Theme Analysis

Brave New World presents a startling view of the future which on the surface appears almost comical. Yet humor was not the intention of Aldous Huxley when he wrote the book in the early 1930′s. Indeed Huxley’s real message is very dark. His idea that in centuries to come, a one-world government will rise to power, stripping people’s freedom, is not new. In fact there are hosts of books dedicated to this topic. What makes Huxley’s interpretation different is the fact that his fictional society not only lives in this totalitarian government, but embraces it like mindless robots.

Soma, not nuclear bombs, is the weapon of choice for the World Controllers in Brave New World. These men have realized that fear and intimidation have only limited power; after all, these tactics simply build up resentment in the minds of the oppressed. Subconscious persuasion and mind-altering drugs, on the other hand, appear to have no side effects. Add to this the method of genetic engineering, and soon almost all “pre-Ford” problems have been wiped out permanently.

The caste system of this brave new world is equally ingenious. Free from the burdens and tensions of a capitalistic system which separates people into social classes by natural selection, this dictatorship government is only required to determine the correct number of Alphas, Betas, etc., all the way down the totem pole. There is no class warfare because greed, the basic ingredient of capitalism, has been eliminated. Even Deltas and Epsilons are content to do their manual labor. This contentment arises both from the genetic engineering and the extensive conditioning each individual goes through in childhood.

Freedom (as well as art and religion which are results of freedom) in this society has been sacrificed for what Mustapha Mond calls happiness. Indeed almost all of Huxley’s characters, save Bernard and the Savage, are content to take their soma ration, go to the feelies (the superficial substitute for actual life), and live their mindless, grey lives. The overwhelming color throughout Brave New World is grey. Everything and everyone seems dull to the reader, except perhaps the Savage, who is the only bright color in the novel. This grey happiness is the ultimate goal of the World Controllers like Mond.

Yet Mond has incorrectly associated lack of pain with happiness. Only the Savage knows that true happiness comes from the knowledge that one has value. He alludes to this when he describes his childhood in the Reservation where the only time he was happy was after he had completed a project with his own two hands. This, not soma, gave him the self-confidence to find happiness. The Savage knows his own value is as an individual, not a member of a collective.

Other characters in Brave New World, however, have no concept of self-worth. This results in their inability to find the happiness known to the Savage and the rest of the pre-Ford world which lives in the Reservation. True happiness is a consequence of freedom, not slavery. No slave can experience happiness until he is free. Yes, any slave can experience the contentment of a full belly and a full supply of instant gratification, but this doesn’t lead to happiness.

Bernard suffers throughout the book, being caught between both worlds. Although he has been conditioned to accept his servitude, he is constantly longing for freedom. He sees this freedom in the Savage, and envies him for possessing the inner happiness— genuine happiness— which Bernard’s society outlaws. Huxley uses Bernard to exemplify this struggle between freedom and slavery. Huxley argues that a genuine, free life requires suffering and pain. Men without anguish are men without souls. Huxley’s future describes a world without pain and a world without soul.

From http://www.novelguide.com/bravenewworld/themeanalysis.html

Nausea (1964)

Written just after the devastating Spanish Civil War and published right before the outbreak of World War II, Nausea addressed and anticipated the themes of anguish and despair that would come to define the horrors of the twentieth century. Sartre used the novel to expose the bare existence of objects and people. The novel’s protagonist, Antoine Roquentin, is horrified to first confront the overwhelming existence of both objects and himself (instead of their essences) and then discover that there is to purpose to existence. Instead, he finds only nothingness: a vacuum filled by questions of free will, self-deception, and responsibility that still influence approaches to art and philosophy today.

From the back cover:
Jean-Paul Sartre, philosopher, critic, novelist and dramatist, hold a position of singular eminence in the world of French letters. Among readers and critics familiar with the whole of Sartre’s work, it is generally recognized that his earliest novel, Le Nausée (first published in 1938), is his finest and most significant. It is unquestionably a key novel of the Twentieth Century and a landmark in Existentialist fiction.

Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic, diary form he ruthlessly catalogues his every feeling and sensation about the world and people around him. His thoughts culminate in a pervasive, overpowering feeling of nausea which “spread at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of our time—the time of purple suspenders and broken chair seats; it is made of wide, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain.” Roquentin’s efforts to come to terms with his life, his philosophical and psychological struggles, give Sartre the opportunity to dramatize trhe tents of his Existentialist creed.

