Misfit Zeitgeist

This fall, my older daughter entered middle school, and I was scared stiff.  This is a child who runs around in the woods with a cloak on, who has always had her own (sometimes very odd) sense of style, a person who has done conceptual art -- without any prompting -- from the time she was perhaps three years old.  She is intelligent, sweet, and totally unlike any of her peers.  I knew she was doomed: she'd get eaten alive.  I certainly had, at that age -- and she was like me, but more so.  (This is the same daughter who took those endlessly popular pictures of tourists at the Tower of Pisa when she was nine).

She was aware of my anxiety, despite my attempts to be calm.  "Mama," she announced to me in August, after coming back from the be-who-you-are heaven of Camp Winnarainbow, which she says is like a second home for her,  "I've decided on a strategy.  I'm going to wear clothes that are totally me, and then see who wants to hang out with me.  If they don't like it, we'll both know we shouldn't be friends.  If they do like it, then I'll have found people like me to hang out with."

I was secretly skeptical of this idea, because I felt she had really no conception of how cruel people can be in junior high, but I stifled that part of me long enough to praise her for coming up with a plan.  And then the rest of the month she hit the thrift stores, and went through her clothes, throwing out anything that didn't fit in with the "real" her, with the exception of some comfy old clothes for around the house.

Then school came, and she wore... well, all of it.  Even the cloak.  And she got no grief for it.  Sure, she got a couple of annoying boys buzzing around, saying, "why are you wearing a cape?"  To which she answered, with admirable aplomb, "It's not a cape, it's a cloak.  Capes don't have hoods."  And they nodded!  And went away!  And the girls didn't even whisper about her!  Except for one couple of (potentially interesting) girls who said to each other "Wow!  That girl is wearing a cloak!  How cool is that?"

So either she's totally insensitive to the giggles and whispers, or middle school has changed inordinately since I was there.  True, that was a long time ago, and true, this is an unusual American town, being an easygoing surf town in California; but I don't think children that age have changed that much.  Instead, I honestly think the culture has morphed a little.  I think the geeks, by hook or by crook, have begun to inherit the earth.

This is what I arrange as my evidence:  Mulan, the girl who was not supposed to dress like a boy and go to war.  Harry Potter, who went against all that he was told to do, and endured whispers and self-doubt while hanging out with a girlgeek that we all loved.  The Incredibles, where a family of unwanted misfits save the world and learn to let their oddness hang out. Percy Jackson. How to Train Your Dragon.  The Sorcerer's Apprentice movie, which took a whole show you can see live at Maker Fair as a centerpiece of geek creativity.  Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book, which turns the whole misfit thing wonderfully on its head.

Lesser known are things like the excellent young adult book Stargirl, and the incredibly inspiring graphic novel Page by Paige, as well as the fine novel A Mango-Shaped Space, and many, many others.  All about people who do things differently than the norm, and who are worthy role models.

Face it, this isn't the 80's anymore.  This isn't Pretty in Pink, where they changed the ending so Andie gets together with the boring jerk guy, simply because the sample audience didn't like it otherwise.  In this incarnation, Ducky not only wins, but the audience applauds because the misfits are happy being themselves.

In the adult world, we have the Maker movement.  Burning Man.  XKCD.  Steve Jobs (okay, that was obvious).  In other words, the geeks of the last generation got creative jobs, started companies like Pixar, and began to influence culture.  Or they took time off from their dayjobs to go out into the desert and build huge sculptures and hang out with people in an alternate city, where the whole local cultural system is based on the idea of giving, of creativity, of being eccentric.

And what about the Steampunk movement?  Before it was boiled down to gears and Victorian garb, it was a bunch of people making things, creating their own alternate aesthetic, revamping computers and rebooting scooters.  And all the other things people did before you just bought your stuff on etsy from people who still do make things.

