A century of evolution between La Guerre des Boutons and Harry Potter

I'd like to share the notes I wrote about a fascinating French book:
De la Guerre des Boutons à Harry Pottter by Jean-Marie Gauthier and Roger Moukakou.

In this book, two psychiatrists connect the novel of Louis Pergaud, La Guerre des boutons (English: "War of the Buttons") written in 1906 with the best seller of Joanne K Rowling (1997-), Harry Potter. The authors present a century of evolution in the teenagers’ life: their space/time structure, their relationship to a group of peers, and their appropriation of the land. The authors analyze the progression from developing concrete skills (close to the ones of adults) to an imaginary virtual world. Based on these two influential novels, a repository for this evolution, they illustrate their clinical analysis with real life scenarios of teenagers.

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You can read on La Guerre des Boutons flyer: “Il y a des guerres qui durent des années, celle-ci doit se terminer avant le diner” which stands for “There are wars that last for years, this one needs to be over before diner”. For the ones who do not know this French novel, I am posting some screenshots from a movie interpretation of La Guerre des boutons made in 1962 by Yves Robert.

An excerpt from the movie can be found ->here<-

Notes from: De la Guerre des Boutons à Harry Pottter by Jean-Marie Gauthier and Roger Moukakou.

Essais anthropologiques

The authors observed that the ones who usually have difficulties to talk and show some reserve towards socialization, tends to spend a long period of time on internet for remote communication. With the computer, the relationship between distance and proximity, direct communication, corporeal and indirect, mediated is transformed. It is as if these teenagers privilege a communication in which the body is absent. The authors propose that this transformation induces difficulties in sharing and exchanging across generations and difficulties in the position that parents take place in the growth of their children.

The relationship to the body
- Rhythm of lives is different. We neglect the sun’s motion in our lives! Before the industrial revolution, a rhythmic life was imposed due to the constraints of working in the field, outside! Now we eat at unstable hours, find abnormal quantity of food anytime of the day, forgetting that meals can have a social function. The social function of meals is replaced by their nutritional function.

- The physical constraints related to transportation have been transformed. We walk less, thus transforming our relationship to time and space as well as our relationship to the body: feelings, feeling tired, cold/heat or being well.
At the time of “la guerre des boutons”, children were progressively learning how to build toys, hunting equipment, using the wheelbarrow under the grand father’s supervision! Now we can be a champion in Karate without moving a finger! The measure of each gesture (cause and effect) goes through an iterative process usually explored by gathering in locations & spaces.



The Land
Play is key for social & individual development, a way to measure personal skills in comparison to others at the same time than measuring one’s body, a necessary step imposed by the life as an adult.





Urban concentration has reduced the children’s possibility to gather outside. The space for play and collective experience is disappearing. Not only that but the parents themselves lost their everyday corporeal connection, their craftsmanship and their personal space. These transformations impact our ability to measure the consequences of our actions; this can explain a come back of the magical thought in a world where the relationship between causes and effects is more and more uncertain. Not only the quantity of available land has changed but also its quality has decreased. Before one could close his house with doors and windows, now it is completely impossible. The house walls not only did become porous, but the family remains in communication with the entire world through telecommunication, TV, internet, mobile phone… thus interrupting the paternal order of things!
Distinguishing between the inside and the outside world is harder (this relationship becomes more and more ambiguous). Distinguishing between private, individual, internal and external realities becomes very hard.

The Group
Children have a predisposition to form groups in which learning by imitation is very important. This helps children leave the exclusive parental relationship to enter a more complex form of socialization: creating an identity and functional skills. In La Guerre des Boutons one practices his skills by crating weapons for hunting while in Harry Potter to compete with one another the children use magical formulas.
In psychoanalysis, authors such as Leroi-Gourhan, Winnicott, Mendal, Montagner, Gibbs show the importance of a psychic construction that needs to connect to the outside world, necessarily going through gesture and object manipulation. Playing without using the body, without manipulating objects is very different.





Creating relationships between children is a considerable advantage as it allows children to realize early on the human’s fundamental destiny: a social being (De Waal, F. 2005). It also allows kids to find modes of learning outside of the parental relationship. The authors remark that we need to think of this child’s pleasure to group and learn in a group and reevaluate the quality of learning that can happen within the group. It is not impossible that behind this pleasure of the group, kids can rediscover values of solidarity probably essential to our humanity and that were still very present at the beginning of industrialization but that are disappearing.

With La Guerre des Boutons one would constitute a group that opposes itself to another one, but today individuals are pushed towards being identical. Solidarity as a value is the most compromised, while individuation is assimilated to the general identical. Consumer society can only live if it destroys values of sharing and solidarity benefiting individualization ...

