This Wednesday, I went to the workshop with Linda Weintraub. The workshop was about net-materialism which encourages people to interact directly with nature. Linda first talked about how our lives are dominated by mass-produced/ artificial products and the virtual world like the internet. The point she was trying to make is quite interesting and intimidating: we’re so obsessed with artificial products that we lost our ability to contact with the nature and the control over our own bodies . Although technology and science help improve arts, as Professor Vesna mentioned in lectures, they also have devastating effects on the nature and how we interact with the nature.
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| Rearranging objects according to their weight |
After the talk, Linda led us into a room filled with stuff she picked up from a forest in Upstate New York, where she hoped we can connect with the objects with solely our bodies, and communicate with the nature. It was quite a unique and overwhelming experience. Several objects require us to use our sense, rather than precise and scientific measures using electronics, to interact with. For example, there was a box full of mosses whose smell Linda hoped us to describe using our own senses rather than a chemistry composition of the particles composing the mosses.
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| The honeycomb Linda collected from the woods |
I would definitely recommend the event to my fellow classmates because I think it would provide us with a perfect opportunity to rethink over the influence of mass production and artificial products on our lives and also because it was such a fun experience!
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| Me at the event |
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