My point is, even in the mainstream, it's all trickling in.  Children are being raised on a diet of misfit heroes, because the people writing the stories and making the films and producing the media were often misfits themselves.  And who doesn't create stories that are, to some extent, about themselves -- or at least about people they identify with?  And, when they get older, if they're lucky, they'll discover that a lot of misfits are now having a lot of fun doing weird, fun things they made up out of thin air -- and everyone's welcome.

There are a number of interesting factors here, besides the obvious "geeks growing up and taking over" model.  For one thing, the whole Web 2.0 model of users creating content means that people are taking control over their own creative production.  Communism, if you will, of the culture, where the most outrageously weird person can get seen for their creative genius.  For another, there is the way the Internet has allowed subcultures to flourish: geeks and eccentrics and anyone else can now band together with people of like minds to create a subculture, instead of sitting at home thinking they are the only one in the world who thinks the 17th and 18th centuries were the coolest ever.

And the more this happens, the more the people who learn the technology are the ones who will be producing the creative stuff that influences culture... and on and on.

Interestingly, it has been pointed out that clothes fashions haven't changed much recently.  Car styles haven't changed much either, and nor has music.  No one is coming up with the new Punk Rock, or the bouffant hairdo.  Back in the last century, clothes and cars and other things were always very distinct from each other from decade to decade, but we haven't seen much of a shift in fashion or industrial design, other than fractional differences, for about twenty years.  Why is this?  Some people say it's because there is too much change: our technology changes so fast and so often that we have had to drop something.  But I think you could phrase it another way -- you could say: our attention is elsewhere.  Cars, clothes, songs, these things are parts of our lives that we live with but don't look at so much.  Many of us are busy with other things, things less everyday.

I am finding, suddenly, that my odd tastes, my weird interests, are becoming the rage.  Everywhere you look, now, references to Wunderkammern and Cabinets of Wonder are popping up, used in every possible way.  Martin Scorcese's wonderful film, Hugo, based on Brian Selznik's even more wonderful book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, is full of things which I've been talking about for years.  It's weird.  I'm finding ideas I already wrote into novels suddenly cropping up in novels I'm reading (for example, there is the fabulous Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, which I have just reviewed in the new book review blog Spec Fic Chicks -- where people are remade with machine-parts as part of their anatomies, and ultimately, part of their souls -- is disturbingly close to something I'm trying to sell in a children's book right now).

So this is a double-edged sword.  On the one hand, something I hold very dear is suddenly seeing a surge in interest -- yay!  But on the other, it means that the cool things I am interested in are suddenly under public scrutiny, are being watered down as they enter the media and become part of the ad-cycle; and soon, Cabinets of Wonder will be passe, will -- oh horrors! -- show up at Costco.  Except... so little of the history will have been truly described, and thus will remain, mysterious and horrific and beautiful, and essentially untouched, the Platonic ideal of exploration and weird magical science.  I hope.

Despite the fact that I could be out of fashion next week, I find this spirit of the times to be incredibly exciting.  Watching my daughter go off to school in a tight leather vest over a cotton shirt, a Steamboy-style cap, and rainbow rubber boots, and knowing that she is doing it safe from severe criticism is honestly thrilling.  Knowing that my people, my kind, are out there remaking the culture from the ground up, even if I don't always like or believe in the things that they produce... just knowing that they're there, making stuff, questioning stuff, trying new cultural systems, makes my adrenaline pump as I think about all the doors that are opening.  Thinking about it, I get shifty in my seat.  I get excited, because you know what?

We're winning.

More in the Way of Hands, Mechanical

Since I've been on the subject of waldos, and making things by hand, I might as well show a few of the myriad interesting images I've come across. The hand can be interpreted in so many ways.


First, an amazing clockwork hand manipulator, which I would love to have, even if it's really simply art for art's sake. However, imagine if this could read Jacquard cards (or complex cams) and thus make your hand move in specific ways. Gives a new meaning to the term "player piano" - or perhaps, "piano player." Which would it be?