Time and space
Important for rational thinking, time and space are constituted and function via intuition. These intuitive forms of representation are constructed progressively while the child uses his corporeal skills. Corporeal exercise has a direct influence on the essential cognitive functions (Gibs, Gauthier, Montagner).
With a computer, one can be in contact with the entire world without having moved from the parent's house. The computer is the perfect compromise between the teenager’s necessity to go outside to become independent and the necessity to keep the protection and security of the parent’s house.





While in the 20th century, kids were riskily gathering outside, creating groups, risking their identity confronting others, now kids can just stay home while contacting the external world, protected by their parents. According to the Oedipian complex, teenagers have to develop their personal lives outside of the family environment [Winnicott & Mendel], the computer seem to be the perfect compromise as children avoid the risks of the foreign while being closely connected to this outside world. The teenagers can also escape their fears related to their own body in comparison to the severe criticisms induced by co-located peers! The narcissistic image remains idealized. The teenagers will not quit their bedrooms and will remain dependent on their parents, because this context does not offer a way to move physically away from the family house.

Speech
Communication technologies modified our relationship to space and time and this cannot be left without consequences on the development of thoughts. Instead of confronting peers using a verbal exchange, communication is now guided with icons that one needs to only “clic” in order to be projected in the other side of the globe. The relationship to speech in which the exchange is contrary to the magical icon formula, is a relationship of time.
This modification of the general relationship to space/time can explain the modification of our potential to take time to share thoughts. Language is more and more stereotypical and univocal (close to the marketing discourse) which appears in the political speech today (Chomsky, 1986, 1998).
The dialog with the computer is a series of keywords and reveal the transformation of the structure and use of language in our occidental society. Harry Potter is truly a hero of our time!

Transmission
To separate themselves from their parents, children need to be a minimum aggressive to distant themselves. At the same time, children need to identify to their parents.
However, parents are questioning their role models and hesitate to propose them as references to their children. So the entire reproduction of behavior and models is questioned. Speed, technological progress and the fact that children possess higher skills in tech fields such as IT, all contributed to this change in the parental role. Harry Potter and his adventures confront us to tendencies and forces, that are modified both in the parental and social space.

The hunting land and the exploration space are restricted. It is now rather difficult to find resources outside of the parental home, parental home from which one of the two parent is usually absent. Grand parents are usually distant geographically. Living conditions have changed so much that there is an unbalanced between our human potentials and the environment in which we evolve. This can explain largely the developmental difficulties of the children. The authors question how socially we can address the educational needs of children considering that we cannot go back in time!
The conditions for education have changed because parents have changed. It happened before, but this time it happened extremely rapidly and the educational methods have not evolved as much. Harry Potter raises interesting questions on how the individual maturation of a teenager is a complex and uncertain process, because of the uncertainties that rest on the transmission mechanism across generations.
Most probably the teenagers need to rediscover the joy of living in a group, the values of solidarity and the belonging to a group of peers. Wouldn’t that be what these novels of youth are demanding from adults?

Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure

Fashion of hope and fear

Hope and fear is the external manifestation of the internal desires and paranoia that are adrift in America by Philip Toledano.

Abstract by Joëlle Bitton

Abstract is the upcoming interaction installation by Joëlle Bitton at Gallery EF in Tokyo.

On the theme of waiting and the perception of the time passing-by: inviting visitors in a space where the body and its movement play the role of interfaces. From a point of view on the Japanese garden and its vision on the surrounding, aesthetic and philosophical world, this project is inspired by the tension between elements intentionally thought here in a contradictory dialog: abstraction and texture, concealment and disclosure, empty space and framed space. This installation places the visitor on the razor's edge: always on the border, between two worlds, passing from one to the other. This is the experience of difference and of a fragile balance, of what is called in the Japanese culture, the impermanence of things. The latter is then staged in a relationship to the cycle of time, to the emotions that the expectation of something to happen can generate.

Joëlle's portfolio

Never too pink

Pink Prank Project found on itfashion

Paperless or techno flat?

Miquel Mora Mor | Paper Alarm Clock | Printed electronics on paper

What ever happened to the paperless future?
What if we could enhance paper instead of getting rid of it?
The Flat Futures project deals with this future. A future where, through printed electronics we could print technology (displays, batteries, speakers...) in flat and flexible surfaces. Objects will wear technology instead of carrying them inside. It will become their skin.
How will this affect our lives? How will our relationship with these enhanced objects change? If any surface can display anything, where will its value be? In the physical object? Or in the information itself?

Videogame controllers as ustensils

Burger time place setting

Chris Dimino redesigns the classic place setting: fork, knife, spoon, cup, and plate using unconventional materials solution: the burgertime place setting, using videogame controllers as ustensils and a TV screen plate that plays the classic nintendo game "burgertime"

Social subjectivity?

