Ethnographies of the imagination

JUNE 2014

ATTRIBUTES (26)

No 01

ETHNO– GRAPHIES Alcohol Amusements/Games Beach chair Bodies on display Danger/Risk (violence, injury, accident) Distant Domestication (sign of human developtment) Food Greenery Healing/Therapy Holiday/Escape Horizon Island Locals/Natives Luxury

OF THE IMAGINATION Volume I

Mild Ocean Palm tree Sand Service (food, drink) Sex/Romance Shelter Sunset Umbrella Unspoiled/Pristine Warm

:

The Beach LANA Z PORTER

“The first frontier was the horizon.

Originating in voyages of discovery, a mysterious Orient, a boundless overseas or a far west, there has always been a frontier to occupy the western imagination.”

Marc Augé, Non-Places (p. XIV)

3

PREFACE

195,000 years Before Present, we went to the beach.1 So that you can start to imagine what this might have been like, I have bathed the page in an orange-red glow. This is to imitate a sunset of the kind you might have experienced had you been on the southern coast of Africa 195,000 years ago. As you can see, it is not very different from what you might find today.

Now that your eyes have adjusted, and you have settled into your present location, I will continue with my history of the beach. The beach, you see, is what many of us in the West imagine when we imagine Paradise. So, in effect, I will be telling a history of Paradise. Please do not take offense if the beach is not your Paradise. I am simply tracing a legacy that took root in modern history, and has intensified since the eye replaced the ear2 and the image outshone the experience.

195,000 years ago, our ancestors survived the population bottleneck of the glacial period by exploiting the abundant resources at Pinnacle Point, a promontory overlooking the Indian Ocean on the southeastern coast of South Africa.

On that small swathe of coast we made The Great Leap Forward. With the magnificent manual dexterity afforded to us by the metacarpal styloid process we bound arrowheads to wooden sticks and crafted beads out of shells. We expressed complex symbolic thoughts.

Here, the coming and going of the tide and the rising and setting of the sun and moon instilled within us the eternal rhythm of time. We perceived the coherence of the universe.

Eyes fixed on the singular and infinite plane where the ocean meets the sky, we were mesmerized. The horizon — boundless yet unchanging — gave us leave to look beyond the immediacy of the present. And as the sun, setting, bathed the beach in an orange-red glow, we constructed new worlds called fantasies.

1

Marean, Curtis W. “When the Sea Saved Humanity.” Scientific American, August 1, 2010. Accessed February 25, 2014. http://www. scientificamerican.com/article/when-the-seasaved-humanity/.

2

Marshall McLuhan, on the sensory barter that took place in the transition from oral culture to literacy (Understanding Media, 1964).

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CONTENTS

PAGES

PREFACE

5

INTRODUCTION Lana Z Porter

9

- 14

PART I LANDSCAPES: THE NEW BEACHES

17 – 45

TIMELINE: A HISTORY OF PARADISE

48 – 71

PART II INTERVIEW WITH DR. STEPHEN M. KOSSLYN

74 – 77

BORROWED MEMORIES (AFTER LUIGI GHIRRI)

78 – 79

INTERVIEW WITH DR. MOSHE BAR

82 – 87

SALT José Fernandes Da Silva

88 – 89

STOUT CORTÉS LOOKED UPON THE PACIFIC AND MARVELLED Dr. Jens Koed Madsen

92 – 94

SWIMMING THE LINE James A. Holliday

96

Jessie Bond

PART III DATA

98 – 101

THEME I

ATTRIBUTES

COMFORT

Alcohol Beach Chair Domestication Food Healing/Therapy Luxury Mild Service (Food, Drink) Shelter Umbrella Warm

7

INTRODUCTION

SUSPENDING DISBELIEF In the fall of 2012, I moved from New York City to London to attend the Master’s program in “Design Interactions” at the Royal College of Art. Having previously studied cultural anthropology with a focus on science and technology, I feared that my highly rational, academic orientation might get in the way of the ability to think the kinds of creative thoughts that would be expected of me. My beliefs about the world had been governed by reason — derived from ordered observations and direct experiences — and from what I could tell, design school was going to require a little more imagination.

Anthropology’s classical concern with the past, with tradition and heritage, as well as with the here and now, operates within the realm of the observable and the evidentiary. Through ethnography, the anthropologist seeks to understand the world by facilitating structured interactions with individuals and communities in context. What can you infer about people from the way they behave or communicate, or the objects and symbols they use?

What is the logic behind their particular ways of being in the world right now, and what does that tell us about the beliefs and values they hold?

In Design, I learned early on that one of the most valuable tools one could have is the ability to suspend disbelief. To understand how the world could be different, we must overcome the rational pull toward the probable, or simply the plausible, and open ourselves up to the possible. What if there were no rules? What if our own reality were just one of many lenses through which to view the world?

Speculative design in particular concerns itself with proposing alternative futures that allow us to examine, as well as challenge, our expectations and pre-conceived beliefs about the future. It does so by taking advantage of the uniquely human ability to engage in ‘mental time travel,’ which allows us to “...mentally project [ourselves] backwards in time to re-live, or forwards to pre-live, events.”1

1

Suddendorf, Thomas and Michael C. Corballis, “The evolution of foresight: What is mental travel, and is it unique to humans?”

Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30, no. 3 (June 2007): 299.

The ability to imagine how things could be — or could have been — transcends not just the past, present, and future, but also the fields of anthropology and design. For what I have learned in the past two years is that imagination plays a central role in how we see and experience the world, how we manage uncertainty, and how we create and embrace change. As Vincent Crapanzano writes in Imaginative Horizons, imagination allows us to “distance ourselves from present realities.”2 Imagination takes root in what we believe, by virtue of the experiences we’ve had, the sensations we’ve perceived, our memories, and the values we hold. At the same time, it articulates our hopes, aspirations, and fears, both within and outside of the context of everyday realities. Understanding imagination requires interpretation (of the past, present, and future) as well as construction, anthropology as well as design.

This journal provides a forum for exploring how imagination guides us towards the future, while reflecting, and sometimes getting stuck in, the past.

It documents a collection of ideas set into orbit during my final year as a graduate student at the Royal College of Art, bringing together ideas from the fields of cognitive neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and computer science. In it, I act as an editor, a curator, a narrator, and an instigator. I am neither fully an anthropologist nor fully a designer, but rather an Ethnographer of Imagination, fusing the analytical toolkit of the anthropologist with the creative toolkit of the designer to interpret imagination as well as construct it.

The Good Life In The Future as Cultural Fact, Arjun Appadurai suggests the need for an anthropology of the future that takes root in the examination of imagination, anticipation, and aspiration. Together, these three

2

Crapanzano, Vincent, Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 19.

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faculties “...produce the future as a specific cultural form or horizon,”3 which can tell us more about how we interact with and think about the future. Furthermore, what he calls the “capacity to aspire”

because it has been with us since the beginning.

Prehistory... returns in the form of “second nature,’ ensuring that as fantasy overextends itself, turning memories into bodily symptoms and corporeal signs, so a newly buoyant language moves us into the seas as our very bodies might.6

...takes its force within local systems of value, meaning, communication, and dissent. Its form is recognizably

Perhaps it started 195,000 years ago, when we thrived at Pinnacle Point on the southeastern coast institutional norms, which tend to be highly specific. 4 of South Africa. Or maybe it was Captain Cook’s thoroughly-chronicled voyages through the South Seas, the tales of which still remain fresh in our Appadurai suggests that an inquiry into the capacities collective memory. Throughout history, the beach has of aspiration, imagination, and anticipation might begin occupied the Western imagination, encapsulating with our ideas about the good life.5 Grounded in the a set of beliefs, values, and ideals about the world, particularities of individual experience and belief while drawing from collective understandings of what is useful about the way we want to live, and about what is important to us. or good, imaginaries, as shared collections of beliefs, values, and symbols, are instructive for tracing the ways in which a set of idea(l)s form within a society. Revealing A Google Image search of the word “paradise” returns image after image of white sandy beaches, the legacy of these ideals reveals the memories that turquoise water, and palm trees, (with the occasional have sustained them. woman in a bikini, thatched hut, setting sun, or endless pier). If Google says it, then it must be true: What is the “good life” for which we strive? This project the notion of the beach as a paradise has entered the confronts a vision of the good life at its most extreme. collective consciousness whether we like it or not, That is, the notion of paradise. For the good life has its whether we know it or not. utopian dimensions, and the myth of paradise, in spite of —or perhaps owing to— its mythical status, remains firmly fixed within the collective imagination, informing our beliefs about the kinds of futures we should want, The Beach (A Memory) and guiding our visions beyond the probable and into the realm of the possible.

For humans to understand, we must throw our myths ahead universal, but its force is distinctly local and cannot be separated from language, social values, histories, and

of us, passing through them to experience the world. The

How are these paradisiacal visions formed, adopted, and internalized? What role does memory play in their construction? To answer these questions, I jogged my own memory to think about particularly Western, particularly American notions of paradise.

I recalled Anthropologist Michael Taussig’s 2000 essay, “The Beach (A Fantasy).” In it, he posits that the beach has, over time, taken hold in our collective memory as a place “...where nature and carnival blend as prehistory in the dialectical image of modernity.”

The beach, he says, finds its place in our visions of paradise, and edges into the realm of fantasy,

question is never, Are we shaped by our myths? Rather it is, How conscious are we of our myths?7

The question is not whether the beach is a paradise, but rather, whether it affects our ability to imagine new paradises. Are we conscious of its ubiquity as a vision of the good life? How does it influence our ability to form new memories, “forget” old ones, and update our beliefs as circumstances change and we seek paradise elsewhere?

Bolstering the collective imaginary are memories that have over time become “bodily symptoms,” moving

3

Appadurai, Arjun. The Future as Cultural Fact. (London, UK: Verso, 2013), 286.

6

Taussig, Michael. “The Beach (A Fantasy),” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 2 (Winter 2000), 276.

4

Appadurai, The Future as Cultural Fact, 290.

7

5

Appadurai, The Future as Cultural Fact. 292.

McGaughey, Douglas. “Through Myth to Imagination.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 56, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 51-76.73

10

from the realm of conscious thought to unconscious instinct.8 From Plutarch’s description of the “Isles of the Blest” to the Brazilian bikini wax, from the Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ USA” to our very own sandcastles, we have built a store of memories that automatically influence the contents of our imagination. Cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Moshe Bar of the Gonda Interdisciplinary Brain Institute in Tel Aviv explains: ...we do not interpret our world merely by analyzing incoming information, but rather we try to understand it using a proactive link of incoming features to existing, familiar, information... [i.e. our memories].9

How do we forget the old patterns, and create new ones? Is it possible to think beyond the Google Image version of paradise, as well as all the historical, geographical, literary, and cultural event that led us to that image? In machine learning, changing the pattern simply means changing the formal rules by which the machine interprets information. Since the beginning of the artificial intelligence era, computer scientists have developed methods that help computers learn about the world by constructing algorithms that encode sets of rules for discovering patterns within large datasets. A pattern is the sum of all formal characteristics of something. It can be a word, an object, or something more abstract.13

To look forward we must also look back. Indeed, the act of remembering and the act of imagining share similar regions in the brain.10 11 If the pool of memories from which we draw to make sense of — and build on top of — the world becomes stagnant, so too will our imagination.