And a YouTube video of how it works:




Shane Willis' cool Escher-inspired hands repairing each other.


Part of a school project where students had to build working hands out of popsicle sticks and strings as a study of engineering and physiognomy.


A Becker Lock Grip hand, modded by the writer of a blog on "Technical Below Elbow Amputee Issues." In fact, modded twice. Really a very nice hand to have if you need a prosthetic arm, because it is so moddable (and cool looking). An interesting discussion, too, of people's reactions to different prosthetics he's tried... And a neat video of him using it to chop tomatoes.



(Editor's note: Wolf Schweitzer, author of the Technical Below Elbow Amputee Issues blog, above, has written to tell me that I must include the beautiful Monestier-Lescoeur hand, made by a sculptor and automata maker who does very interesting work. He's right - check it out: you can see the video here)


Another school project, with instructions


Kroenen's Mechanical hand, a reproduction of the one in the movie Hellboy.


A cheap mechanical hand ($17) which I came across on BoingBoing

I wasn't able to get a copy of this amazing tattoo of a hand emerging from this person's flesh, but I encourage you to go look at it.


In the Waldo tradition, this person made an oversized wooden hand to fit on their arm


Lastly, Ambroise Pare's excellent rendering of a mechanical hand, made from the original but with metal parts inside. From a nice Timeline of Robotics website.

The picture at the top was in Google Images, but led to a site which proposed to scan my computer for viruses, and nothing more. So I snagged the image and got out of there...

Where's the Waldo?

Last night I had a dream where hands had become obsolete. For everything one wanted to do, one selected a tool that attached to one's arm, and then used the tool to do the activity. Golf clubs, oars, hammers, even cutlery -- they all had little slots in various walls; and when you wanted to do that activity, you simply stuck your (obsolete, apparently) hand into the ends that stuck out, and they would click onto you, becoming part of your body.

This is, of course, ridiculous, because hands and arms are one of the most amazing examples of evolutionary engineering that one can find in nature. Ultimately, a huge number nonrotational mechanical devices -- pliers, pistons, and even backhoes, to name a few -- are directly related to the structures of our hands. Why (as in my dream) would anyone make tools that bypass that extraordinary usefulness?

But it was just a dream.

In 1942, Robert A. Heinlein published a story called Waldo, about a man who is weakened by disease who invents a device (nicknamed a "Waldo") which allows him to magnify his own manual strength: the movement of his own hand would direct the device, which was also hand-like.

The Giant Hand, which is waldo-driven and was also at Maker Faire - and anyone could sit in the driver's seat

Since then, of course, remote manipulators (actually called waldos) have become common, especially for magnifying size and strength or reducing movements to microscopic size. For the most part, they have been used to reproduce hand movements; but this has progressed to things like powered exoskeletons, a la Ironman or Aliens (curiously, some of the real life ones were actually inspired by Heinlein, again - this time the book Starship Troopers). True, the contemporary exoskeletons can only walk a mile in half an hour, and their power packs don't last long; but someday, of course, we'll all be fighting wars with faceless super-soldiers.

Cyrano de Bergerac must have had a good sense of smell

Much of the funding for exoskeletons has come from places like MIT and the Pentagon, homes of ubergeeks and soldiers -- thus the dream of making oneself superstrong and impervious. True, the appeal of Ripley in the cargo loader in Aliens saying "Get away from her, you bitch" is enormous. But why can't we create waldos for other uses, perhaps to enhance more peaceful parts of us? I'd like to see sensory enhancement, not just moving and lifting. Waldo noses, for example, that allow you to smell better or in weird and interesting ways -- imagine smelling the difference between oxygen and helium, or being able to have a nose like a hound dog! I'd love to be able to become a SuperTaster , like in the They Might Be Giants song. Or perhaps someone could make Steampunk-like eye enhancers, like in City of Lost Children, that let you see infrared, ultraviolet - or even (gasp) real X-Ray specs?