Should we design for everybody within a consensus or should we find a new line of products outside of the consensus? Should we go for the consensus and define what this consensus is or should we rethink the interaction with products itself? When researching on interaction design and defining visionnary work, I found the following quote to be inspiring:

Is it really so sad and dangerous to be fed up with seeing with your eyes, breathing with your lungs, swallowing with your mouth, talking with your tongue, thinking with your brain, having an anus and larynx, head and legs? Why not walk with your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly.
Where psychoanalysis says, "Stop, find your self again," we should say instead, "Let's go further still ... we haven't sufficiently dismantled our self." Substitute forgetting for anamnesis, experimentation for interpretation. Find your body without organs. Find out how to make it. It's a question of life and death, youth and old age, sadness and joy. It is where everything is played out. (150-151) - Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie, 1980.

Richard Nonas

55 meter long double-line of double-bolders cutting diagonally trough a formal grid of trees - Permanent work
Image from Galleri Andersson Sandstrom

Not the forest, or even the North, but simple places barren, and hard when you touch them - places that are clear about excess... 1997

Invited by Helen Mirra, Richard Nonas came to lecture in our sculpture class. He discussed his view on art, art trying to confuse the categories in a way the culture hesitates to or is not meant to do. He raised the question of the difference between entertainment and art. He compared to a meal "this is the difference between a meal that makes you feel well fed and a meal that you remember twenty years later." An artist is someone who devotes his life to the cause of what he is trying to achieve. It is not per se a profession. An artist looks at everything and question everything.

He explained that he became an artist by coincidence, being an anthropologist at first. He started building sculptures of objects that were powerful for him, such as two pieces of wood. He watches and observes people in their environment before creating anything. Richard Nonas invests in space and place. In the notion of space the world is untouched and undefined by human counsciousness, rather in place there is a direct interaction between the physical world and the human mind. It contains an emotional content of that of an hybrid between the physical world and the human being.
He builds sculptures as place and unsettled, for him the tension is the power. The notion of fragment is key because it is in the middle of something.

He is interested in the strong power of an object into a space. For instance, a dog shit on the ground and everybody walks around. The dog shit recreates the space. He is working on that type of power of an object that transforms a place within his work. He thinks that most outside sculptures are confusing: are they about entertaining? are they a logo? ...
Some outdoor sculptures that were powerful and moving to him, such as the ones of Richard Serra, have been removed and this argumented with practical reasons: terrorism, people using the sculpture as a toilet, ...

The confusion that Richard Nonas creates, is an opening, a discovery, it is not a closing. He does not try to annoy people. He mentions that it is very hard to draw this line. He needs to seat on a bench and watch people to understand their habits and not distub them with his sculptures. He wants to create a shift, a move, so that, for a piece of time, one cannot see the world the same way. This is important because we live in a wolrd of compromises and we makes choices that are important. We need to filter, and certain things are ambiguous while others are not. He finds this type of shift exciting, energizing, and also it is about wander. That way the world changes. He compared this shift with drugs, and he says "with drugs it is always the same thing" with art it is always different. Unfortunately with time everything becomes a cliche, for the artists of his generation, it is hard to see something new. He says he has this responsibility as an artist to keep this dialogue, and create this shift happening.

What an inspiring person! My PhD work is very different and extremelly practical. Yet I always integrated this shift component as a principle in my work. I try to empower people by letting different kind of complexity emerged and this by reducing the technical complexity of expressive tools. I also always worked on what can be seen as two contradictory elements: designing tools for people to create their personal content to be driven into someone else's perspective.

With the class and Richard Nonas, we will all go out for a drink later tonight, I cannot wait to continue this discussion!

Clothing with memories

For my sculpture class, I created a dress that works as a low-tech magnetic tape of tactile sensations. I vaccum formed hands, objects, textures throughout the fabric of a dress I made in transparent plastic.

I depart from scarring on the body: tatoos, percings, scarves in our western societies. I am looking for envelops: mental but also physical. These envelops that people try to create after traumas. I want to represent these envelops in a sculptural form.

I would like to create a skin shell, in the form of a coat, that can be worn. A skin shell that is a souvenir of a previous body and that was left out. This skin shell that showcases traces of influences, people, and objects. Yet I want this skin to be vulnerable, fragile. A skin that tries to protect, to be useful and accepted. I also want the skin to be obvious and a showcase of its internal fight.

I like the vinyl raincoat metaphor because it protects against the rain, but it does not comfort, nor does it contain. It does not isolate, because it is transparent. It feels vulnerable. I was envisioning creating clothing elements in transparent vinyl / PVC / plastic. Vinyl could symbolize the material used for the outside against the rain. Clothing and fashion, the showcase. A coat could work as to represent the cocoon, the shell, a protection against the outside.

