Writer, speaker, thinker. Based in Klampenborg near Copenhagen, Denmark. Books published about numerous issues dealing with the modern worldview and being human. Phenomenons like consciousness, generosity, social behaviour and environmental issues are present in most of my books. Themes like food for the world, daylight in everyday life and the importance of epistemology are presently on my mind. My last name is often spelled differently from the Danish Nørretranders: Norretranders, Noerretranders, Nörretranders or Nrretranders -- all of which are fine with me. My best known books also include the weird Danish letters ø or æ or å in the title: Mærk verden (The User Illusion), Det generøse menneske (The Generous Man), Menneskeføde, Fælledskab (with Søren Hermasen), Glæd dig, Børnespørgehjørne, at tro på at tro. But not all titles include the unusual Danish letters: eg. vild verden, afskaf affald, Civilisation 2.0.
Artist Olafur Eliasson has collected an offering of thoughts on light and lighting from a global group of thinkers and doers: A Charter of Light and Energy. On display at the website of the Little Sun project, it offers a chance to see light from many angles.
Little Sun on Sale in Jakarta, Indonesia
Olafur Eliasson writes: “Like a muscle, the Charter of Light and Energy is a tool to move things. Words can make a difference. A feeling becomes thought; a thought becomes word; and word becomes action – bringing energy access to all!”
“The Charter of Light and Energy brings together distinct voices from around the world that encourage commitment and step-by-step action to improve light and energy access.”
Not all contributions are up yet (mine for instance is still in line), so there is more to follow.
Strawberry ice-cream with vanilla and caramel? Cross-country ski slopes with bushes and fir trees? Japanese seaweed on a weird beach? You are nowhere near. Look again — dream on and only then look
Avalanches on Mars! Close to the North Pole of our neighbouring planet the extremely cold winter traps the atmospheric carbon dioxide as ice that settles on the top of sand dunes. Everything is covered by fine dust coloured red by iron. When the ice thaws and sublimate into air the sand below it is released and descends down as long brown avalanches — looking like trees.
Right in the middle of the picture, a little to the left of the center, you can see an avalanche photographed in action. The bowl of dust bears witness to an avalanche caught in the act. On Mars! The cloud is maybe 25 meters across. The whole image one kilometer. The photo is takes by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. More about the image here. More about the avalanches here. More about the experience inside you.
MAD Food symposium talks available as audio files at renewed website.
The spectacular lineup of talks from the two MAD Food Symposiums held in Copenhagen during the summer of 2011 and 2012 are now also available as audio files at the renewed MAD website. Videos have been up for a while, but now you can now get the global food revolution to go in your earphones. Quite a buffet!
Participatory enthusiasm at MAD Symposium 2012
MAD now has a newsletter, a blog, a feed and much else that makes it look a little less enthusiastic and a little more pro than the charming old clumsy MAD site. But don’t get it wrong: It is a sign of the event growing up and therefore saying: Donations are welcome … and necessary.
My talks at the MAD Symposiums as audio files:
2011
2012
My presentations are still also available as videos and slides from 2011 and 2012.
What a relief: “Fine dining is dying,” says Christian Puglisi, head chef at Copenhagen Restaurant Relæ and the the wine bar Manfreds. It is soon over with reserving the best stuff for the snobs at the overly pretentious fine ding restaurants where you have to dress and behave properly. “Good food of high quality is going to become more accessible,” Puglisi predicts.
Puglisi is no average chef. After a job as deputy top chef at restaurant noma he now runs one-Michelin star Relæ which is a true innovation in restaurants, with lots of atmosphere and very good food. But his Manfreds og Vin, at the other side of the not so posh Jægersborggade in the not so posh Nørrebro neighbourhood in Copenhagen, is even more of a sensation: A small, unassuming wine bar packed with people and extraordinarily good food that you consume in a simple and homely setting. It is everything you want when you need food before going out in the city. The quality is gourmet but the style is friendly and the place human sized.
Puglisi has shown the way for good dining that is not fine. He made his prediction about fine dining dying in a round table discussion hosted by the global lifestyle magazine Monocle. The first result from the round table is an article in the print magazine Monocle 59, 239-24, and will soon also appear on the radio version of Monocle’s content, monocle.com/24.