Information Maps – 2003

Centered at Princeton University, the International Networks Archive is a global alliance of scholars who believe that geography is becoming increasingly irrelevant. INA is developing a new way of mapping our world, based on global transactions instead of geography. I helped INA develop its experimental mapping philosophy, and the way it merges data, maps and technology.

Information Maps | Non-Geographic Mapping

WordCount – 2004

WordCount is an interactive presentation of the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked and scaled in order of commonness and arranged side by side as a very long sentence. Each word’s size reflects its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.

WordCount data currently comes from the British National Corpus, a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent an accurate cross-section of current English usage. WordCount includes all words that occur at least twice in the BNC. In the future, WordCount will be modified to track word usage within any desired text, website, and eventually the entire Internet.

WordCount was designed with a minimalist aesthetic, to let the information speak for itself. The interface is clean, basic and intuitive. The goal is for the user to feel embedded in the language, sifting through words like an archaeologist through sand, awaiting the unexpected find. Observing closely ranked words tells us a great deal about our culture. For instance, “God” is one word from “began”, two words from “start” , and six words from “war”. Another sequence is “america ensure oil opportunity”. Conspiracists unite! As ever, the more one explores, the more is revealed.

www.wordcount.org | QueryCount | Conspiracy | 1970s Name Game

10×10 – 2004

10×10 (‘ten by ten’) is an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time. The result is an often moving, sometimes shocking, occasionally frivolous, but always fitting snapshot of our world. Every hour, 10×10 collects the 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale, and presents them as a single image, taken to encapsulate that moment in time. Over the course of days, months, and years, 10×10 leaves a trail of these hourly statements which, stitched together side by side, form a continuous patchwork tapestry of human life.

10×10 is ever-changing, ever-growing, quietly observing the ways in which we live. It records our wars and crises, our triumphs and tragedies, our mistakes and milestones. When we make history, or at least the headlines, 10×10 takes note and remembers.

Each hour is presented as a picture postcard window, composed of 100 different frames, each of which holds the image of a single moment in time. Clicking on a single frame allows us to peer a bit deeper into the story that lies behind the image. In this way, we can dart in and out of the news, understanding both the individual stories and the ways in which they relate to each other.

10×10 runs with no human intervention, autonomously observing what a handful of leading international news sources are saying and showing. 10×10 makes no comment on news media bias, or lack thereof. It has no politics, nor any secret agenda; it simply shows what it finds.

With no human editors and no regulation, 10×10 is open and free, raw and fresh, and consequently a unique way of following world events. In 10×10, we respond instinctively to patterns in the grid, visual indicators of relevance. When we see a frequently repeated image, we know it’s important. When we see a picture of a movie star next to a picture of dead bodies, we understand the extremes that exist in our world. Scanning a grid of pictures can be more intuitive than reading headlines, for it lets the news come to life, and everything feels a bit less distant, a bit closer to heart, and maybe, if we’re lucky, gives us pause to think. If you’d like to learn more about 10×10, you can read how it works.

www.tenbyten.org | 10×10 Video: Full (9.2mb) Small (3.3mb)

Fabrica – 2005

Fabrica is Benetton’s creative think tank, located in northern Italy. I recently spent a year at Fabrica, towards the end of which I was asked to remake Fabrica’s website. The site explores notions of order and chaos, control and changeability. A simple grid-based design allows the work to communicate without distraction. Fabrica fellows, past and present, can create project cards using a simple web interface, and their projects then appear on the site’s front page. The Fabrica logo changes to reflect the most recently posted project, literally transforming the identity of Fabrica with each new piece of work. Any visitor to the site can scrawl graffiti on any project page, for all future visitors to see. In this way, any project is vulnerable to praise, criticism, or mockery, and any visitor to the Fabrica site becomes both a critic and an artist. An IP address locator logs the country where each graffiti is created, expressing the global outlook of Fabrica, whose community of artists stretches worldwide.

www.fabrica.it | Graffiti Archive | My Fabrica Projects

Yahoo! Netrospective – 2005

To celebrate the first ten years of the Interent, Yahoo! selected the top 100 moments of the web from 1995 to 2005. I worked with Yahoo! to develop “Yahoo Netrospective: 10 years, 100 Moments”, the commemorative microsite, the design and functionality of which was inspired by 10×10.

birthday.yahoo.com/netrospective

justcurio.us – 2005

justcurio.us is an anonymous question and answer system, open to anyone, with one simple rule: to ask a question, you must first answer someone else’s question. Question yields answer yields question. Strangers helping strangers.

