged with.

What’s more important, both the shopping divider and sustainability mark the necessity for confinement of our own consumption and draw attention to others’ needs.

Maybe those two points, shallow engagement despite omnipresence and a focus on limitations of our consumption, are related. We are reluctant to make explicit the distinction between our needs and those of others, even though we are acutely aware of its necessity.

However, this is exactly where the beauty of both the ‘shopping divider’ and ‘sustainability’ could lie: in marking the confines of our needs, they enable us to direct attention to our fellow human beings. We begin to acknowledge that we are ‘in this together’, urgently needing to demonstrate our ‘ability to sUStain’.

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The editors are Robert Butler and Wallace Heim. The associate editor is Kellie Gutman. The editorial adviser is Patricia Morison.

Robert Butler’s most recent publication is The Alchemist Exposed (Oberon 2006). From 1995-2000 he was drama critic of the Independent on Sunday. See www.robertbutler.info

Wallace Heim has written on social practice art and the work of PLATFORM, Basia Irland and Shelley Sacks. Her doctorate in philosophy investigated nature and performance. Her previous career was as a set designer for theatre and television/film.

Kellie Gutman worked with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture for twenty years, producing video programmes and slide presentations for both the Aga Khan Foundation and the Award for Architecture.

Patricia Morison is an executive officer of the Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts, a group of grant-making trusts of which the Ashden Trust is one.

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Technology, culture, Rodney King, Ian Tomlinson and Damien McBride

Two very modern stories, and one slightly older one:

1) Attempting to grasp the new digital culture, the UKâ€™s Labour party falls foul of it instead when Gordon Brownâ€™s protege Damien McBride is caught plotting to feed bloggers malevolent disinformation.

2) Protestors, long warning of the evils of surveillance culture, suddenly find that surveillance has its uses when horrendous footage of the beating of Ian Tomlinson emerges, to be followed yesterday by more amateur phone video of another police assault on a G20 protestor.

The socio-technological earthquake continues to alter the way our culture unfolds in surprising ways. The omnipresence of continually updated digital representations of our world is altering our relationship to it in ways that are both dangerous and liberating.

Blogger Tomorrow Museum suggested something like this recently, kicking off with Momusâ€™s idea of the 1:1 ratio of experience to writing. For the slightly Eeyore-ish artist/musician Momus, the suggestion that we now turn every act into content – a blog, a Tweet- is something of a worry. For Tomorrow Museum, though, this world in which everyone becomes a witness is a safer place. He cites the filmed beating of Rodney King – the assault that started the LA Riots – as a starting point of this info earthquake.

The paradox is that while Damien McBrideâ€™s actions are now witnessed and scrutinised, weâ€™ve also lived through a decade in which around seven million have been killed or died in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia with barely any witness at all.

And having met Rodney King a couple of times while I was working in South Central Los Angeles, I wouldnâ€™t envy anyone who becomes part of the info-maelstrom. The film of Rodney Kingâ€™s beating became a focal point for civil rights activism, but King himself was not a man who ever asked for the attention, who felt tragically responsible for the deaths that happened in the ensuing riots, and who appeared to be just as much a victim of the all attention he had as of that original police assault.

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