I mold objects, textures, persons within the transparent pieces of clothing, objects that have been internalized and been forced to appear for a showcase. It has to be a mess of objects, or organs or things that can show the violence of the showcase done onto someone.

Because I want this sculpture to be a left over of a fight, I want it to be left on the ground, like an animal mutation. Yet in this case it could also be re-worn and re-appropriated.

The Youtube of the Avant-Garde

Do you prefer to listen to sounds or to the relationship between two or more sounds? That is the question even though it may not be exclusive ...

A new addition on ubu, Four American Composers, Directed by Peter Greenaway.

For those who do not know Ubu, UbuWeb is the YouTube of the Avant-Garde.

UbuWeb has converted all of its rare and out-of-print film & video holdings to on-demand streaming formats à la YouTube, which means that you can view everything right in your browser without platform-specific software or insanely huge downloads. We offer over 300 films & videos from artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Vito Acconci, Pipilotti Rist, Jean Genet, The Cinema of Transgression, Richard Foreman, Terayama Shuji, Paul McCarthy Jack Smith, Carolee Schneeman, John Lennon and hundreds more -- of course all free of charge. Presented in conjunction with our partners at Greylodge.

List of the avant-garde films available.

A view on conventional work

At the present time there are enough cultivated entertainment and issue-oriented films, as if cinema were a stroll on walkways in a park… One need not duplicate the cultivated. In fact children prefer the bushes: they play in the sand or in scrap heaps. - Alexander Kluge

Germany in Autumn

As a medium that organizes human needs and qualities in a social form, the existing public sphere maintains a claim to be representative while excluding large areas of people's experience. Among the media that increasingly constitute the public sphere, the cinema lags behind on account of its primarily artisanal mode of production (in Germany, at least), preserving a certain degree of independence thanks to state and television funding. This ironic constellation provides the cinema with a potential for creating an alternative, oppositional public sphere within the larger one, addressing itself primarily to the kinds of experience repressed by the latter. Thus the cinema's intervention aims not only at the systematic non- or misrepresentation of specific issues—eg. family, factory, security, war and Nazism—but also the structure of the public sphere itself. - Alexander Kluge

my body is a hypertext

I love this concept of Yasmine Abbas



project number . 20050816
project title . shotcode tattoo
medium . ink or washable tattoo
my identity has shrunk to my skin...
<< I link therefore I am >> says WJM
my tattoo is no more a barcode that one scans
for revealing the identity of a product
the extension of my body is a url
we exist because of the envelope, the image
which is drawn, written, or projected onto it
our skin is a state of mind, a habitat, and our identity
the last private space?
my body is a hypertext

Also available for 5$, washable bar code tatoos - Via needled

Issey Miyake by Etienne Mineur

Stunning interactive graphic piece for Issey Miyake by Etienne Mineur. Jean-Jacques Birgé talks about la derniere valse of this work.



Spring summer 2007 women collection.
Spring summer 2007 men collection.
Collections designed by Naoki Takizawa for Issey Miyake.

The Ulm School of Design

I am particularly fascinated by the Ulm School fo Design as it integrates political, social and scientific approach to design.

The Ulm school (in 1949) has integrated the Bauhaus into German design. Some might confuse the Ulm school to the Bauhaus. However, the Ulm school differs from the Bauhaus in the sense that the Ulm School wanted to enable a better democracy while the Bauhaus wanted to change immediately Germany. The Ulm school focused more on art theory while the Bauhaus more on applied design. The idea of the Ulm School was to have a strictly scientific approach, a pure science linked to design and not craft. The school also has positioned itself politically and raised social questions as part of its curriculum. It also researched on cognitive science to understand the perspective of space, e.g. Josef Albers' book 'interaction of colors' would consider colors as meaningless out of their context.

The brochure to apply to the Hochschule fur Gestaltung. Ulm (Ulm School of Design) starts its introduction with the spirit of resistance introducing Hans and Sophie School, shot for high treason to the Nazi regime on February 22, 1943.

On February 22, 1943, two young students of the University of Munich were shot for high treason to the Hitler regime. Hans Scholl, age 25, and his sister Sophie Scholl, 23, were put to death for having distributed pamphlets advocating resistance to the Nazi government.” Indeed it is introduced as an example of courageous persons who have risked their lives in resistance to a way of life they knew was fundamentally incompatible with their own values...

The spirit of the school was then to contribute to the spiritual regeneration of a destroyed and confused post-war Germany and attack the problem of educating young people toward social and cultural responsibility... In 1955, according to Walter Gropius, the architect and founder of the Bauhaus, the goal of the Ulm School of Design is to convince the world of the vital necessity of the creative man for the proper of a true, progressive democracy.