Frederich Nietzsche emphasized the importance of “active forgetting” for maintaining positive social illusions that help us move on from the past.12 Unfortunately, the act of forgetting is not as simple as erasing a hard drive, and it is more than a conscious choice to “keep the past in the past.” Our memories guide the world of our perception; they are containers of belief, and roadmaps for coping with novelty. The worlds we create around ourselves are the result of an unconscious pattern-seeking logic that orients us toward the familiar, the useful, the safe, or the normal (as a result of what’s in our memories) in order to reduce uncertainty. As the world changes, we try to maintain control by seeking what we know.

8

9

In his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, psychologist Daniel Kahneman cites Herbert Spencer’s observation that intuition is “...nothing more and nothing less than recognition.” Kahneman writes, “...the mystery of knowing without knowing is not a distinctive feature of intuition; it is the normal of mental life” (p. 237).

The more familiar we are with something, the more second-nature our responses become when cued within that domain. This can work against us when it comes to imagination. The more familiar the Google Image version of paradise becomes, the more space it occupies in our memory, and the more likely we are to recognize it, or to seek it out, with or without realizing it.

Bar, Moshe, “The Proactive Brain,” In Predictions in the Brain: Using Our Past to Generate a Future, edited by Moshe Bar, 13-

For humans, unlearning and re-learning is particularly difficult. There is no button to erase or blur the memories of the past; only new experiences can help rewrite and reshape our models of the world.14

How do we move beyond old patterns and form new experiences? How can we create new visions that help us engage with a variety of futures — futures that reflect and respond to the world as it changes?

We must change the patterns.

Disambiguating Paradise The Ethnographer of Imagination constructs worlds to interpret our own. What would paradise look like if the images we have in our heads were separated from the beliefs and values they embody? Would we like what we see?

26 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011), 14.

10

Addis, Donna Rose, Alana T. Wong, Daniel L. Schacter, “Remembering the past and imagining the future: Common and distinct neural substrates during event construction and elaboration,” Neuropsychologia 45, no. 7 (2007): 1363-1377.

11

Hassabis, Demis and Eleanor A. Maguire, “Deconstructing episodic memory with construction,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11, no. 7 (July 2007): 299-306.

12

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. (New York, NY: Vintage, 1989).

Tanase, Diana, (personal communication, May 9, 2014).

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13 14

To explore these questions, I conducted a survey of the history of the beach as a paradise, beginning with Pinnacle Point and ending with the Google Image search. Drawn mainly from American and European sources, including historical documents, paintings, films, songs, cultural events, and websites,15 the timeline reflects a patchwork of references (fragments of the collective memory) that have, over time, structured the notion of the beach as a paradise.

Using the timeline as a data set, I extracted the discrete attributes that describe what makes the beach a paradise in each of the references. From a list of 120 attributes in total, I calculated which occur most frequently, and ended up with a final set of 26. Ranging from the concrete (sand, ocean, palm tree, horizon, sunset) to the abstract (pristine/ unspoiled, distant, healing, service), the attributes reflect the range of beliefs and values embedded in the collective imaginary.

Out of context, however, the attributes take on a new set of meanings, and form a new set of patterns from which to imagine new outcomes. Decoupled from the beach itself, the attributes might inspire very different landscapes. I pulled together the list of attributes and created a design brief titled “Generating a Landscape,” which I posted on freelance websites and landscape modeling message boards, and distributed amongst friends.

With a direct pipeline to Olivia and Mark and a rapport from having worked together before, it was easier to emphasize the importance of thinking like a computer by trying to expel any expectations or preconceived ideas of what the landscape might be, given the attributes. They took it to heart, and created the image as if they were an algorithm, searching for features, keywords, and other cues that matched (or might be mistaken for) the attributes on the list. The final landscape bears little resemblance to a beach.

The other artists approached the project differently.

When first drafts started arriving in my inbox, I realized just how difficult it is to think like a computer.

Memory took over, and the landscapes became direct reflections of the degree to which particular attributes are embedded in the collective imagination.

From the composition of the image and the way the attributes are combined, one can see which memories have the strongest pull, and which fall to the wayside when taken out of context.

In the process of working with each of the artists, categories emerged to describe the different attributes: themes of separation, exclusivity and privacy, comfort, protection, control and domination, nature and beauty, and pleasure, entertainment, and thrill. Among the artists, there was a sense that the attributes came from something that might have been good at first, but, somewhere along the way, went awry. In his initial pitch, one of the artists wrote:

Without mention of the beach, or of paradise, I asked artists to act as human computers to render new landscape from the list of 26 attributes. The instruction to think like a computer was intended to encourage an objective, logical approach to the task, as if the attributes were search terms or parameters within a piece of software. Looking at the attributes in this way might help distance ourselves from our own memories and make room for new ones.

I had been thinking of what, at first glance, might be an ad for a resort on the “Med” or a Mexican beer commercial.

That is, a beach umbrella, couple of beach chaises, long sandy white beach... and the view is out towards the ocean and the waves, except there are no waves. Where the ocean should be is a landscape of what it would look like if all the water was drained off; or perhaps some Martian terrain of impossible cliffs and valleys. Further in the background, a Hellish “Mordor” type landscape of volcanoes and lava.

In total, seven artists, including two friends, answered the brief.16 My friend Olivia was the only woman, and, from what I could tell, the only person under the age of thirty. She and a mutual friend, Mark, worked together to construct a single landscape.

15

This survey was aided in part by the book The Beach: A History of Paradise on Earth by Lena Lencek (1999).

16

There were four artists from the United States (including two friends who worked

12

There’d have to be lots of atmospheric perspective so that the weirdness of the scene wasn’t immediately apparent.

The scene is framed with rich tropical plants.17

During a conversation with Olivia, she mentioned that

together), one from England, one from Canada, and one from India.

17

Turner, Patrick, (personal communication, May 6, 2014).

ATTRIBUTES (26)

the attributes are not far from what one might find at a strip club, or a celebrity rehab facility. She and Mark’s final image juxtaposes a glitzy golf club with an old bus shelter, separated by a wall with a security gatehouse.

The foreground, sparse and sandy, reads like a desert, while the background, with its rolling green hills receding into the horizon, reads like a sea of plenty. It is a beach of a different kind.

Alcohol Amusements/Games Beach chair Bodies on display Danger/Risk (violence, injury, accident) Distant Domestication (sign of human developtment) Food Greenery Healing/Therapy Holiday/Escape Horizon Island Locals/Natives Luxury Mild Ocean Palm tree Sand Service (food, drink) Sex/Romance Shelter Sunset Umbrella Unspoiled/Pristine Warm

The final landscapes, each individual visions united by the same component parts, are uncanny amalgamations of places that seem familiar, but look strange.18 As reflections of the beliefs and values embodied in our notion of paradise, the landscapes hint at a fundamental dissonance between what the good life should be, and, perhaps, what it has become.

In a recent New York Times story on the Dark Mountain Project, a movement that openly seeks to acknowledge the impending end of civilization, cofounder Dougald Hine said,

18

I was interested in employing Bertolt Brecht’s alienation effect (verfremdungseffekt) as a way of creating a critical distance between the viewer and the image. By exposing the discrete parts (memories) that make up the whole of the imaginary, what was once familiar becomes strange, and the audience must consider the subject matter in a new light.

19

Smith, Daniel. “It’s the End of the World as We Know It... and He Feels Fine.” New York Times, April 17, 2014. Accessed April 19, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/ magazine/its-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-knowit-and-he-feels-fine.html?_r=0

20

Dr. Jens Koed Madsen expands upon the logic of persuasion and its relationship to Bayesian probability theory his essay “Stout Cortés look upon the Pacific and Marvelled” (XX).

People think that abandoning belief in progress, abandoning the belief that if we try hard enough we can fix this mess, is a nihilistic position. They think we’re saying: ‘Screw it.

Nothing matters.’ But in fact all we’re saying is: ‘Let’s not pretend we’re not feeling despair. Let’s sit with it for a while.

Let’s be honest with ourselves and with each other. And then as our eyes adjust to the darkness, what do we start to notice?19

Suspending Belief The unconscious logic of memory leads the imagination to strange places. The landscapes, as ethnographic experiments in transcription from a set of “objective” attributes to inherently “subjective” worlds, reveal a set of beliefs and values that are at once personal and collective. The new “beaches” bear some resemblance to the Google Image version but hint at something darker and more complex.

The project seeks to provide a new way of examining how a collective imaginary takes hold. How willing are we to accept the new landscapes as reflections of our values? How persuasive are they?20 Sit with them, and let your eyes adjust. Confronted with images that are perhaps not what we want or expect to see, we must decide whether to overlook them and carry on, or take the time to consider why we like or

13

loathe them, and what to do about it.

The fields of anthropology, design, cognitive neuroscience, machine learning, and philosophy (among many others) are converging as they seek to address some of the most pressing issues of the contemporary era, from global climate change to social and economic inequality to political violence.

The question of whether to address these issues or to ignore them in favor of a vision of the “good life” is one that presents itself with increasing frequency and urgency in our lives.

This project attempts to illustrate how memory and imagination are undeniably and unconditionally bound up in this choice, and in our ability to propose alternatives if we choose to take action. Our direct and indirect experiences, stored as memories, characterize the beliefs that inform our imagination about the future, as well as our choices in the present. Ethnographies of the Imagination, as observations of and interventions into the imagination as a cultural phenomenon, challenge us to suspend disbelief about how things could be, while also suspending belief about the way they already are.

From Here (to Eternity) The following pages are a montage of ideas that have coexisted and coevolved over the past year. As the first volume of Ethnographies of the Imagination, it combines specific reference to the project (and the beach in particular) with larger topics of imagination, memory, belief, and perception.

Part I presents the final landscape renderings, as well as the timeline from which the attributes were drawn.

Part II is a collection of interviews, stories, and essays that have inspired, or been inspired by, the project.

First, an interview with cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Stephen M. Kosslyn expands upon the relationship

14

between memory and mental imagery, revealing specific ways in which mental imagery can reflect unconscious beliefs and attitudes. Next, Jessie Bond’s short story “Borrowed Memories” makes sense of a trip to the beach through a layering of memories of previous beach experiences. Then, a conversation with cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Moshe Bar connects memory and perception, exploring how expectations based on previous experience can influence the way we perceive the world. In “Salt,” José Fernandes da Silva writes about a beach romance complicated by unsettling memories and irrepressible urges. Next, an essay by Dr. Jens Koed Madsen examines the subjective and creative nature of persuasion, drawing from Bayesian models of rationality to explain how we update our beliefs based on new information.

Finally, “Swimming the Line,” a short story by James A. Holliday, records the transformational experience of swimming in a former industrial channel on the coast of Southampton, England.

Part III is a modified index that lists all of the attributes raw, edited, and separated by theme. It includes a visualization of the data that correlates points on the timeline with their corresponding attributes.

