Stills from a live-animated installation I've been working for the last few days. Flybys of a mathematical object, a three-dimensional visualisation, built in Processing, of the amount of daylight by day-of-year and latitude. Tomorrow is the equinox: at just 50km from the Arctic Circle, the days are changing length faster now than at any other time of the year, seven minutes a day of extra sunlight.
I'm in Húsavík, Iceland, for a month, in residence at the Fjúk art centre. I'm doing digital work, mostly using Processing, exploring natural phenomena: daylight variation by latitude, eclipses (we had one today!), geophysics.
Húsavík is a small town in the north of Iceland: fishing and whale watching are the main activities. People are friendly in that undemonstrative Nordic way. I've been here for five days and I know a few people: Arzu my studio-mate, Eggert, Marina, a progenitor of Fjúk, Hei∂∂i, Giuditta, Francesco, Dave. I know more people, awkwardly, with whom I've had interactions in a combination of their excellent English and my shameful, hello-point-thankyou Icelandic: at the pub, the bakery, the supermarket. When the day is nice (which at the end of winter at 66° north is hardly ever) I try to go for a run, to explore the landscape and to breathe deeply the cold, clean air.
It's wonderful opportunity: of course I miss my partner K, my family, my workmates, but it has never been easier to work and play and create from anywhere on Earth.
I'm in the discomforting position of having the great majority of my books in storage, hidden in boxes, accessible in theory but opaque to my immediate view. I find myself unmoored, unsure of where I've been and where I'm going. Mike Jones write about his own collections:
“...in recent years I have moved so regularly and am so perpetually short of shelf space that I never seem to get them into any order.
Regardless, I know what’s there and why. In and between them all – even the bad ones – I see stories and memories, narratives and connections, hidden delights and buried sorrows.”
A well-thumbed book is easier to decode than a braid of browser histories, split between devices and applications and operating systems: our flirtations with different philosophies, our passing interests and intellectual crushes are lost from view. Now Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr and Reddit and Hacker News and Metafilter and Boingboing and Audible and Kindle conspire to disappear what we read.
An old person, their senses dwindling, dwindles all the quicker when taken out of their homes, away from the familiar accretions of a life. Our habitual surroundings provide context, confirmation of who we are. What does this unpapered, unremembered reading do to us? Can we find ways to archive our own experiences, to help us understand how we've become ourselves?
Time to plaster the walls and put up the shelves and unpack my boxes of books.
New Year's resolutions are nowadays considered gauche, and yet the similarities between all our wishes tell us something important. We all want to eat better, exercise more, be smarter with our money, make better choices; we all want to find partners, or keep them, or be better for them, or to reconcile ourselves to their absence; we all want to be better children, siblings, parents, colleagues, citizens. We all want to be better human beings.
For most of us, the new year comes during a time when our normal routines are temporarily suspended, where we achieve some critical distance from which to question our everyday behaviours, so it's not surprising that we come to think that our efforts over the last year have not been those of our best selves. Our days are long and full of compromise; our short-term desires are incompatible with our long-term goals; we long to live with clarity, to trace a straight path between decision and action, to live without frustration or regret. What better time than now to encourage ourselves to live the lives we think we should?
Wanting to be a better person is a resolution worth making.
When the government loses the confidence of the people, it loses legitimacy.
When our institutions are weakened by greed, by corruption, by pandering to ignorance or fear, they lose legitimacy.
Leadership is nothing without the consent of those who follow.