There are actually waldo noses, although sadly they do not connect to anyone's sense of smell. And of course, visual enhancers have been around for a long, long time (say, three thousand years or so?). At Maker Faire two years ago, too, I saw Elly Jessop's wonderful Opera Glove, which she developed in MIT's Media Lab. This shoulder-length Glove was a sort of Voice Waldo, allowing her to catch her voice and manipulated it with an interactive glove. Very cool! In fact, a nice note (sic) to end on:



Links:

How to see if you're a Supertaster

On Utopias and the Hand

This year, in an effort to get the count in so our school could get more accurate funding, I became a census enumerator for the Non Response Follow Up (NRFU) part of the census operation.

It was interesting because, being someone who moved back to the area in which I grew up, I finally got to go down all the roads I'd wondered about as a kid -- and explored the outer reaches of Last Chance Road, which winds and bumps for eight miles or more into the back country, unpaved all the way. Some of it requires four wheel drive just to be able to get over the lumpy terrain or up the super steep hills. People there live in all kinds of interesting situations.

When I told other census workers I was going up Last Chance, they looked at me in awe. "Aren't you afraid to go up there?" one person asked me. "I had to go there to find houses. Brrr," and she shuddered. Other people had similar reactions. "Be careful," one person told me, as if I might not come back.

However, I knew a great many of the people who live back there. Some of them are teachers at the local school, and a great many have kids who go to school with my children. The larger majority of them are people who wanted to own their own land and their own homes, who wanted to grow gardens and live in nature, but could not afford to do it in fancier "rural" neighborhoods like Bonny Doon -- which has city garbage service, post boxes, and a bus line. Instead, they opt to drive in and out the five or six miles of rutted dirt road to their houses in the knowledge they can live their lives undisturbed, without a mortgage or a crazy lifestyle to support it.

Some of them have been there from the beginning. One of the teachers, for example, has a half-adobe house with hand-hewn beams and lives in a valley rich in creek-bottom soil. The garden, and the plants and flowers all around their house are like a fairy tale -- the result of more than 35 years of hard work. They built their house themselves, with no hired help, and it's a lovely work of art, like a house out of the Brothers Grimm.


A Low Impact Woodland Home – but not from here. This one's in Wales...

Another family homesteaded a piece of property where the soil wasn't quite so rich, but 36 years on the garden is extraordinary: fruit trees and bowers of roses, vegetables and one of the most beautiful hand-built log houses I've ever seen. It took three and a half years to build, hauling the trees in from the forest, peeling them and setting them; cutting the floorboards and making kitchen cabinets from hand-cut boards without the benefit of power tools.

Other houses perch on hillsides with extraordinary views, tucked among the manzanita; and there was one amazing treehouse I came across that towered over a hundred feet up in a huge tree, a three-tiered platform with arguably the most breathtaking vistas anywhere.

Some of the houses there are newer, and built with less creative endeavors in mind, of modern trucked-in materials; there are even all-mod-con trailers parked here and there in the woods. But they have the same idea in mind: a beautiful place, undisturbed by your neighbors. Even people who live only a few yards away from each other don't bother each other, except to say "hi" when you are getting in and out of your car. The unwritten rule is that they are all out here for one basic reason: to be left alone to live their lives. How that makes these people scary, I can't imagine. I suppose the outside reaction to their life-choices says more about the people who are scared than it does about the people they are scared of.

I wasn't part of the 1960's and early 1970's ideology which some of the old-timers up Last Chance have managed to successfully embody. However, my parents were. They were a bit old to be hippies, but they had a creative (some would say bohemian) outlook which fit well with the can-do attitude of the times. In 1967 they built one of the first summer craft schools in the United States and called it Big Creek Pottery. It was more than a place to go to learn to throw pots; it was a place where people discovered themselves, dropped some of the pre-existing ideas of who they were. That sounds cheesy, but think about it: they learned how to build a kiln; they learned the chemistry of glaze formulas; they had lectures and slide shows and demonstrations by some of the leading craftspeople of the time. And they stepped out of their lives for a moment, into a place in the country, where there was hand-cooked food, two acres of vegetable garden, goats, chickens (fresh eggs!), and all the stars in the world to look at when they stayed up at night. It was idyllic, and it was hard not to go home changed.