The questions can be about anything the best Beatles album, your saddest moment, your biggest regret, your best childhood memory, the meaning of life, whether you should break up with your girlfriend, the best crepe place in Paris, the best cure for loneliness. Anything at all. This is our chance to lean on each other, to look to a stranger for help, to discover what other people think.

justcurio.us is entirely confidential, allowing anyone to ask and answer questions with complete anonymity. So, what’s on your mind?

justcurio.us is a collaboration with Robert Kalin.

www.justcurio.us

Phylotaxis – 2005

Phylotaxis was developed for Seed Magazine, as an expression of the space where science meets culture.

Its structure, derived from the Fibonacci Sequence and closely related to the Golden Ratio, is one of nature’s most elegant. The Fibonacci Sequence is the set of numbers where each number is the sum of the previous two numbers. This simple sequence governs phenomena as diverse as the petal arrangement of roses, the breeding patterns of rabbits, and the shape of our galaxy. It is also evident in the design of the Great Pyramids, the composition of the Mona Lisa, and the construction of Stradivarius violins.

Related to the Fibonacci Sequence, Phylotaxis (Phyllos – leaf, Taxis – order) is the study of the ordered position of leaves on a plant stem, and also applies to the shape of pinecones, and the dispersion of seeds on the flat head of a sunflower.

Phylotaxis illustrates the delicate balance between science and culture in our world. Without the randomness of culture, science becomes dry and predictable, imprisoned in a strict square grid. Without the rational thinking of science, culture quickly teeters towards chaos. Only when science and culture act as peers can harmony be achieved, expressed through the astonishing Phylotaxis shape.

The individual beads of the Phylotaxis represent an ever-changing zeitgeist of science news in our world, populated automatically every few hours by a computer program that scours a slew of online news sources and blogs that focus on science. The Phylotaxis is therefore beyond human control, autonomously composing its own new identity, based on what’s happening in the world of science.

The color makeup of Seed’s insignia changes as the Phylotaxis changes, each dot taking on the average color of its corresponding Phylotaxis photograph, and then quivering with Brownian Motion. In this way, the identity of Seed constantly reflects the identity of science.

www.phylotaxis.com

Lovelines – 2006

Lovelines is an exploration of human desire.

Through large scale blog analysis, Lovelines illuminates the topography of the emotional landscape between love and hate, as experienced by countless normal humans keeping personal online journals.

Using a data collection engine created by the artists for their recent collaboration, We Feel Fine, Lovelines examines thousands of blogs every few minutes to find expressions of love and hate, posted by all manner of people. When it can, Lovelines identifies and saves the age, gender, and geographical location of the person who wrote the post, and then presents that information along with the post. The entries range from frivolous to profound, offering a glimpse into the hearts and minds of people blogging about their wants and needs.

Lovelines presents a stark white screen, bounded on the bottom by a slider running from “Love” to “Hate”, with a draggable heart that becomes scratched out to the point of illegibility as the heart approaches “Hate”. As the slider is pulled through Love, Like, Want, Indifference, Dislike, and Hate, words and pictures appear above to represent the chosen state of desire or despair.

Lovelines is structured around three movements: “Words”, “Pictures”, and “Superlatives”. Words and Pictures iteratively present individual examples of human desire, while Superlatives provides a daily zeitgeist of the most loved, wanted, liked, and hated things. Interactive timelines represent the changing magnitude of love and hate over time, and allow navigation into the past.

The artists were invited to make this piece by Oral Fixation Mints, a breath mint company devoted to “making everyday objects beautiful”, of which Jonathan Harris is a co-founder. We realize that the heart of all fixations is the desire to own, possess, and consume. Great desires imitate the physics of giant pendulums: the higher they rise, the deeper they fall. In this sense, love is inextricably tied to hate, desire to despair. Lovelines walks the line between these two extremes, painting pictures of the shifting landscape of desire.

Constructed entirely from found artifacts – words and pictures posted to blogs – Lovelines draws its identity from a world of strangers, brought together by shared degrees of desire.

Lovelines is a collaboration with Sepandar Kamvar, and was launched simultaneously with We Feel Fine on May 8, 2006.

www.love-lines.com | www.oralfix.com/lovelines