THEME II

ATTRIBUTES

CONTROL DOMINATION

Beach Chair Bodies On Display Domestication Locals/Natives Luxury Service (Food, Drink) Sex/Romance Shelter Umbrella

15

PART I

LANDSCAPES

17

BEACH 01-A

ATTRIBUTES (10/26)

Richard Fraser UK

Beach Chair Bodies On Display Distant Horizon Mild Sand Shelter Umbrella Unspoiled/Pristine Warm

20

BEACH 01-B

ATTRIBUTES (17/26)

Richard Fraser UK

Beach Chair Bodies On Display Danger/Risk Distant Greenery Holiday/Escape Horizon Island Mild Ocean Palm Tree Sand Shelter Sunset Umbrella Unspoiled/Pristine Warm

24

BEACH 02

ATTRIBUTES

Patrick Turner Canada

Alcohol Beach Chair Distant Greenery Holiday/Escape Mild Ocean Palm Tree Sand Service (Food, Drink) Shelter Sunset Umbrella

28

BEACH 03

ATTRIBUTES (26/26)

Thomas M. Grimes USA

Alcohol Amusements/Games Beach Chair Bodies On Display Danger/Risk Distant Domestication Food Greenery Healing/Therapy Holiday/Escape Horizon Island Locals/Natives Luxury Mild Ocean Palm Tree Sand Service (Food, Drink) Sex/Romance Shelter Sunset Umbrella Unspoiled/Pristine Warm

32

BEACH 04

ATTRIBUTES (19/26)

Olivia Vanter Tuig Mark Lewis USA

Alcohol Amusements/Games Bodies On Display Danger/Risk Distant Domestication Food Horizon Locals/Natives Luxury Mild Ocean Palm Tree Sand Service (Food, Drink) Shelter Sunset Unspoiled/Pristine Warm

36

BEACH 05

ATTRIBUTES (19/26)

Michael Tello USA

Alcohol Beach Chair Danger/Risk Distant Healing/Therapy Holiday/Escape Horizon Island Luxury Mild Ocean Palm Tree Sand Sex/Romance Shelter Sunset Umbrella Unspoiled/Pristine Warm

40

41

BEACH 06

ATTRIBUTES (9/26)

Satish India

Domestication Greenery Luxury Mild Ocean Palm Tree Sand Shelter Warm

44

>> >> >>

From: Lana Z Porter To: Satish Date: May 02, 2014, 9:22 am

Hello Satish, Thank you for your proposal!

I have attached a PDF which includes a brief for the project. I am curious to know what you think and how you might approach it!

Thanks again, and All Best, Lana >> >> >>

From: Satish To: Lana Z Porter Date: May 02, 2014, 9:44 am

Hi Lana, I saw the pdf and go through it. Can you mark the land area where we are going to create realisation of landscape design and 2nd thing i want to let you know that it will take around 7 days because as we know it is totally visualisation so it will have several changes and revisions work.

We do not charge for revisions as it is included in total budget.

Please let me know. Thanks Satish >> >> >>

From: Satish To: Lana Z Porter Date: May 02, 2014, 11:04 am

Hi Lana, Can you send me little more information about your exact requirements. or any image or link similar to your requirements.

Thanks satish >> >> >>

From: Lana Z Porter To: Satish Date: May 02, 2014, 11:06 am

Hi Satish, The idea behind the project is that this location is imaginary. So there is no specific land area where it takes place -- the landscape is simply a reflection of those attributes listed in the brief.

So, using the attributes, I am looking to generate the landscape from scratch.

In general, I think it would be best if the image were slightly zoomed out/from a distance, with a long depth of field.

I’m not sure if that helps to answer your question. Please let me know if you have 45

more questions -- I understand that this is an unusual request!

All the Best, Lana >> >> >>

From: Satish To: Lana Z Porter Date: May 02, 2014, 11:27 am

Now i understand what you need. do you have any rough idea or sketches that you want to visualise. >> >> >>

From: Lana Z Porter To: Satish Date: May 02, 2014, 11:34 am

Hi Satish, I hesitate to give you any sketches because I am hoping the image comes from the attributes and your own imagination. I think it will be quite helpful to use the attributes to create rules for how the image is put together. (I talk more about this in the brief).

The image references in the brief are useful as guides for the scale/composition of the image, as well as the mood. They are all a bit weird/quirky, on the border between real and unreal.

I hope that helps. I know it’s a difficult task, but I am very open to whatever you are moved to create! It is more important for the final image to reflect the attributes in interesting ways than for it to look like a polished, perfect place.

Thanks again, and please let me know if you have more questions!

Regards, Lana >> >> >>

From: Satish To: Lana Z Porter Date: May 02, 2014, 12:15 pm

Hi Lana. First you will have to make a rough sketches something that is moving in your mind. we will also make some rough sketches and will send to you after that we will combine both sketch designs and we will reach a point.

Once the rough sketch of design is finalized then we will convert that sketch into realistic photograph image and this way we can proceed.

Please let me know is it fine for you?

Thanks Satish

46

>> >> >>

From: Lana Z Porter To: Satish Date: May 02, 2014, 3:59 pm

Hi Satish, I know it’s not traditional for the client not to have a specific desire for the final image... but this project is about interpretation and imagination. If I provide a sketch, it will influence what you imagine this landscape to be. I am looking for someone who will use his or her own imagination, to think about what these attributes would look like in a landscape?

There are very concrete attributes like “land,” “water,” “island,” “shelter,” “horizon...” all of these things one can imagine quite clearly. Some of the other attributes are more abstract, which takes some interpretation. Like I said, turning them into rules/parameters might help.

If you refer to page 12 of the brief, you’ll see a photograph of a beach with a pool and a lamp, rocks, and a man on a horse. Even though the scene is real, it feels strange. It is as if someone just said “rock,” “horse” “beach” “pool” “lamp” and this is the image that came out.

I am asking for something similar -- I am providing elements, but you are putting them together in as realistic a way as possible. You don’t have to use all of the attributes, but as many as you can!

Please use the reference images as guides for the mood and scale. Other than that, I can’t provide much more, or else I will be influencing your imagination too much! Like I said, this is open to the interpretation.

Thanks again, and all Best, Lana >> >> >>

From: Satish To: Lana Z Porter Date: May 02, 2014, 4:07 pm

Ok, Thanks for your valuable response. I agree with you and will proceed with this method. Please let me know the total no. of render required at final stage from our created scene. >> >> >>

From: Lana Z Porter To: Satish Date: May 02, 2014, 4:17 am

Thank you for being so understanding. This is certainly not a typical project!

I am hoping to have 2 views of the final landscape. Perhaps just different angles/ points of view.

The images will be printed in the end, so they will have to be quite high resolution.

47

>> >> >>

From: Satish To: Lana Z Porter Date: May 05, 2014, 3:37 pm

Hi Lana, Thank you. The scene is in rendering process it will finish by next 1 hr.

I have drawn a rough idea of some water, sands and some palm tree , also i have place a building. It is just for idea. after this we will discuss and add more details by revisions and puting your and our ideas.

I am about to send you in next 1 hr.

Thanks!

//

[Rough _ Draft _ View _ 5-5-2014.jpg]

>>

From: Lana Z Porter To: Satish Date: May 05, 2014, 5:30 pm

>> >>

Hello there, Thank you so much for so quickly designing a draft! I think there are some very nice elements. My concern is mainly that the image should be about the landscape, not the building.

I’m sorry that the brief is confusing. I know it’s a very different kind of task!

Would it be possible to see another draft in a few days?

Again, please let me know if you have questions.

All the Best, Lana

//

4 days pass

>>

From: Satish To: Lana Z Porter Date: May 09, 2014, 11:36 am

>> >>

Hi Lana, my designer is working on it if he is able to send something definitely i will send to you.

Thanks

//

48

4 days pass

>> >> >>

From: Lana Z Porter To: Satish Date: May 13, 2014, 8:05 am

Dear Satish, I hope you are well.

I wondered if the image is ready today? Time is getting a bit tight, so please let me know as soon as you can.

All the Best, Lana >> >> >>

From: Satish To: Lana Z Porter Date: May 13, 2014, 8:35 am

Hi Lana, I will send you updates today by the end of the day, if you have any suggestion or any rough sketch you can send to me.

Thanks Satish

//

End

49

TIMELINE

50

THEME III

ATTRIBUTES

EXCLUSIVITY PRIVACY

Beach Chair Distant Holiday/Escape Island Luxury Service (Food, Drink) Umbrella Unspoiled/Pristine

51

DATE

195,000 B.P.

15 B.C.

∟ Baiae, the first “beach resort” Rome

EVENT

52

∟ Pinnacle Point, South Africa

75 A.D.

IV Century A.D.

∟ Fig.1 “The Bikini Girls” Mosaic of Ten Athletic Women Villa Romana del Casale, Piazza Armerina, Sicily

∟ The Parallel Lives “The Life of Sertorius” Plutarch

“These are called the Islands of the Blest; rains fall there seldom, and in moderate showers, but for the most part they have gentle breezes, bringing along with them soft dews, which render the soil not only rich for plowing and planting, but so abundantly fruitful that it produces spontaneously an abundance of delicate fruits, sufficient to feed the inhabitants, who may here enjoy all things without trouble or labor.”

53

VI Century A.D.

XVI Century A.D.

1616-1620

∟ Beach Zoning Laws Justinian the Great

∟ Fig.2 “The Bathers” Jacques Callot

∟ “Bathing season” emerged Germany, Italy

54

1658

1712

∟ Fig.3 “The beach at Scheveningen” Adriaen van de Velde

∟ Joseph Addison in the Spectator

“[O]f all Objects that I have ever seen, there is none which affects my Imagination so much as the Sea or Ocean.

I cannot see the Heavings of this prodigious Bulk of Waters, even in a Calm, without a very pleasing Astonishment...”

55

1719

1748

“When I came down the hill to the shore, as I said above, being the S.W point of the island, I was perfectly confounded and amazed; nor is it possible for me to express the horror of my mind at seeing the shore spread with skulls, hands, feet, and other bones of human bodies; and particularly, I observed a place where there had been a fire made, and a circle dug in the earth, like a cockpit, where it is supposed the savage wretches had sat down to their inhuman feastings upon the bodies of their fellow-creatures.” ∟ The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe

∟ Scarborough, England A Bathing Establishment

56

1755

1766-1769

∟ Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Jean-Jacques Rousseau

∟ The Pacific Journal Louis Antoine de Bougainville

“These people breathe only rest and sensual pleasure.

Venus is the Goddess they worship.The mildness of the climate, the beauty of the scenery, the fertility of the soil everywhere watered by rivers and cascades, the pure air unspoiled by even those legions of insects that are the curse of hot countries, everything inspires sensual pleasure.”

57

1769

1773

“In the midst of these breakers 10 or 12 Indians were swimming who whenever a surf broke near them div’d under it with infinite ease, rising up on the other side; but their chief amusement was carried on by the stern of an old canoe, with this before them they swam out as far as the outermost breach, then one or two would get into it and opposing the blunt end to the breaking wave were hurried in with incredible swiftness.” ∟ Surf-riding in Tahiti The Endeavor Joseph Banks

58

∟ Fig.4 View of the Province of Oparree Island of Otaheite, William Hodges

1812

1820

∟ Fig.5 “A View in Tahiti” Augustus Earle ∟ The Swiss Family Robinson Johann David Wyss

“Our passage, though tedious, was safe; but the nearer we approached the shore the less inviting it appeared; the barren rocks seemed to threaten us with misery and want. By and by we began to perceive that, between and beyond the cliffs, green grass and trees were discernible.