Monocle round table group: Christian Puglisi, Søren Ejlersen, me, Rosio Sanchez. (Photo: Jan Søndergaard)
I was fortunate enough to be part of the round table event conducted by Michael Booth for Monocle. Søren Ejlersen from organic food retailer Aarstiderne was there also, as well as Rosio Sanchez, dessert chef at noma. Her prediction for the future is anywhere as mind-blowing as Puglisis: “What would be great would be if farmers moved into being chefs more.”
So there you are with the future of good meals: Gifted chefs offering their gifts in livable places — true restaurants that will restore your mind and body. And gifted farmers cooking for us all, teaching the chefs how to deal with their produce. And chefs becoming farmers, as many leading restaurants already have shown the way to.
Dining is about to become fun. At the moment for the few, in the future for the many.
PS: My own prediction? Wild food will be the coming mega trend.
Wikipedia is a modern miracle. Who would have thought that a collective effort where everyone can edit everything would lead to such credibility? And something as useful?
Wikipedia is a celebration of cooperation and it’s strenghts.
Wikipedia needs money. Help! It helps you. Send money here.
Laughter, joy and thrill is evident in this large group of people taking part in a seminar at Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin. I performed my Tickling Experiment with the audience. The result is vividly documented in this film clip by Tomas Gislason. Watch the clip and read here about the scientific background for the tickling exercise.
Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson runs an outstanding studio in Berlin. More than 50 people work in a large building housing studio, offices, labs, machine shops, an art school being part of Berlin art university UdK and numerous other big and small activities — all orbiting around the extraordinary installations and other artwork flowing from Olafur Eliassons imagination. From idea to installed work of art there is a huge amount of logistics, craft, design, trial-and-error as well as group work.Truly a laboratory producing hitherto unseen phenomena.
A much larger group than the 50 who work there on a day-to-day basis interact with the Studio throughout the year. They are brought together for seminars:
“Almost annually since 2006, Studio Olafur Eliasson has hosted a get-together called Life is space. For this day-long event, scientists, artists, scholars, dancers, theorists, spatial practitioners, and movement experts come together with the Institut für Raumexperimente participants and the studio team to share, discuss, present, and experiment. These meetings are only loosely planned in advance and are largely left to intuition and serendipity.”
I have had the great fortune of taking part in all of them, watching the seminars developing from mostly talks and discussions into more and more emphasis on experiments. At the most recent “Life is space” I contributed the tickling experiment.
A film is being produced (edited by the exceptionally gifted and skilled Tomas Gislason) to document this Life in Space 4 event that took place on 17 June 2011. The following clip is a preview of the film, posted on the Studio Olafur Eliasson homepage yesterday:
The Tickling Experiment was developed over some years when I was lecturing about my 2007-book (in Danish only) glæd dig dealing with joy and happiness. In the book I describe scientific experiments with tickling developed by a british group of neuroscientists interested in how we perceive the difference between ourselves and others. In a wonderful scientific paper with the unusual title “Why can’t you tickle yourself?” the authors Sarah Jayne-Blakemore, Daniel Wolpert and Chris Frith describe how the tickling sensation is rooted in the element of surprise that stems from you being tickled by someone else.
You need the surprise to feel the tickling. No joy without other people. Well, no joy without the surprise. You can in fact tickle yourself, but then you have to cheat yourself. The three neuroscientists described a tickling machine:
(From 1998 article by Jayne-Blakemore, Wolpert and Frith.)
This construction makes it possible to tickle yourself because the brain cannot keep control with the movement because it is being displaced in time and space by the odd connections.
But as the video shows, it is easier to have someone else tickling you.
In my book glæd dig I developed the idea that joy and control do in fact exclude each other. Neuroscientific experiments shows that when you get something you really like (such as a monkey having orange juice) you produce neurotransmitters for instance dopamine. But if you are told that you will get a reward later, you produce the dopamine when the message comes, not when the juice is served. Thus, monkeys like you and me will not enjoy treats that we are sure we will have. Control and predictability ruins the feeling of joy. This observation was based in work done by Wolfram Schultz (see his somewhat technical Scholarpedia article about the issue).
