Prof Takemura is known for his numerous innovative IT-driven social activations, such as the ‘Internet stethoscope' he demonstrated on Friday on the last day of the annual Design Indaba at the Cape Town International Convention Centre. He is billed as an anthropologist who uses his skills to encourage meaningful change in the world.
His wet project, ‘Aquascape', on water, focuses on global environment and sustainable water resources. He placed Internet mikes around temples in Tokyo and Mumbai to listen to water dripping into earthen jars, through the Internet, thereby resonating across the world. Listen to it here: www.aqua-scape.jp/.
The nature of mass media is to report that which is extraordinary, but what we need to do is share the lives of ordinary people across the globe, he explains. Sharing the context of news events. It is also about recognising our planet as a whole, as a globe. So we need a system... and for the media to have a system for recognising the context around us...
His design work centres around designing global windows. Breathing Earth is a programme that measures seismic activity around the world. “What I recognise as disastrous is the vulnerability of our urban society and lack of sensitivity to our dynamic, living earth,” he says of this project.
He hopes to make us more sensitive to what is going on with our planet and how vulnerable it actually is and how we impact on it. His belief is that if we feel connected to our world, we will care more how we treat it. Computer graphics aren't important here, although they are extraordinary, what is important, he feels, is to measure activity on the earth as it happens... so the self portrait of the earth is continually updated, he explains further. For more: {www.sensorium.org/breathingearth/index.html}}.
He stresses the need to...
This is where his incredible Tangible Earth project was born. He has created the first digital complete image of the earth in 10 million to one scale, to communicate the tangible sense of our planet as one living, global earth – to observe, so that the user can look at the world from any perspective, and are indeed, encouraged to do so, to imagine things happening, interrelated and all connected.
It is set up so that even a child can see how fragile the layer of the earth's air is, for example. You can observe typhoons over regions. “I hope people will intuitively grasp the fragility of the earth,” Prof Takemura says. Click through to www.tangible-earth.com to see for yourself.
It is in actual fact a magnifying glass on the globe so that anyone can go straight to a location on earth and plot what is happening – from migratory birds, deforestation, sea currents, to chemical smogs in Japan, the direction of air pollutants coming from other countries into our atmosphere... the global warming process...
He says he is bringing out the “broadband” of people's imagination. We see the news of atrocities, but don't always see it as our problem, he explains. But, his point is, that if we had to hear, for example, a victim of ethnic violence's screams real time through the global stethoscope of the Internet, we would react differently to global tragedies.
His philosophy is thus, according to a web entry... “the Internet has the potential to give rise to a new human common sense: an enhanced and pluralistic sensorium and nervous system that can be shared by all. The internet is here to connect us to the hidden channels of the wind and water and fire of the earth. Like electronic acupuncturists we will diagnose the body of the planet through our senses.
“We live in a time when both our self-definition and world view, as well as the cosmological implications of our existence, are undergoing drastic change. The elements of the exciting and new discoveries in the life and earth sciences, in communications and other fields are being synergetically integrated on the deepest levels. Soon, even long-accepted buzzwords such as ‘communication' and ‘network' will not be limited to refer to human activity. Ideas of a ‘communications revolution' and a ‘global village' will soon be seen within a greater context, a deeper and wider network.”
For more on this amazing man and his thoughts... www.sensorium.org/faqs/person/takecomment.html.
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