Fritz could distinguish many tall palms, and Ernest hoped they would prove to be coconut trees, and enjoyed the thoughts of drinking the refreshing milk.”

59

1863

1863

∟ Fig.6 “Playa de Sainte-Adresse” Johan Barthold Jongkind

∟ Fig.7 The Beach at Trouville Claude Monet

60

1871

1890

1900

∟ Bank Holiday Act Brighton, Weymouth, Werthing, UK

∟ Fig.8 “From the pier” Brighton, England

∟ Fig.9 Scheveningen Beach, Netherlands

61

1905

∟ Fig.10 “They were on their honeymoon” St. Augustine, Florida

62

1907

1922

“The magic isle that glides over the seas; mariners sometimes see her near ...

And point their bows toward her blessed shore: Among unfamiliar flowers soar lofty palms, The divine aromatic forest, thick and lush, Weeping cardamom, seeping rubber sap ...

Herald like the arrival of a perfumed courtesan, The Island Never Found ...” ∟ “La più bella” Guido Gozzano

∟ Fig.11 Coney Island, New York

63

1924

1930

1940

∟ Fig.12 Paradise of the Pacific Magazine Cover H.B. Christian

∟ Fig.13 Miami Beach, Florida

∟ Copacabana Night Club opens New York, NY

64

1942

∟ Fig.14 “Sing Me a Song of the Islands” Betty Grable

1946

1953

∟ Fig.15 “From Here to Eternity” Dir. Fred Zinnemann

∟ Modern bikini introduced

by Jacques Heim Paris, France

65

1957

1963

1959

∟ Fig.16 Côte d’Azur Nice, France

66

∟

∟

Fig.17 “Beach Party” American International Pictures

Fig.18 “Gilligan’s Island” TV Series

1961

1963

1966

1967

∟ Fig.22 The “monokini” introduced Life Magazine

∟

∟

Fig.19 “Slicin’ Sand” Elvis Presley, in Blue Hawaii

Fig.20 “Surfin’ USA” The Beach Boys

∟ Fig.21 “The Endless Summer” Dir. Bruce Brown

67

1979

1987

If you like piña coladas And getting caught in the rain If you’re not into yoga, if you have half a brain If you like making love at midnight In the dunes of the cape Then I’m the love that you’ve looked for, Write to me and escape ∟ “Escape (If You Life Piña Coladas)” Robert Holmes

∟ Brazilian bikini wax New York, NY

68

1989

∟ Fig.23 “Baywatch” TV Series

69

1993

2012

∟ Fig.24 Sea Gaia Ocean Dome Miyazaki, Japana

∟ Fig.25 Paradise by Marriott Marriott Hotel

70

2013

âˆ&#x; Fig.26 Cheval Blanc Rhandeli Resort Maldives

71

2014

∟ Fig.27 “paradise” Google Image Search, UK 72

73

IMAGES Fig.1 “The Bikini Girls.” Villa Romana del Casale, Piazza Armerina, Sicily. 4th Century A.D. Mosaic. Accessed on April 2, 2014. http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Villa_romana_bikini_ girls.JPG. Fig.2 Callot, Jacques. “The Bathers, from Various Scenes Designed in Florence.” 1618–20. (Art Institute of Chicago). Etching on Paper. Accessed March 15, 2014. http://www.artic.edu/aic/ collections/artwork/77780?search_no=1&index=5.

Fig.3 van de Velde, Adriaen. “Het Strand van Scheveningen.” 1658. Oil on canvas. Accessed April 8, 2014. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ File:Het_Strand_van_Scheveningen,_Adriaen_van_ de_Velde_(1658).jpg.

Fig.4 Hodges, William. “View of the Province of Oparree, Island of Otaheite.” 1773. (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Ministry of Defense Art Collection). Oil on panel.

Accessed May 13, 2014) http://collections.rmg. co.uk/collections/objects/13414.html.

Fig.5 Earle, Augustus. “A View in Tahiti.”

1820. (National Library of Australia). Oil on canvas. Accessed April 2, 2014. http://nla.gov. au/nla.pic-an2272930.

Fig.6 Jongkind, Johan Barthold. “Playa de Sainte-Andresse.” 1863. Watercolor on paper. Accessed March 15, 2014. http://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/File:Johan_Barthold_Jongkind_005.jpg.

Fig.7 Monet, Claude. “The Beach at Trouville.”

1870. (The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art). Oil on canvas. Accessed April 26, 2014. http://www.thewadsworth.org/medieval-to-monetfrench-paintings-in-the-wadsworth- atheneum/.

Fig.8 “From the pier.” Brighton, England, 1890-1900. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.) Photograph. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print.

Fig.9 “The beach and hotels, Scheveningen, Holland.” 1890-1900. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.). Photograph. Accessed March 15, 2014. http:// hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsc.05861.

Fig.10 “They were on their honeymoon.” 19001905. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.). Photograph.

Accessed March 15, 2014. http://loc.gov/pictures/resource/det.4a28649/.

Fig.11 Rutter, Edward E, “Coney Island looking east from Steeplechase Pier showing Sunday bathers, crowd on beach,” July 30, 1922. (NYC Municipal Archives). Photograph. Accessed March 15, 2014. http://nycma.lunaimaging.com/luna/ servlet/detail/ RECORDSPHOTOUNITARC~29~29~74150 0~113962:bpb_02297.  Fig.12 Christian, H.B. Paradise of the Pacific Magazine Cover. December 1924. Accessed March 15, 2014. http://www.honolulumagazine.com/HonoluluMagazine/November-2013/HONOLULU- Magazine-andParadise-of-the-Pacific-125-Years-of-Covers/index. php? mode=popup&cp=7&view=slideshow&play=0.

74

Fig.13 Adams, Clifton R. “A group of people on Miami Beach sunbathe and look out on the ocean.”

Miami Beach, Florida, USA. 1930. (National Geographic Society/Corbis). Photograph. Accessed March 15, 2014. http://www.vintag.es/2013/04/ color-photos-of-florida-usa-in-1930s.html.

Fig.14 Grable, Betty. “Sing Me a Song of the Islands.” In Song of the Islands. Dir. Walter Lang. Twentieth Century Fox, 1942. Film Still.

Accessed April 1, 2014. https://www.youtube. com/ watch?v=WiW9lH0xc6Q. Fig.15 From Here to Eternity. Dir. Fred Zinnemann. Perf. Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr. Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1953. Film Still.

Accessed April 2, 2014. http://www.telegraph. co.uk/news/ celebritynews/9057386/From-Hereto-Eternity-is-given-extra-passion-by-Sir-TimRice.html.

Fig.16 Côte d’azure, Nice, France. 1957. Accessed March 15, 2014. http:// distractionsoflola.tumblr.com/image/607560784.

Fig.17 Beach Party. Dir. William Asher. Perf.

Robert Cummings, Dorothy Malone, Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, Morey Amsterdam. American International Pictures, 1963. Film Poster.

Accessed March 15, 2014. http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/File:Beachparty1.jpg.

Fig.18 Gilligan’s Island. Sherwood Schwartz.

Perf. Bob Denver, Alan Hale, Jr., Jim Backus, Natalie, Schafer, Tina Louise, Russell Johnson, Dawn Wells. United Artists Television, 1964-1967. Title Card. Accessed April 1, 2014. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gilligans_Island_title_card.jpg.

Fig.19 “Slicin’ Sand.” In Blue Hawaii. Dr. Norman Taurog. Perf. Elvis Presley. Paramount Pictures, Hal Wallis Productions, 1961. Film still. Accessed April 1, 2014. http://www.elvisinfonet.com/ spotlight_BlueHawaii.html.

Fig.20 “Surfin’ USA.” The Beach Boys. 1963.

Album Cover. Accessed April 2, 2014. http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Surfin%27USACover.jpg.

Fig.21 The Endless Summer. Dir. Bruce Brown.

Perf. Mike Hynson. Robert August, Miki Dora.

Cinema V, Monterey Media, 1966. Film Poster.

Accessed April 1, 2014. http:// justbrowsingopl.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/endless-summermovie- poster-1967-1020295533.jpg.

Fig.22 Life. January 27, 1967. Magazine Cover.

Accessed April 1, 2014. http:// bobbinsandbombshells.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/fashionable-history-swimwear-by- decade_28.html.

Fig.23 “Panic at Malibu Pier.” Baywatch. GTG Entertainment. 23 Apr. 1989. Production Still.

Accessed April 1, 2014. http://www.veronicamagazine.nl/entertainment/nieuws/3503-pamela-anderson- blaast-huwelijk-nieuw-leven-in.  Fig.24 “Sea Gaia Ocean Dome.” Miyazaki, Japan.

1993-2007. Photograph. Accessed April 2, 2014. http://www.taringa.net/posts/imagenes/16420456/ Las-10-piscinas-mas-sorprendentes-del- mundo.html.

TEXTS Fig.25 “Paradise by Marriot.” Marriott International, Inc. Website. Accessed March 16, 2014. http:// www.paradisebymarriott.com/.

Fig.26 “Randheli.” Cheval Blanc, LVMH Hotel Management. Website. Accessed March 16, 2014. http:// randheli.chevalblanc.com/en/.

Fig.27 “Paradise.” Google Image Search. Accessed April 2, 2014. https://www.google.com/ search? q=paradise&safe=off&es_sm=119&sourc e=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=KZWDU8u2IZPN7AbV34 DwBA&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAQ&biw=1842&bih=1052v.

Addison, Joseph. Spectator 489. September 20, 1712. Accessed April 1, 2014. http:// www. gutenberg.org/files/12030/12030-h/SV3/Spectator3.html.

Banks, Joseph. The Endeavor. May 28, 1769. (The Trustees of the Public Library of New South Wales in Association with Angus and Robertson, Sydney), 259. de Bougainville, Louis Antoine. The Pacific Journal. (1766-1769), 63.

Defoe, Daniel. The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. (United Kingdom: W. Taylor, 1719), 107.

Gozzano, Guido. “La più bella.” In Eco, Umberto. Inventing the Enemy and Other Occasional Writings. (New York: NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).

Holmes, Ruport. “Escape (The Piña Colada Song).” Infinity Records, 1979.

Plutarch. “The Life of Sertorius,” In The Parallel Lives. Trans. John Dryden. Revised Arthur Hugh Clough. (75 A.D.), Chapter 8. Accessed April 2, 2014. http://www.telelib.com/authors/P/ Plutarch/prose/plutachslives/sertorius.html.

Wyss, Johann David. The Swiss Family Robinson.

(New York, NY: Puffin Books, 2009), 13.

75

PART II

76

THEME IV

ATTRIBUTES

NATURE BEAUTY

Food Greenery Horizon Mild Ocean Palm Trees Sand Sunset Warm

77

INTERVIEW D R. S TE P H E N M . K O S S L YN is the Founding Dean of the Minerva Schools at the Keck Graduate Institute. He served as Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and was previously chair of the Department of Psychology, Dean of Social Science, and the John Lindsley Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.

