Material for thought

Artwork from Takashi Murakami at the Hong Kong art fair 2010

Sailor Moon (1992 – 1997) transcended Japanese anime and reached a pure state of corrosiveness. Sailor Moon is an artificial flavouring substance: depthless, highly satisfying and addictive. It is more than any artwork of Takashi Murakami the best illustration of his superflat art movement, depicting “the shallow emptiness of Japanese consumer culture”. The original manga is a little different from the anime and somehow more spiritual. The anime version expunged its scenario of any particularity, leading to the ultimate stereotype of the Japanese girl, flanked with kitsch accessories ready for merchandising, cheap love stories and consumerist lifestyles. The characters were designed as for any animes to appeal both to girls and perverts thanks to a quota of ‘subliminal’ underwear scenes. Their transformations into self-centred wonder women are the climax of every episodes (otherwise rather mediocre in their drawings). The same scenes of transformations are shown again and again, becoming objects of cult, obsessing and hypnotic. They saturate the narrative with their superflat symbolic.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) by Hayao Miyazaki is maybe not as famous as some of his later films, such as Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, but it is one of my favourites and it is currently available for free on Google Videos! One aspect that strikes me in Nausicaä and the other films of Hayao Miyazaki is how much villains are portrayed with humanity. Their roughness is what makes them somehow fragile and human. They are most often forgiven by the other characters, this generosity is in my view related to their sensual experience of the natural surroundings, which seems to soften feelings and induce a more distant view on human conflicts. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is a utopia, but its poetic description of an imperfect human nature is touching on something very real.

“Geographical segregation exists whenever the proportions of population rates of two or more populations are not homogenous throughout a defined space”. It is the norm in most of our cities: wealthy vicinities, china towns, Italian and Turkish districts are examples of non-uniform spread of populations. Laetitia Gauvin explained at the ECCS 2010 conference in Lisbon why it happens and presented some interesting variants of the phenomenon. I have edited the authors’ introduction in order to make it more accessible. I think there is much more here than technical jargon, with many social and philosophical implications.

Schelling’s segregation model for an open city: emergence of physical frontiers from a socio-spatial dynamics

What is the resource that most companies are desperate to get their share of: oil, food, human power? Well, did you ever think of our own minds? Our minds are solicited nowadays by tons of information per day. We cannot pay attention to all of them. Consumer products, politics, activists and media want desperately to get their “mindshare”, and I don’t even speak about the attention sought by our friends and family. Mindshare is a limited and highly valued resource, its negotiation is the object of a new economy, the Mind Economy. But if you are let’s say a teenager, fan of Justin Bieber, and want to become influential, how can you compete and get a bit of the public’s mindshare?

Complex Systems Theory can help us better understand some of the mechanisms that shape our cultures and languages. Here are three academic examples from the ECCS 2010 conference in Lisbon.

Wikipedia and Linguistic Networks

(“Generating Linguistic Networks Based on Large Corpora of Linguistic Data”)

By Alexander Mehler