Most of my early adulthood was spent coming to terms with the fact that adult live would never be like that. The eighties and nineties were enough to teach me that those days might never return. However, now I've come back to the place I grew up I'm finding new generations of believers in the idyll: this area is rife with organic farms, and new crops of idealists keep Last Chance alive and kicking. The can-do attitude has not died.

Wavy Gravy

This summer my children went to Camp Winnarainbow, a circus camp which was started by 1960's icon Wavy Gravy. I sent them there because it sounded fun, learning stiltwalking, trapeze, tightrope, juggling, you name it. When they came back changed, I couldn't help thinking of Big Creek Pottery and wondering what experiences they'd had in their time away. My younger daughter, given to fits of evil genius which tended to ruin her sister's life, suddenly was making an effort to be sympathetic and good-hearted. The older daughter seemed calmer, and talked about wanting to do acting. She'd never wanted to be onstage in front of lots of people before.

Winnarainbow's slogan is "Toward the Fun," a humorous take on the Sufi expression "Toward the One." And as it happens, there is another agenda here: one of giving children a safe place to go and explore parts of themselves they don't get to be with every day -- without fear of being made fun of or the sense that they are weird. There is a whole tent devoted to costumes (one drawer is labeled "gorilla parts"): spangly things, wigs, silly hats, ball gowns, makeup. Children can access this treasure house at will, and often wander around with costume parts on as part of the everyday routine. The Tornado of Talent goes on almost nightly, and everyone gets to show what they can do. My younger daughter, who had been bullied at school this last year, discovered an insane talent for improv -- when I got there, strangers would come up to me and tell me she had the best sense of humor in the camp -- and is now putting that talent to use practicing comebacks for the bullying remarks she might encounter next year.

The camp is associated with Patch Adams, and some of the counselors have been Clown Ambassadors to other countries. Their stated philosophy is to teach responsibility for one's own behavior, and develop confidence, inner security, and appropriate self expression; to value the uniqueness of each individual within a diversity of backgrounds; and "to provide a training ground to nurture leaders for a peaceful, harmonious and sustainable culture."

I'm not an advocate of backwards-looking thinking. I don't believe we should always be remembering the "Good Old Days" and wishing we could go back. But I do believe in learning from our past. There are a lot of failure stories from the 1960s: hungry people abandoning their attempts at self-sufficiency; communes where people had impossible falling-outs; the sexual revolution backfiring as women who didn't want to sleep with every living being were told they were "uptight."

At the same time it can be awfully tempting to look back and see a time with fewer electronic devices, when we weren't all expecting Internet access and people had so very much time to actually build things and make things - and talk to each other face to face. The loss of hand-work as a regular part of life is a definite problem with the way we do things now, which is why I'm always so pleased to see people making things with their hands. Here in California, I see music programs, art programs and all the shop and woodworking programs being cut out of existence -- not only that but the equipment is being sold off and the buildings closed or even pulled down. The outlay involved to rebuild these programs, buying the equipment and so on, will be impossible for many, many years; and in the meantime, generations of children are being raised who aren't being taught to do anything with their hands other than type and write (and use a Wii). And sports, of course, but not all of us are cut out for that.