He received a B.A. from UCLA and a Ph.D. from Stanford University, both in psychology. Kosslyn’s research has focused on the nature of visual cognition, visual communication, and individual differences; he has authored or coauthored 14 books and over 300 papers on these topics. Kosslyn has received numerous honors, including the National Academy of Sciences Initiatives in Research Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, three honorary Doctorates (University of Caen, University of Paris Descartes, Bern University), and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

78

LZP

What is the role of memory in the creation of mental imagery?

SMK

Most mental images are either replays (not necessarily accurate!) of things you’ve remembered or some kind of creative combination of bits of things you’ve remembered. Although not all mental images are like that — for instance you can visualize drawing something entirely new — I suspect that most of them probably are. We once did a survey of imagery where we had people keep logs of mental images they formed during the course of the day, and I think most of them were memory based, if I remember correctly.

LZP

If mental analogies help us make sense of new information, will our perception always be limited by what we have seen or experienced in the past?

SMK

I think that’s probably true. Analogy, for me, is where you have a familiar object or event and you map it onto something new. So analogy is drawing a parallel. But what you seem to mean here is more like matching, where something comes in, and it gets automatically compared to what you’ve previously stored in memory. An analogy requires some kind of conscious reach, whereas matching is automatic.

LZP

We seem to be very good at detecting patterns and recognizing the familiar. Why is that?

SMK

Our brains are built that way. We’re very good at storing memories of things we’ve perceived, if we’ve thought about them in any depth at all. And once we’ve stored them, subsequent input gets automatically compared to them along with everything else that’s previously been stored memory, in parallel. And if there’s a match to something previously stored, we “recognize” the input as an instance of that thing.

LZP

How does that affect our ability to imagine something new?

SMK

What’s stored in our brains is used both during perception, for matching input to make sense of it, and also during mental imagery -- when you activate it in the absence of input to make a mental image. This goes back to your question about the role of mental imagery in imagination. It seems like it’s easier for people the reactivate a representation of something they’ve previously perceived, so the more things you’ve perceived, the wider range of mental images you will find easy to evoke.

LZP

We are exposed to an incredible amount of visual material every day. What makes something stick in our memory?

SMK

Basically if you pay attention to it. The more deeply you process something you perceive, the better you will remember it.

LZP

Does frequency of exposure matter?

SMK

Yes, it does. In fact, it’s not just frequency, but how it’s spaced out over time. If it’s all bunched up, you know — you see it once every 5 minutes for an hour — that’s not going to be as good as seeing it once a day, the same number of times spread out over a week or a month. Frequency definitely does affect how easily we will learn something.

79

LZP

When we imagine something, what is happening?

SMK

Visualizing, in particular, is a constructive process. You need to find the stored representations of the parts or characteristics you want to visualize, and then activate them while at the same time arranging them properly. Clearly, there’s plenty of room for error on both of those aspects.

LZP

What is the distinction between imagining and visualizing?

SMK

One is that visualizing is just visual. You can also imagine sounds. Do you know the song “Three Blind Mice?” Do the first three notes go up, down, or stay the same?

LZP

They go down.

SMK

To answer that, I bet you had an auditory mental image; you “heard in your mind’s ear,” so to speak. But the other thing is that the word “imagine” is ambiguous. It also means “suppose.” Imagine that Abraham Lincoln showed up on the streets of Boston today, what would happen? You don’t necessarily have to visualize it or have any kind of perceptual experience — you just suppose if it were true and think of the implications. Usually, I think, people do use mental imagery as a vehicle for supposing, but not necessarily. Supposing can be completely abstract.

LZP

How do our beliefs about the world influence our perception?

SMK

They direct our attention to certain objects or characteristics, or they prime us to be ready to see certain things.

LZP

What can imagination and mental imagery tell us about who we are, or what we believe?

SMK

There is one paper that we did on this, where we were interested in racism. We gave participants a mental scenario to visualize. It was along these lines: Imagine that you are in a big city and you’re late for meeting a good friend for dinner. It’s getting dark and you see an alley where you can take a shortcut, and you decide you’re going to do it. At the opening of the alley there are three black teenagers wearing droopy pants and t-shirts, and they’ve got a boom box going. You walk by them, and it’s getting darker and darker. You’re walking down the alley and you start hearing footsteps behind you, so you speed up a little bit, and you hear the footsteps getting faster. How do you feel?

I’ve done this demo many times, and at the end, when the footsteps are very very close, I say that you turn to look behind you -- and at that point I smack the table really hard, creating a loud “wham!” And you can see people jump. It’s called “fearpotentiated startle,” which is actually mediated by a part of your brain called the amygdala—which plays a special role in fear. The more anxious you were, the more you will be inclined to be startled by the sound. And then I say, OK, compare that to when you walk into the alley, and instead of seeing three black teenagers, how about three white accountants wearing three-piece suits, and instead of boom boxes they have their briefcases? And I go through the same scenario. People report a very different experience. But is this race, or is it social class? Let’s make it black accountants. And guess what, it’s really different than with the teenagers. My point: Mental imagery can function as a way of learning about yourself; it can be a vehicle for revealing unconscious beliefs and attitudes.

80

LZP

What kinds of biases are built into our visual perception?

SMK

Our brains are built to be biased, usually in ways that help us in the short-run.

For example, there’s a brain structure, the superior colliculus, which produces a reflex for shifting attention to places where something has visibly changed. If you see something suddenly become bright, it’ll draw your attention to it immediately.

From an evolutionary perspective, this is obviously helpful if you’re on the lookout for wild animals that might jump out of the woods or the like. In fact, if you look at infants, at say about age 6 weeks old, their frontal lobes haven’t developed very much, but the superior colliculus has, which makes them prone to something called “perceptual capture.” If you take a piece of tin foil and wiggle it off to the side, the superior colliculus drags babies to look at it, and then they are stuck. They just keep looking at it. They can’t override it. The way our adult brains work is that our frontal lobes override this so we can stop. But the impulse to look is still in us.

We still have those perceptual reflexes in there.

LZP

What happens when we see something that confronts or contradicts the images we have in our heads?

SMK

There’s sometimes a boggle effect. This happens with top-down perception, where you have a strong expectation that primes you to see a specific object. I had an experience like this once, where I was looking for a friend’s purse. We were going out somewhere, and she said she left it in her bedroom. She asked me to fetch it, and I asked her what it looked like and she said that it was a black handbag. So I walked in to her bedroom, and I saw out of the corner of my eye what I thought was her purse. And I leaned over to pick it up and it turned out to be a black cat!

That just freaked me out. I was completely blown away. My top- down perception imposed the shape of a handbag on the cat—my expectations led me to organize the cues I saw improperly. But eventually, reality impinged and I saw the cat. Reality had better impinge, or we would be not just seeing oddly but also actually living in a fantasy world.

81

ST O RY Je ssie B o n d

BORROWED MEMORIES (AFTER LUIGI GHIRRI)

We arrive early to claim our spot. The beach is empty save for the skeletal structure of an outdoor gym; the fringing of a lurid pink un-opened beach umbrella blows in the wind. Automatically I wander to the water’s edge and slip off my sandals.

The sea makes a straight line dissecting the view, an edge to fall off, my thoughts focus there, then drift away. Waves approach in a constant, almost mechanical rhythm; relentlessly they continue towards the shore. I notice silences between them, pauses for breath in which I am left suspended, secure in the knowledge that another will come. My shoulders drop, my chest opens and I relax. The fall of the waves defines a new measurement of time.

Now standing in the shallows, I shift my weight from one foot to another and gradually they bury themselves in the sand. I have surrendered, waiting for the next wave to come. When it does it licks further up my shins to my knees.

Back up the beach, on the dry warm sand, others have arrived. We set out the windbreak, lay down our towels, remove layers of clothes and apply the sunscreen. You unfold the newspaper; I open the novel I’ve been meaning to read for weeks.

Sunglasses on, heads resting on rolled up jumpers: it is Sunday; we are at the beach.

I lie on my back; my fingers scratch slowly through the warm surface sand to the cool layer beneath. I wriggle my hips to find the perfect support for my back. A light breeze dangerously blocks the intense heat from the sun as I am lulled by the sounds of the waves, the distant cries and splashes in the shallows. My book discarded I close my eyes and pretend we are alone here.

Once we waited on the beach for a train… I recall photographing the trip and that I never developed the film. My mind wanders home and into boxes with their idiosyncratic semi-ordered contents, onto my desk and shelves overflowing with books half-read, onto the floor and under clothes half-clean, through piles of paper: receipts, bills, bank statements and hastily scrawled notes. I cannot think where it would be.

82

I’m reminded of a train ride to another beach. You were reading whilst I filmed the sunlight flickering as the train sped past gaps in hedges, focusing on your hand resting on my knee. It leaves the shot, only to turn a page, then returns. I remember feeling the warmth and slight dampness left by your hand in its absence through my thin floral sundress, and how I longed for its weight to return, never precisely in the same spot.

Next: a bench between two palm tress, one for you and one for me. We sit and look out across the water; I lean my knees towards you and nervously fiddle with my jacket’s zip. Fingertips sticky with ice cream and candyfloss, greasy with chip fat and salt.

The world is split in two; sky and water fill the shot perfectly dividing it in half. The horizon disappears, sea mist blurs; there is no gap between the moisture in the air and that more solid mass of water below.

And then I’m floating further back, to making shelters from white bed-sheets borrowed from our rented hilltop villa, tying them to scavenged driftwood branches: it felt like we were shipwrecked. We’d walked through woods and far along the beach to find a quiet spot. The sea was perfect blue, so tempting in the heat, yet the waves were filled with jellyfish.

Sounds interrupt my reverie, shrieks of laughter, and the gentle crash of waves seeming closer than before.

I picture a woman watching a man drag his foot in the wet sand. He is inscribing a heart, scraping out their initials and ‘4eva’. The next waves erase his marks; they giggle and embrace. The tap, tap, tap, tap of bat and ball, almost rhythmic but not quite; an erratic unskilled game frequently interrupted by ocean gusts.

More shouts of exertion, a volleyball match perhaps.

Sand sprayed into the air from a misjudged dive is caught by the wind and lands, sticking to the sweat and sun lotion smeared on my legs.

Reluctantly I squint open my eyes to the sun’s glare and disorientated try to blink away my blanched vision; the beach has been transformed. The view is hazy, sandblasted, worn; bright candy tones misted as if by the passing of time. The beach has dramatically

shrunk, compressing its temporary inhabitants to the dry sand. I am alone. In my semi-conscious state I hadn’t notice you leave, perhaps you’re swimming?

I scan the bathers but cannot identify you amongst them. And then you appear, weaving between the patchwork of mats, blankets and towels, an ice cream cone in each hand. Mine mango and coconut, yours rum and raisin; we stare out at the horizon, swapping lick for lick, a tropical daydream forming in our mouths.

83

THEME V

ATTRIBUTES

PLEASURE ENTERTAINMENT THRILL

Alcohol Amusements/Games Bodies On Display Danger/Risk Food Locals/Natives Sex/Romance

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INTERVIEW DR. M OSH E B A R is the Director of The Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center at Bar-Ilan University and an Associate Professor in Neuroscience, Psychiatry and Radiology at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital. His work focuses on exploring how the brain extracts and uses contextual information to generate predictions and guide cognition efficiently, as well as characterization of the links between cognitive processing, mood and depression. Prof. Bar uses neuroimaging (fMRI, MEG), psychophysical, cognitive and computational methods in his research.