Not that there is anything wrong with having a warm shower in the morning, it is just that we do not feel joy when we observe the water running from the pipes. We only feel disappointment when it is not running. Thus the more predictability and control we have, the less joy we feel.
When lecturing about the book I started doing simple tickling exercises with audiences, discovering how a few straight instructions could gently turn an audience into a thunder of laughter in a split second. Having cultivated the exercise for years, I found the warmest and most receptive audience ever in the Life Is Space group. It is a thrill that is was recorded with such skill. Looking forward to the film!
At the time I was working on the book, New York literary agent and editor of the wonderful edge.org website John Brockman and art curator Hans Ulrich Obrist asked a group of people to send in formulas to be exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery in London where Obrist is co-director. My contribution was this complementarity between joy and control:
Back to the Life is Space 4 seminar:
Another experiment at LIS 4
For Danish readers, the tickling experiment is mentioned in glæd dig at pages s. 77-81 og kilder s. 208.
Genetically engineered athletes, robot universities, academics not competing, peacocks advertising, visions of the poet William Blake and the University of Utopia are some of the crazy ideas floating around in a congress keynote talk from the far future of 2048 — looking back on the year 2028. The video of the talk has been long-lost in time travel, but now recently refound and made available here.
Confused? Here is more to puzzle over:
This is Thomas Moore – statesman and thinker – around year 1500 he coined the word “utopia” – the place that is not – to be able to publish in 1516 a social vision for better society without having his head cut off. (He did end up having his head cut off, but for other reasons.) His ideas eventually led to the origin of the University of Utopia in 2028. The talk explains how.
A video of the talk from 2048 appeared together with this message:
The organizers of EUNIS 2048 has asked me to look back on those good old days when we humans were still smarter than our creations and the human individual was considered the seat of the mind. But please do remember: 2028 was not at all a year of festivities. It was the time when it suddenly and dramatically dawned on humans what robot scientists had been talking about for three decades: 2028 was to become the last year before that phase transition where the sudden superiority of artificial information processing led to the merging of all individual human minds into one universal mind. The disappearance of the ego was a consequence of the many changes in the organization of human knowledge that happened in the years up to 2028: The merging of all texts into one searchable unit, the linking of all learned and educational institutions into one grand networked lecture bazaar, the appearance of instant translation between disciplines of knowledge and the acknowledgement of the complexity of everyday knowledge as compared to the abstract, formal knowledge of the old scientific disciplines. But perhaps most of all the appearance of art as the prime engine of knowledge and the flow of relationships in networks as the prime mover of the mind was the forerunner of that great achievement of 2028 for which we are still thankful: The University of Utopia. And for its wonderfully deep slogan: All humans are students, all students are teachers, no teacher is human anymore.
It turns out that this talk was in fact not held in 2048, but in 2008.
“Looking back on 2028” is kind of weird title for a lecture held in year 2008. But the lecture pretends to be held in 2048 and to be looking back on 2028. It can therefore deal with a lot of wild statements as a kind of science fiction story. Thus it is about robots, olympics, universities based on collaboration and other utopian stuff.
The occasion was the 14th EUNIS congress held in Aarhus, June 24-27 2008. EUNIS is an organisation that brings together people responsible for information technology in european universities. The organizers wanted something far out as an opening keynote, so they asked for at forecast for 2028. My response was to double the challenge by choosing to do a look-back at 2028 from the point-of-view of 2048. So impossible perhaps, that one is forgiven for saying silly things. Oddly enough, this statement from the future was lost again. The video of the talk was on the net after the event, but has been unavailable for years. But then in the fall of 2012 it became available again on Vimeo. So here it is in 2012 – with apologies for the sound being slightly out of synch … asynchronous like the entire talk:
The video ended in a strange way? At the actual event, when the talk was given in 2008, I stepped down from the stage and then played the Beatles-song “Because” (originally from the Abbey Road album). However, copyright issues made it impossible to include the soundtrack of the song in the video. Only the lyrics were allowed for.
You can listen to a sample from the original version of the song here.