So it's easy to look at a time when most people did have those skills - the skills to build their own houses and to fix their own cars and make gardens out of poor soil, and did have time, and worked together to build a shared vision of the future - and see a time that's slipping away. And yet, here I am, talking to a much vaster audience, all about making things and being idealistic. And there's Make, and Instructables, and learning things via YouTube, all the products of visionaries. My daughter learned how to do Jacob's ladder from an unknown 11-year-old boy on YouTube; how cool is that? You can convert your diesel car to cooking oil, and power your generator on walnut shells, if you learn how at places like Maker Faire which is the coolest thing ever, and a place where like-minded visionary people can come together. It really isn't a lost culture, after all, we're just doing it a little differently. So I'll finish with one last exhortation: Make stuff. Do it a lot. Use your hands. And don't be afraid to change your environment. Or the world.


LInks:

A Wonderful book by Juhani Pallasmaa called The Thinking Hand:
"In The Thinking Hand, Juhani Pallasmaa reveals the miraculous potential of the human hand. He shows how the pencil in the hand of the artist or architect becomes the bridge between the imagining mind and the emerging image. The book surveys the multiple essences of the hand, its biological evolution and its role in the shaping of culture, highlighting how the hand–tool union and eye–hand–mind fusion are essential for dexterity and how ultimately the body and the senses play a crucial role in memory and creative work."

Rural Old New York

Janice McIntire just sent me a link to a New York Times article about a man who has spent 30 years turning his 1-bedroom Manhattan apartment into a rustic cabin á la Abe Lincoln. Check out the amazing interactive tour, which allows you to see a panorama of both his living room and his kitchen. I took a couple of screen shots just to give you a taste (check out the computer in the kitchen, and don't forget you can look at the ceiling and floor).

The things one can do if one has enough time! Who says Steampunk is a recent development? It's been in the works a long time.


Thanks, Janice! (via Bettershelter)

Social Sewing and Networked Objects

My friend Gwyan sent me a link (via O'Reilly Radar) to a project developed for Microsoft Research's Design Expo, wherein a group of students came up with a wonderful networked object which is designed to be a comfortable improvement for a grandparent. The project is called Social Sewing, and was designed for Despina, grandmother to one of the people in the design group.

Despina was a dressmaker before she retired, working in a shop with several other people, all sewing and gossiping together as they worked. She did this for many years, until it became too hard to get to the shop. Apparently she is still working, but now does it from home – and finds it incredibly lonely work. So the group designed three little sewing-machine-like-objects, with different colored fabrics on each one, which are networked with her friends' sewing machines. When her friends are sewing, the needles on the faux machines go up and down and the wheels go around - with apparently the right sound - and a light goes on to illuminate the fabric, just like in a real machine. When Despina sits in her sewing chair, communication is activated by her weight, and she can talk to whichever friends are sewing at that time, thus making her sewing the interesting gossip-and-sew experience it used to be in the shop. Apparently the friends are all such good seamstresses that they can tell, just by listening to the sound of the others' sewing, what the others are making. By making the devices familiar in shape and sound, the group have enhanced Despina's life dramatically without making her learn anything outside her comfort zone.

For years people have been talking about humanity getting wired into the world, wearing earrings that talk to the bus (and pay the fare) and so on. But I think that is largely chatter. The real impact is going to be in ways like this, where individual people find ways to make their lives better in ways that corporate entities could never imagine. How well would a device like this sell - or perhaps I should ask how many people out there are retired seamstresses? Not many. And yet people like this group, and many of the people who come to events like Maker Faire, are finding incredibly individual and creative ways to use technology - including, as in this case, networking everyday objects so as to make them familiar and fun, without all the learning involved in a designed corporate interface. As far as I'm concerned, this is where combining humanity and technology will have real impact, when we have the tools to design our own technological objects, when the tools are in our own hands to make what we please, in much the same way we knit sweaters or design our own websites. We are all different from any other person; and so, too, should our technology be different. And part of our everyday world, not as "technology", like cell phones or the Internet, but incorporated into our clothes, our knitting needles, the things we like to do. It's where all the personalized interfaces are trying to go, but in a much better, much more interesting way.

(PS. I'll be posting about Maker Faire in the next few days, I hope).