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LZP MB

How are memory, perception, and imagination connected?

Many of my talks start by talking about this imaginary or arbitrary boundary that people in textbooks or in graduate schools, implicitly or explicitly, have placed in between perception and cognition. In school, usually you have classes in perception, you have classes in cognition, you have classes in memory. I think the common dogma is that first there is perception, for example in the visual domain: we analyze the lines, the texture, then contrast and corners and contour and color, et cetera, and once we understand what we see, only then does cognition take the helm. Cognition starts doing stuff and perception is done.

On a personal note, maybe what has led me to this view, which I don’t think is unique to me, is that I grew up as a vision scientists. When I branched out and went to Harvard to do my post-doc, I had questions that interested me that went a little bit beyond vision and included memory. That’s why I had two advisors.

I realized that there’s this community that studies memory, and for them, the medial temporal lobe (MTL) is where everything happens. And when you look at anatomy, you see that the visual cortex and the MTL are just adjacent to each other. It’s almost a crime that in one class they teach you this, and another they teach you that. They are connected, they work together. The brain and nature had no reason to make it into modules that are as separate as you are led to believe.

You realize more and more that memory and our expectations, and the results of our experience, play a direct and very critical role in our perception. The way we understand what we see does not stem only from what enters our eyes or our senses. There is a constant interplay between top-down and bottom-up, between memory and between perception.

Of course, it’s hard to find extremes, like if I imagine monsters, I will not start seeing them in my environment just because top-down plays a role in perception.

You need some feedback. Likewise, what resides in our memory doesn’t just wait to be activated by what perception has concluded. I call it the “proactive brain” because it doesn’t wait, it just sends down information to try to help.

LZP

So to what degree are our actions based on templates that we’ve built based on experiences that are in our memory, and to what degree are they novel performances?

MB

In the world of action proper, there’s a term called ‘action plan.’ If you want to reach a cup, or if you want to clap, or if you play squash, or if you hug somebody, there is a sequence of movements that you have to perform, and you don’t start them tabula rasa from the beginning. When you’re a kid and you learn to catch a baseball for the first time, you don’t have a plan, just like when you see your first car and you don’t recognize it, so you don’t know what aspects of the car should be stored in memory or not. It takes time, but once it’s done, the typical and frequent actions are stored in actions plans. This, of course, doesn’t mean we’re robots that only perform fixed movements, but rather, just like with visual simulations, we can scramble, we can shuffle and reshuffle, and we can make new connections between plans. So if I tell you first to clap and then to scratch you right eyebrow, then you connect two actions plans that you have and you make a new one. In a way, it is pre-fixed, but it can also be novel. But it’s like perceiving a 87

novel object: it’s so rare that we almost always connect it to things we have seen in the past.

LZP

If memory and experience provide us with the large bank of information about the world from which we’re constantly drawing as we encounter new situations, does that mean that memory is the foundation of our beliefs about the world?

MB

Yes! What else, if not memory? It sounds very intuitive to me. I mean, of course there’s a difference between how much one assigns to input versus internal representations.

We see differences in people in how rigid they are, how conservative they are, how they want to fit the world into their templates versus how open they are to creating or modifying existing patterns. So of course there’s flexibility, and there are major individual differences there. But by and large, I would say that our beliefs about the world are exactly in memory.

LZP

And from there, how do our beliefs, based on those experiences and those memories, alter our perception of the world?

MB

We actually tried in the past to manufacture hallucinations, in a way — to create predictions that are so strong that you see things that are not there. If I look at my desk now and I imagine that there’s a monster there, no matter how hard I try, unless I’m schizophrenic, I won’t be seeing this monster. But if I am passing by the kitchen and expect to see a loaf of bread on the kitchen counter, and somebody replaced it with a mailbox that looks like a loaf of bread, and I see this mailbox where I expected a loaf of bread to be, I won’t give it a second look because it wasn’t part of my main goal. I would think it’s a loaf of bread and move on. So in a way, this type of prediction can distort what we see. When things become extreme, when you really need to find the bread, and you enter the kitchen to look for the bread, maybe for the initial twelve millisecond you will still think the mailbox is a loaf of bread, but then you see more details and you realize it’s not.

I don’t think predictions can trump perception, and I also think it’s pretty hard the other way around. It’s a tango dance that they are doing together, and they depend on each other. I think if your perception violates your prediction in a major way, you will have a problem with your perception, and if your perception violates your prediction, you also have some kind of a double take.

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LZP

This all sounds a lot like Bayesian models of cognition, or the self-tickling problem. Our unconscious expectations, based on subjective experience, color or influence the way we perceive the world.

MB

Yes it is reminiscent of the Bayesian approach, a family of theories that basically tell us that we rely on our experience to perceive.

LZP

Which is extremely intuitive, but I think what’s interesting about the Bayesian model is that it tries mathematically to assign probabilities to these kinds of experiences. In the end, what it says is that the more flexible we are in our beliefs, the wider range of possibilities we’ll see.

I’m wondering whether these unconscious expectations or responses to the environment are necessarily based on our own personal experience, or do they also come from other sources — things we’ve seen or heard secondhand, or even things that were maybe important in our evolutionary past but are no longer relevant now?

MB

It happens a lot when people talk about fight or flight response, the example of a tiger that’s about to jump at you, or a snake in the woods. How often does it happen that we see lions in our environment? When we see them, they are usually behind a fence and we are still safe. Maybe evolution is not fast enough to catch up. Maybe 2,000 years from now, all these things will be obsolete, and we’ll be afraid of an error message on our iPhone. These give us the flight response, but not snakes.

We get in this tricky domain of evolutionary psychology where people make up stories about why we dream that we’re falling and wake up startled, that it has some connection to us sleeping in trees and being afraid of lions. These are things nobody can prove.

There’s also the whole issue of how we make impressions of each other. There again, I think it’s the same mechanism of connecting things we are familiar with with things in memory. Once we’ve made the connection, we can project all these attributes from memory, from this analogy, into the new item. Just like when we see a new chair, we don’t analyze it from scratch, we know it’s a chairs because it looks like other chairs, and we immediately know it’s rigid, we can sit on it, it’s stable, et cetera. With humans, this is not something that we want to do in a social setting, but when you look at somebody who looks like someone you know who is really cheap, then you think automatically that this person is cheap, and you have to fight to change that. Just like I’ll have to give you a lot of counterexamples of why the chair you think is a chair is actually something else that looks like a chair, but is actually made of marshmallows.

LZP

MB

It’s interesting, because part of what I’m investigating with the project is how a certain kind of collective imaginary, or a set of mental images that many of us share, can form. When we all come to share a belief about something, it seems that at a certain point it is no longer under our control. It becomes a given, which is hard to overcome. In a way, these shared imaginings are like memories that have become irrelevant, like fight or flight is no longer as relevant now. Part of what I’m trying to understand is how you can actually change the way we imagine something, or form a new set of beliefs.

There’s a theory that I expect you’re familiar with called statistical regularities. We pick up these regularities from our environment, we learn what comes with what, what comes after what, what tends to affect what, et cetera. All these regularities are stored, and now you have this person that you’ve never interacted with before, and he looks like someone who’s cheap, and this poor new person suffers from your past experience. So now you want to change it, and change it quickly. What are the circumstances that will teach you that after A there’s B — A B A B? Or that sometimes C will come after A, but just at the end of the month. You will have to 89

augment what you’re learned, and you either have to eNoich this memory or this statistical regularity to include more than one outcome, or eliminate it completely and build it anew. It takes a few exemplars, and my hypothesis for the experiment is that it depends on the complexity of the irregularity, because if it’s A B A B A B, the first time you see A C, you are already understanding that something is wrong, and the second time you see A C, you know, OK, either it’s A B or A C. Its very quick.

If I say that somebody with a certain type of face features is not intimidating, but all the N people you’ve seen before with those face features were intimidating, then you’re still intimidated. You’re not changing your view so quickly.

The ultimate goal with the project is to go back to stereotypes, and change stereotypical thinking. But we are starting from simpler statistical regularities. I think it is possible to change, and how fast you change is a function of what’s at stake and how complicated the regularity. But the brain is very plastic, so I’d be surprised if you cannot change it at all.

There are things that are less changeable, especially related to the amygdala.

You’ll keep blinking every time I puff air into your eye, it’s not like you’re just going to stop doing it anymore. And every time you see a snake in front of you, you’ll jump. You don’t want to get used to things that are really critical. But the other more mundane things are easily adaptable.

LZP

The idea of statistical regularity seems quite similar to machine learning, and the ways that we’re now trying to simulate cognitive processes in a highly perfected, computational way.

With machine learning, you can change the predictive model that the computer is reading, or you can alter the formal characteristics or rules by which the program detects salient information. The problem is, humans can’t un-learn and re-learn this way. We are always in some sense burdened by our memories and beliefs about the world.

MB

When I give popular talks, I like to show this extreme black and white picture that nobody can understand. Then I show the richer version in the next slide: it’s the head of a horse, and mountains, a lot of nature around. And when I go back to the first picture, now it’s clear, you can see the horse, you can see everything. It’s just an impoverished version of the richer version. And that’s it. You cannot unlearn this, you cannot not see the horse anymore. You’re brain has changed completely.

This type of learning is hard to unlearn. But if you learn that one thing leads to another, or one thing usually appears with another thing, and then you encounter more and more exceptions, you kind of unlearn and unlearn. So there’s a difference between what we call synaptic weights — how strong the connections are — and changing these weights because of new occurrences, versus just learning a new representation that’s there, and that’s it.

LZP

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Everything we’ve talked about so far seems to point to the fact that we are not particularly good at imagining outside of the realm of what we have already experienced or can access in memory — or, put a different way, we are very good at assessing

probabilities in everyday life, but are maybe not so good at seeing possibilities.

MB

There is an example from the movie What the Bleep Do We Know. Unfortunately it’s an urban legend, but it’s a story about how the Native Americans couldn’t see Columbus’s ship arriving because it looked like nothing they’d seen before. They couldn’t connect it to anything.

You see in science fiction movies, aliens always look the same because we’ve never seen aliens. When people have to imagine them, they imagine them based on what they know, so they make their arms a little larger, or they put antennae, but on the day when we do see aliens, they will be like nothing we expected. It’s like when you try to imagine life after death — of course you have nothing to connect it with, it’s limited by your own experience. So you connect it to things that you’re familiar with.

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ST O RY

SALT

Jo s é Fe r n a n d e s d a Si lv a

Jean’s roman nose pointed towards the girl’s crotch as the Murcian sun burned down on both their bodies. The girl lay there, dumb and small, while Jean’s nose, blue eyes and dark eyebrows, flicked momentarily towards the girls blinking hazels and plump tanned cheeks – the only remnants of a childhood left behind in Valparaiso.

The roman nose turned back and those blues settled once again on the crease of skin between the girl’s thigh and the triangle of bikini fabric that covered her. Sea salt had crystallised and gathered there, and Jean’s eyes were fixated on it while her mind drifted elsewhere. Jean’s fingers would usually be unable to resist a light touch, or a slip under the matt polyester but now only those blues laid any claim to the girl.