Abbey Road, 1969
In fact, the version played at the talk was the remastered one from the Beatles album “Love” produced for the Cirque de Soleil show of that title.
Video of a talk on how we see the world: Today – as an enemy to be controlled by our technology. Tomorrow – as a friend to be explored by our appetite. From a symposium for chefs, here is a story about a forager in a kindergarden.
The world is not a desert, devoid of edible stuff. It is a welcoming, blossoming and rich world full of plants, animals and insects that we can eat as food. But we seem to have forgotten what is there. We have forgotten that we are natives belonging to this world.
We treat the world as if it was hostile and unfriendly. Our technology reflects that attitude. We try to control the world because we are afraid of it. That is a major mistake. We have to learn that it is a kind kind of world.
A kind kind of world was my punchline in my opening talk at this summers’ MAD Food Symposium on Refshaleøen in Copenhagen, July 1-2 2012. Some 500 chefs and food people from all over the world gathered to discuss the future of food under the theme of appetite. Rene Redzepi from restaurant noma is the convener of this spectacular annual event.
Audience going MAD
My talk this year exemplified the kindness of the world by the story of a foraging tour with the kindergarten Skovbo from Taarbæk, north of Copenhagen and British foragerMiles Irving. The extraordinary experience of seeing the edibility of the wild plants of the world through the eyes of kids developed my thinking into three basic “kindergarden rules” for how to go about the world:
• Everything is everywhere (the world is rich)
• Go look (we are blind)
• Eat together (we need to share)
British forager Miles Irving speaking at Mad 1
The videos of this summers’ talks from chefs and other explorers of the dealing food of the planet are now up at the website Madfood.co. The site is rich in great talks also from last year. New videos from this years’ talks are added on a daily basis with half the talks up by now – with my kindergarden stories here:
The video pretty much shows the slides of the talks, but in case you would like to see them, they are here: Talk at MAD 2 010712 q
BTW, the theme of kindness of the world is also dominant in my talk on “verdens venlighed” (the kindness of the world) from this spring – availlable in Danish only.
PS: So you say that it is spelled “kindergarten”? The English word kindergarten comes from German, meaning children’s garden. So I spell it in English, even if the English do not.
Keynote on India, on the windmills of Samsø, on the new lamp the Little Sun, on restaurant noma and the global food revolution – but most of all about the coming era of compassion and the superpower to come: India.
India is to become the superpower of compassion in the future. That was the forecast I gave in a keynote speech at a conference on India and its future, “Sustainability and Peace – Dialogue between Cultures” held at Arken Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen, on September 13th 2012. The conference is part of a massive cultural exchange project, “India Today – Copenhagen Tomorrow“.
The forecast takes a little explanation.
India is on the rise as an economy. In a few decades India expects to be the dominant economy on the planet, bigger than China, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia and the old ones, US and the EU. regardless of whether India will become nr. 1, 2 or 7 of he economies, the country has a particular cultural strength in its rich history. Therefore it is likely that India could well become another kind of superpower than the superpowers of the mechanical age or the nuclear age. India has the potential to become the superpower in the coming age of compassion.
Cooperation, compassion, empathy and caring for other human beings and the environment are on their way to the top of the agenda for science and for general society. It is in this context that India has the opportunity to play an outstanding role. But, of course, only if the Indian economy does not try to copy the mindless and soulless tradition from the west.
The point is further explored in this interview, conducted by the Danish Cultural Institute and published at Cocreate Now with a little clip from the actual keynote included :
Revi’s theme was how India could tunnel through to the 21st century using decentralised technology, avoiding the mistakes of the 20st centurt centralized technology that we have been using in the West.
• The keynote as audio and slides, if you like
The full length of my response was this 16 minute long keynote that can be heard here:
Compassion is the new frontier of science, in the sense that scientists try to understand why it is that we care for each other, why we want to co-operate with each other, and why we have empathy for each other.
Neuroscientists are studying this phenomenon, because it is a real biological phenomenon in us: That we want to have compassion for each other. We also want to have compassion for the environment we live in, the ecology, the world around us, the eco-systems.
