User:Jasper van Loenen/RWRM/review-draft

When browsing on a book market I stumbled upon a small book with bright colored bars (including gradients), an icon and big typography on its cover: this most be something made by Mieke Gerritzen.

Gerritzen is both the author and the designer of ‘Next Nature’ (2005). The book is basically a short essay in which she reflects on how our view on nature changes with our changing culture. Nature used to stand for something wild and not man made, but now, nature in that sense is disappearing. More and more we are able to shape nature to our will, converting it from nature to culture. On the other hand are elements from our culture, like our technology, moving more towards what nature used to be to us. “The natural landscape became a cultural environment. And the cultural products we developed ourselves became our real nature.” [page 048]

She has some interesting points about this change and the way it influences our perception of things. For instance: she asks the viewer to look around and note the most natural thing in sight. I was sitting in the train when I read this part, which should give you an advantage with the fast changing landscape, but still her answer was the only right one: I, myself, was the most natural thing around - together with my fellow travelers of course. Almost every bit of nature has been planned - or at least been allowed - by men, from the grouped trees around farmhouses to the grass in the middle of the highway.

In the course of around 140 pages filled with big letters and icons, the goes on to explain how we learned to understand nature, which enabled us to change it its form. One of the examples that struck me most was the following: “What will it mean to come across a rabbit in the woods after genetically engineered ‘rabbits’ are widespread? Why would we have any more reverence, or even affection, for such a rabbit than we would have for a Coke bottle?’ McKibben, Bill. (1989):The End of Nature. New York: Random House.

I think this is an important point: if you are able to shape something as complex and ‘wild’ as a rabbit, and can decide its color, sizes, behavior, etc., it really has become a product - as I reread this paragraph, I see a rabbit in the meadow next to the train tracks and can’t help to think what things you would be able to change: shorter ears, a bigger tail and glow in the dark fur might be fun.

The ‘fact’ that nature and culture are switching places is repeated multiple times, and while it is easy to understand the first part, the latter isn’t really explained. In first part of the book she fantasizes about technology that will connect different house-hold appliances and can be embedded in such a way that it will become invisible. But the fact that it is invisible and controlling itself doesn’t mean it is changing into what nature used to be. She talks about autonomous robots, doing there chores without needing our instructions or guidance, as if they have their own will. But how does one of these robots differ from her genetically modified rabbit? They both seem to be in the perfect center of the scale; one ‘wild’ thing getting engineered to become a piece of editable technology, and a part of technology that needs to become something that is able to operate on its own - to become ‘wild’.

But this whole notion of what is nature and what is not is already tainted by culture itself. Bruno Latour mentions a native tribe, the Achuar, who “do not (...) share this antinomy between two closed and irremediably opposed worlds: the cultural world of human society and the natural world of animal society.” There are areas where one can flow into the other, but there is also a boundary between them. “And yet there is nevertheless a certain point at which the continuum of sociability breaks down, yielding to a wild world inexorably foreign to humans. Incomparably smaller than the realm of culture, this little piece of nature includes the set of things with which communication cannot be established.”

I think ‘communication’ can be explained in different ways. If you are able to control the genes of a rabbit, it is also a way of communicating. Knowing how something works lets us control it, send messages to it - even if they’re just going one-way. Gerritzen defines nature the same way, as things that we do not yet control. But when we loosen the control on our technology to let it work on its own - as with the internet of things - does it turn into nature, as she claims? I don’t think it does. Even though or little vacuum robot seems to operate on its own, without us having to tell it what to do, without communicating with it, it is still made by men who told it how to behave.

You can’t write about Next Nature without mention the design. It looks like a typical Mieke Gerritzen design, with bright colors, images in patterns, a lot of logos and big text - I think the actual text could fit on just two sheets of A4 paper. There are no ‘normal’ pages and a lot of the pages feature just a really short text - often just one line - with some visual elements. And it is because of this overload of visual elements, that it becomes a cliche rather quickly. Already after reading just a third of the book, I got the feeling that I was reading a collection of memes, with their short and snappy lines on top of colorful compositions. The layout reflects what I think about the contents: interesting at first, but with too much repetition and not a lot of depth.