Her body was not Polynesian but it reminded Jean of a postcard depicting one of Gauguin’s paintings of ‘primitives’ (Jean smiled as the clumsy alliteration played out silently across dry lips). Although it was a misremembered memory, Jean pictured the Polynesian in the picture with skin so tanned that it had turned purple. The only mauve on the girl was a ripe bruise that glowed on her hip, which Jean was surprised not to have noticed the previous night.

The sun directly above caused them both to perspire gently and mottled beads of sweat gathered in between their limbs, and where their bodies lay heavy on the faded towels. The damp hairs under Jean’s arms began to form into two small mice. Jean remembered how in the early hours of the previous night, the girl had tried to be what she thought Jean wanted her to be – giving big eyes, running her hands over Jean’s long back and up under those armpits.

Jean’s strong thighs, covered in wisps of light brown hair, had briefly gripped and held the girl, while the girl, in turn, had used her teeth to search out Jean’s thin pink lips, and bite down. Her kisses were short and brief; light pursed lips tapping Jean’s. Jean couldn’t help but be disappointed by her inexperience and found it difficult to be charmed by it.

As they had lain naked in the single bed, tasting the evening’s rum and sweet cola on each others lips, the 92

girl had whispered that this was paradise, that Jean was paradise and that the boyfriend she’d left behind in Valparaiso was nothing now, a nobody. They had searched out each other’s bodies in the dark and the girl, barely out of her teens, had told Jean that it would be her first time – that her boyfriend had never really been with her. The only thing he’d given her were blows to her soft stomach and kicks to the small of her back as she turned away from him.

The girl had carried on confessing, or confiding.

Jean didn’t know or care for the difference, and realised that the girl thought Jean was much more than someone she had just shared jokes and kisses with in the preceding weeks. Jean hadn’t truly been there in that cheap metal-framed bed, nor in that small Moorish town, or even in that country. As the girl had described how her boyfriend had touched and filmed her as she slept, a sickness crawled into Jean’s stomach. The same stomach where that ripe Granadan plum would sit the next day, along with its stone accidently swallowed. The overripe juice would swirl its way with the fruit’s flesh around Jean’s long tongue, before slipping down a throat that was raw from too little sleep.

Jean’s mouth was dry now as they both slumbered on that impossibly hot Murcian beach. The girl breathed softly as she slept. The only sound was the low hum of a generator, left running by the workmen higher up the beach where yellow pebbles and wild Algerian lilies dotted the dusty ground. The men sat and drank in the temporary shade of the wooden hut they were erecting. Jean thought it a pointless task to labour over a small café shack on such an isolated part of the coast. The humming was perfect though – it complemented the heat and forced sleep in between the girl’s eyelids. And almost into Jean’s who stared again, lost in thought, at the crease between the girl’s leg and bikini. The corners of Jean’s eyes smarted with sea salt that mirrored those tiny crystals in the girl’s crease. When the generator was turned off, the silence on the beach became deafening and the girl awoke momentarily with a start, lifting her eyelids, looking at Jean and smiling before dropping back to sleep.

Those eyes had pleaded to be looked into the night before, but Jean’s had looked down and away, consigning themselves to self-pity and the selfishness of youth. The girl had spoken softly and moved her palm over the bed sheet, feeling the grains of sand brought in from previous beach visits.

She had told Jean how her mother had thrown her boyfriend out – grabbing him by the shirt and forcing his protesting voice through the door. And how she begged her mother to let him stay, pleaded for her to forgive him, said that he hadn’t hit her that hard, that he was young, that he was drunk, that he didn’t know.

The girl had continued recounting – as much as she could remember – how he’d filmed her, how she had awoken half-conscious, still, with his body weighing down on top of hers. And she described how when she had awoken aroused one time, she had felt more ashamed and betrayed by her own body that by the boyfriend who had violated her. Jean’s ears had filled with these stories as they cascaded out the girl’s lips and anger arose in Jean’s stomach and throat. A snarl developed and Jean could not longer contain her silence and cried out that it was rape. That those kicks to the stomach were an assault and those threats of love were empty, as fucking empty as how she’d felt when he had forced his fingers into her. It was the worst abuse, even if she couldn’t remember because she was half asleep. The girl remained placid, quiet. Those memories were left behind, she had said. And anyway, now she had Jean.

They had grown tired, and stopped talking. Jean had glanced fleetingly – for what would be the last time – at the girl’s small white breasts. The crisp line between light and dark skin, sun and shade, was mirrored by the mestizo bronze and Breton white of their two exhausted bodies. The memory of the previous night began to fade as Jean stared and the girl slept in the relentless sun. Jean was tired of remembering now. And feeling pity and concern for the girl could not stand in for what the she craved.

Jean knew this was it. The sun was still high in the sky and the plums in the canvas bag were warming steadily. Jean took one out, bit into it and stared at the point where the dark skin met the orange flesh and made it glow red. It was sweet and sickly and bruised – almost rotten – but Jean sucked it up, rolled over and watched as pinks, yellows and mauves danced on the inside of her closed eyelids.

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THEME VI

ATTRIBUTES

PROTECTION

Beach Chair Domestication Greenery Palm Trees Shelter Umbrella

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ESS AY J E NS KO E D M A DSE N works at Birkbeck, University of London at the department of psychology. Having completed degrees in rhetorical theory and a PhD in cognitive psychology, Jens is working on the psychology of persuasion and argumentation. Currently, he is interested in the psychological foundation of reasoning skills and works on reasoning models, personality traits, and empathy as well as the link between believing in something and acting upon it. He has recently become interested in voting behaviour and conflict resolution as case studies of the psychology of persuasion. Jens is 28 years old and has lived in Dalston for nearly six years.

He is highly interested in alternative ways of describing imagination, reasoning and psychology in general.

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STOUT CORTÉS LOOKED UPON THE PACIFIC AND MARVELLED In the 16th century, European explorations and exploitations ran rampant across North and South America. Explorers from England, the Netherlands, and Spain extracted gold and riches to make and break kingdoms back in the old world. The Spanish empire gained wealth and power from these expeditions, such as during the conquest of the Aztec empire led amongst others by Hernán Cortés around 1520. Despite the numerous expeditions and the wealth brought back from these raids, the Europeans had yet to explore the entirety of the new world. Indeed, many of the explorers still believed they had landed somewhere in East Asia. Columbus is a prominent example of this belief; the discoverer of the Americas died believing he had found the Western passage to India. Let us place ourselves in the mind-set of these 16th century explorers.

Imagine travelling around Mexico after landing on the east coast at the Mexican Gulf. You believe, as it were, that you are walking around somewhere in East Asia. Indeed, the explorers must have thought of all the novel encounters and sensations they experienced in this place as simply belonging to East Asia. And thus, despite seeing new animal species, plants, and different cultures, they could still manage to integrate this information with the belief that they were somewhere in East Asia. Imagine the bewilderment and wonder these people must have felt when they first laid eyes on the Pacific Ocean.

The existence of such a body of water would be impossible if they were truly in East Asia, as these masses of land are landlocked with the European continent. Poetry, as so often, might illustrate this idea more poignantly. In the final lines of On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer, Keats beautifully describes this sensation: Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise Silent, upon a peak in Darien

Cortés’ men, standing atop a peak in the Panama province of Darién, gaze upon the impossible existence of the Pacific Ocean. Instantly, their

subjective beliefs regarding their location shift in the face of overwhelming evidence that they cannot be in Asia, as no such body of water would exist between East Asia and Europe since the continents are landlocked. Through developments in the psychology of reasoning, such a change in beliefs in face of information is best explained from a subjective, contextually immersed, and cultural perspective. Here, reasoning takes point of departure in subjectively held uncertain information that is more or less probable, rather than objective facts that are certain and either true or false. This means that different human beings can have different estimations of the same idea (most likely springing from their sociocultural background, their personal experiences, their immediate emotional states, interactions with others and so forth). It also means that people can believe subjectively in statements despite very poor evidence in favour of the idea (e.g. creationism).

Traditional ideas of reasoning spring from the exploration of argument structures and whether or not the structures are logically valid. For these approaches, the principles of rationality are constructed on the validity of the statements such that we can tell whether an argument is logically sound, and in an epistemic state where statements are thought to be truth-conditionally dichotomous (either true or false).

Taking an inherently different perspective, recent ideas in cognitive psychology explore reasoning from a subjective and probabilistic perspective. Here, our socio-cultural background, our personal experiences, and our mood might influence how we process and estimate a particular piece of information. Thus, you and I might see the same politician delivering the same speech and arrive at vastly different conclusions simply due to the fact that our estimations of the strength of the evidence and the credibility of the source might be completely different. From a subjective and probabilistic rational perspective, it makes sense that I draw certain conclusions if my prior beliefs direct me in such a way, even though objective evidence speaks against it. Such an account allows for people to disagree respectfully and reasonably on certain statements – and given their different opinions, they 97

should indeed reach different conclusions (even when presented with the same information). This shift in principles lodges rationality firmly within the subjective realm of probabilities rather than in a clean world of objective information.

One of the fascinating lessons we have learnt from reasoning theory is the importance of style and framing. In the literature, the frame of an argument is the way that information is presented. In a famous experiment called the ‘Asian disease problem’ (Tversky & Kahneman, 1981), participants were confronted with a made-up scenario where 600 people were infected with a deadly illness. They were then asked to choose between two options.

Asian disese problem Type of farming Option A Gains “Saves 200 lives”

Loss

“400 people will die”

Option B “A 33% chance of saving 600 people, 66% possibility of saving one” “A 33% chance that no people will die, 66% probability that all 600 will die”

Interestingly, the two options mathematically are equivalent, but 72% chose option A when framed as gains whereas only 22% chose this when framed as a loss. So, even though they had the exact same choice, there was a huge difference in outcome. This shows us that humans do not simply process the mathematical properties of information; we are also influenced by the way information is presented.

We therefore move to the wonderful arenas of style, eloquence, and poetic creativity. If humans truly approach evidence subjectively and are influenced by immediate factors such as the style and phrasing, their immediate emotional states, and their sociocultural backgrounds, the challenge of persuading someone becomes lodged in a completely different frame than the traditional frame of objective information transmission. It is lodged in the meeting of humans, in understanding the backgrounds and psychological complexities of the other, and in empathetically appreciating that different humans might entertain different beliefs. It is lodged in the human subject.

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The human and the subjective lend space for creative exploration, as cognition opens up beyond the content of the argument and is broadened to the intrinsically stylistic and metaphoric perception of language. What is more, if we look at language as co-constructed in the moment between collaborating and cooperating humans rather than as small packages of information transmitted between separated individuals, communication becomes playful, malleable, and inventive. Here and together, we construct new ways of thinking as well as new metaphors. As such, reasoning ceases to be an introspective exercise in content-evaluation and moves towards an extroverted creation in each separate beat of interaction. This does not detract from the importance of the content being communicated and explored, but adds an interactive and creative element to the communicative situation and to our reasoning abilities. Bayesian approaches give reasoning and communication a human and subjective touch that manifests across individuals, across contextual space, and across multi-layered temporalities such as the immediate past, the socio-cultural background, and the development and management of languages (see Madsen & Cowley, 2014).

In this way, I wholly agree with Aristotle when he once remarked that rhetoric was the ‘art’ of persuasion.