And the funny thing is that science, civilization and culture has been very much about the opposite direction, going in the other way, saying that “the world is a desert” – that every human being should be on its own. That has been what we have learned from economy, from ecology, and all those sciences. And now we are discovering the fact that – no! – we care about each other! We care about the planet!
And this is also the key to how we can run our society, our production, our consumption, in a way that is agreeable to the planet: That we are much more oriented towards liking what we do, liking each other, co-operating, building communities, using the old knowledge that normal people have about how the world functions, rather than thinking that we can run everything from a desk in a headquarter.
So there is a big revolution coming now – in food, in energy production, in how to manage societies, how to manage the commons, the shared resources. And this revolution is going away from the headquarters, from the desks, from the central offices, and putting much more emphasis on the peer-to-peer relations between everyday people, and the civil society, the way that people can self-organise themselves.
This is a big revolution happening, and the Internet is the first great technological example. But there will come [new areas] now: with food, energy and many other things. We will see this compassion for each other. Compassion for the world around us is the key to the future.”
Excerpt of conference presentation
“To like each other, and to want to share, and to want to co-operate with other people – it is not the invention of Western culture. You find it in monkeys. It is there, and we just need to liberate the willingness to co-operate and to have compassion for others in the human being. This is the new frontier of science, and just like older frontiers of science created the superpowers of the mechanical age, of the electrical age, of the atomic age, and so on, this frontier of science – the frontier of compassion – will also produce a new superpower.
And this is wonderful, because the superpowers of compassion will not be countries like Denmark – it will be countries with a bright and glorious future, because they have an old tradition and an old culture of cultivating compassion and knowing how to live a good life.
It means that India will have a bright and glorious future as the Superpower of Compassion. It will take a few decades before you are there, I am sure – and I think you will repeat many of the mistakes we made in our part of the world, with the middle class becoming arrogant and idiotic when they become a little rich, but I am sure that you can overcome this, and become the Superpower of Compassion for the future – and I am sure that Mahatma Gandhi’s old reply to a question from a journalist will then be seen as even more prophetic than it is today.
He was asked, “Mr. Gandhi, what do you think about Western civilization?”, and he answered, “Oh, that would be a very nice idea.” This will be the answer to give in the future.”
The Indian superpower (back to interview)
“India is a country with a long and beautiful cultural tradition, and long spiritual and human… In terms of values, a richness and a kind of maturity that we don’t really have in the West. I think India has an enormous amounts of offerings for the rest of the world when compassion becomes more essential, and I think in a way India will become the ‘Superpower of Compassion’.
Just like in Europe or USA, you had the superpowers connected to earlier leaps in scientific, technological development, like the mechanical over the electrical over the atomic age.
Now we are entering the age of co-operation and compassion, and I hope that India will become a superpower, and I hope also that part of the reason that India will become a superpower is that they will learn from smaller countries like Denmark that do have a tradition for that a highly educated and democratically engaged population can be a driver of good energy systems like windmills, good hospital systems, good educational systems. That much of which made Denmark rich was, in fact, that we had a population that was so highly skilled and educated that it demanded a good life. And that created around it an industry for serving the hospital, an industry for serving education, and windmills, and all that – which made us rich. So the Danes became rich, in a sense, because we wanted a good life. And that lesson I hope the Danes can bring to others part of the world.”
Little Sun is a beautiful piece of technology and art – a lantern, a small lamp powered by a battery that is recharged by a solar cell on the back of the lamp. Five hours of sunlight gives you five hours of LED light from the small diode on the front of the Little Sun. That way you can have light where there is no electricity grid, entirely out in the bush. This is great for people who happen to live in a part of the world where there is no grid. Thus it can be of huge importance to the 1 billion people on this planet that do not have access to electricity at the moment.
Little Sun is a model for the future of technology – non-centralised, robust, self-supporting technology that enables people to help themselves. It has been developed by Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson and the Danish engineer Frederik Ottesen. In the rich part of the world you can buy one for 20 euros and thereby make it accessible in the part of the world where it is really needed, for instance Africa.
It was presented originally at the Tate Modern in London during the Olympics this summer and later at the Biennale in Venice.
There is a lot of great material on the lamp at the Little Sun homepage where you can also buy one for your field trips.
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