Changing someone’s mind is not just a matter of terse conveyance of information, but of style, emotional content, eloquence, and – ultimately – creativity.

Further Reading Aristotle (1995a) “Rhetoric,” in Barnes, J. (Ed.) The complete Works of Aristotle, vol.

2, Princeton University Press, 6th printing, 2152-2270.

Hahn, U. & Oaksford, M. (2006a) A Bayesian Approach to Informal Reasoning Fallacies.

Synthese 152, 207-23.

Harris, A., Hsu, A. & Madsen, J. K. (2012) Because Hitler did it! Quantitative tests of Bayesian argumentation using Ad Hominem, Thinking & Reasoning 18 (3), 311-343.

Madsen, J. K. & Cowley, S. J. (2014) Living subjectivity: Time-scales, language, and the fluidity of self, Cybernetics and Human Knowing 21 (1/2).

Oaksford, M. & Chater, N. (2007) Bayesian Rationality: the probabilistic approach to human reasoning, Oxford University Press, Oxford: UK. Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1981) The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice, Science 211, 453-458.

ST O RY

SWIMMING THE LINE

Ja m e s A. H ol l id ay

The water is the colour of gunmetal; it looks as solid too. In the November air it looks almost impenetrable.

The free flowing water appears to have halted completely, seized by the cold and now stagnantly waiting for spring. It is high too. Weeks of heavy rain have brought the treetops down and the water level up. Broken branches, some smashed others splintered, coat the shoreline. The waters edge is closer than usual. It laps, pulling back before rolling in as far as my bare toes. I can feel them begin to tingle. I remove my top and begin a one legged balancing act to remove my trousers. Next to my paired shoes, I drop my clothes. They become a lifeless pile of fabrics. With trepidation, I move into the water. It is cold against my calves and I bend my knees to lower myself before leaning forwards, becoming horizontal and making my first strokes. As I draw arcs with my arms, I feel the coldness of the water against my fingertips before streaming along my arms and into my body. Here it sits. My innards feel dull with the weight of coldness.

As I draw arcs and am pulled through the water, my splayed fingers have become receptacles for the cold. I picture television aerials jutting upwards from rooftops, reaching into the air for signals. These metal poles, angled and linear in construction, submerge themselves in the airspace, just as my long arms and extended digits do.

Behind me is the site that once housed the Netley Military Hospital, but is now empty and green. All that is left of the quarter mile long Victorian building is its chapel. I can see the steeple towering higher than expected, dwarfing its short body. During the First World War, military ships travelled through these waters, bringing boys back from the front and depositing them here. Some were so wounded that they appeared lifeless. Shocked into looking vacantly through, over or beyond, but never at the view or the doctors. My head and body turns from the open green space and the solitary chapel and faces stacked cars waiting for exportation.

In the sunlight, the new and unblemished car bonnets glisten and the bank is illuminated. It must be at least seven stories high and seems to spread across the majority of Southampton’s front. I think of the owner – a car enthusiast, obviously, but also an avid collector.

This display of cars is not dissimilar to a bedroom wall coated in Matchbox cars; kept in Perspex boxes, parked at a slight angle to give the best view to passers by. As I swim past, I understand this.

As I swim back to shore, towards the greenery that was once the military hospital and leave the car collection behind, I realise that I have been swimming in neither rural nor industrial water but somewhere Ahead of me a freightliner moves towards the channel. between the two. There is no start or finish of either; rural waters seamlessly move into industrial, and visa I can feel the water swell as it passes and like a television delay, it hits me once the ship has passed. In versa. Stooped over, reaching for my clothes, water drips from me. The droplets are clear, not gunmetal. the news a few years ago, I read of a woman out in a They run down my flesh, leaving trails of coldness rowing boat. As a ship passed, she was pulled under, behind. Water is pooling at my feet as I begin putting only to pop back up on the other side. The shape of the hull must have cut a V shaped channel in the water wet limbs back into clothes.

– sliding her down on one side and spitting her up on the other. Trying to recreate this, I lower my head (for the first time) underwater. The cold now blankets my whole body. The water is cloudy-brown and dense and hard to see through. I can feel hands holding me down.

Pressing on my shoulders as I gather kinetic energy.

Until, like a jack-in-a-box, I am released and spring out of the water. Rocketing upwards until my head and shoulders are clear of the waters’ surface. As I swim, the sharpness of the cold feels like warmth and my body stings somewhere between being hot and cold.

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THEME VII

ATTRIBUTES

SEPARATION

Distant Holiday/Escape Horizon Island Unspoiled/Pristine

101

RAW ATTRIBUTES (119) Activity (canoeing) Activity (dancing) Activity (digging in sand) Activity (fire building) Activity (fishing) Activity (foraging at low tide) Activity (harvesting fruit) Activity (sex/romance: visitors) Activity (sex: native) Activity (surfing) Activity (tanning) Air (pure) Artifact (bathing machine) Artifact (beach blanket) Artifact (beach cabana) Artifact (beach chair) Artifact (canoes) Artifact (umbrella) Artifacts (shells) Bare feet Beverage (alcohol) Bodies on display Body decoration (bathing costume) Body decoration (bikini/modern bathing suit) Body decoration (grass skirt) Body decoration (lei) Body decoration (monokini) Body decoration (paint) Climate (mild) Climate (warm) Cooking (fire) Crowd (natives) Crowd (visitors) Danger (cliffs) Danger (natives) Danger (reef) Danger (waves) Destination/Distant Domestication Fauna (birds) Fauna (dog) Fauna (horse) Feature (boat) Feature (cove) Feature (dunes) Feature (hut/shelter) Feature (meadow) Feature (mountain) Feature (pool) Feature (promenade/pier) Feature (promontory/lookout) Feature (river) Feature (rocks/cliffs) Feature (village/town) Feature (waterfall) Flora (banana tree) Flora (coconut tree) Flora (palm trees) Flora (trees) Flora/greenery Food (fish) Food (fruit) Food (oysters) Food (shellfish) Food (spice) Healing/Therapy Holiday/Escape Horizon Island Moon waves(rhythmic) Music Native men (navigation) Native men (surfing) 102

Natives (noble savage) Native women (naked) Ocean (clear) Ocean (dark blue) Ocean (light blue) Ocean (turquoise) Rain (showers) Recreation (Amusements/attractions/games) Recreation (bathing) Recreation (boating) Recreation (children playing) Recreation (golf) Recreation (snorkeling) Recreation (sports) Recreation (swimming) Sand (brown) Sand (brown-gold) Sand (course) Sand (fine) Sand (light brown) Sand (orange-yellow) Sand (white) Seasonal Service (food and drink) Service (natives) Service (safety) Service (spa) Shelter (cave) Solitude/Isolation Status (luxury) Sun (constant) Sunset (orange-red) Sunset (orange-yellow) Sunset (twilight) Survival Tide (low) Tides (moon) Travel (air) Travel (boat) Travel (road) Travel (train) Unspoiled/Pristine Waves (foam) Waves (unpredictable) Wind (breeze) Wind (mild)

FINAL ATTRIBUTES (26)

NATURE / BEAUTY

Alcohol Amusements/Games Beach chair Bodies on display Danger/Risk (violence, injury, accident) Distant Domestication (sign of human developtment) Food Greenery Healing/Therapy Holiday/Escape Horizon Island Locals/Natives Luxury Mild Ocean Palm tree Sand Service (food, drink) Sex/Romance Shelter Sunset Umbrella Unspoiled/Pristine Warm

Food Greenery Horizon Mild Ocean Palm Trees Sand Sunset Warm

THEMES (7) Comfort Control/Domination Exclusivity/Privacy Nature/Beauty Pleasure/Entertainment/Thrill Protection Separation

PLEASURE / ENTERTAINMENT / THRILL Alcohol Amusements/Games Bodies On Display Danger/Risk Food Locals/Natives Sex/Romance PROTECTION Beach Chair Domestication Greenery Palm Trees Shelter Umbrella SEPARATION Distant Holiday/Escape Horizon Island Unspoiled/Pristine

COMFORT Alcohol Beach Chair Domestication Food Healing/Therapy Luxury Mild Service (Food, Drink) Shelter Umbrella Warm CONTROL / DOMINATION Beach Chair Bodies On Display Domestication Locals/Natives Luxury Service (Food, Drink) Sex/Romance Shelter Umbrella EXCLUSIVITY / PRIVACY Beach Chair Distant Holiday/Escape Island Luxury Service (Food, Drink) Umbrella Unspoiled/Pristine 103

Alcohol Sunset Umbrella Beach chairs

Food Horizon Greenery Mild

Bodies on display

Island

Warm Sand Palm trees

Luxury Distant

Distant Domestication Shelter

Ocean

104

1719

Robinson Crusoe - Defoe

1773 1775 1812 1820 1863

View of the Province of Oparree - Island of Otaheite - by William Hodges Jean-Jacque Rousseau - Discourse on the Origin of Inequality The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss A View in Tahiti by Augustus Earle Playa de SainteAdresse by Johan Jongkind

Bank Holiday Act of 1871 UK

1769

Joseph Banks description of surf-riding in Tahiti

1871

1870

1748

Scarborough England

1766-1769

1712

Joseph Addison essay on the sea in Spectator

Bougainville in Tahiti

1658

1618-1620

Het Strand van Scheveningen painting by Adriaen van de Velde

Jacques Callot Medici Landscapes the Bathers

16th c.

6th C. AD

Justinian the Great's first zoning law for beach Bathing season Germany Italy

4th c. AD

75 AD

5-6th c. BC

195000 BP

Mosaic of Ten Athletic Women Via Romana del Cassale

Life of Sertorius - Plutarch

Baiae - Roman beach resort

Pinnacle Point

105

1942 1953 1957 1963

Betty Grable - Sing Me a Song of the Islands From Here to Eternity Cote d'Azur Nice France Beach Party

1963 1966 1967 1979 1987 1989 2012 1993 2013

Beach Boys Surfin' USA Endless Summer Life magazine cover Escape by Rubert Holmes - If You Like Pina Coladas Brazilian bikini wax brought to NYC First episode of Baywatch Paradise by Marriott Seagaia Ocean Dome in Miyazaki Japan Cheval Blanc Rhandeli resort in the Maldives

2014

1961

Elvis Presley Slicin' Sand in Blue Hawaii

1960s

1946

Modern bikini introduced

Gilligan's Island TV series

1940

Copacabana nightclub opens

1930s

1924

Paradise of the Pacific magazine cover

Miami Beach

1905

American beach honeymoon

1920s

1900

Scheveningen Netherlands

Coney Island

1890

Brighton from Pier

Special Thanks

Artists

Ditto Press Stephen M. Kosslyn Moshe Bar Jens Koed Madsen Jessie Bond JosĂŠ Fernandes da Silva James A. Holliday Nina Pope Noam Toran James Auger Fiona Raby Tony Dunne Diana Tanase David Muth Tom Hulbert Tim Olden Channing Ritter Lukas Franciszkiewicz Sures Kumar Nestor Pestana Alexandra Hubbell David Moinina Sengeh

Richard Fraser Patrick Turner Thomas M. Grimes Olivia Vander Tuig Mark Lewis Michael Tello Satish Book Design Marcel Kaczmarek