Simon Ings

“Ah, bankers, students, workers, officials, servants, you are the cock-suckers of the useful, the masturbators of necessity. I shall never work. My hands are pure.” — Louis Aragon

82.8 per cent perfect

Posted on October 13, 2021 by simonings

Visiting Amazonia at London’s Science Museum for the Telegraph, 13 October 2021

The much-garlanded Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado is at London’s Science Museum to launch a seven-plus-years-in-the-making exhibition of photographs from Amazônia — and, not coincidentally, there’s barely a fortnight to go before the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference convenes in Glasgow.

Salgado speaks to the urgency of the moment. We must save the Amazon rainforest for many reasons, but chiefly because the world’s rainfall patterns depend on it. We should stop buying Amazonian wood; we should stop buying beef fed on Amazonian soya; we should stop investing in companies who have interests in Amazonian mining.

There are only so many ways to say these things, and only so many times a poor mortal can hear them. On the face of it, Salgado’s enormous exhibition, set to an immersive soundscape by Seventies new-age pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre, sounds more impressive than impactful. Selgado is everyone’s idea of an engaged artist — his photographs of workers at the Serra Pelada gold mine in Brazil are world-famous — but is it even in us, now, to feel more concerned about the rainforest?

Turns out that it is. Jarre’s music plays a significant part in this show, curated and designed by Sebastiao’s wife Lelia Wanick Salgado. Assembled from audio archives in Geneva, it manages to be both politely ambient and often quite frightening in its dizzying assemblage of elemental roars (touches of Jóhann Jóhannsson, there), bird calls, forest sounds and human voices. And Selgado’s epic visions of the Amazon more than earn such Stürm und Drang.

This is not an exhibition about the 17.2 per cent of the rainforest that is already lost us. It’s not about logging companies or soy farms, gold mines or cattle ranches. It’s about what’s left. Ecologically the region’s losses are catastrophic; but there’s still plenty to save and, for a photographer, plenty to see.

Here, rendered in Selgado’s exquisitely detailed, thumpingly immediate monochrome, is Anavilhanas, the world’s largest freshwater archipelago, a wetland so complex and mutable, no-one has ever been able to settle there. There are mountains, “inselbergs”, rising out of the forest like volcanic islands in some fantastical South China Sea. There are bravura performances of the developer’s art: rivers turned to tin-foil, and leaves turned to photographic grain, and rainstorms turned to atom-bomb explosions, and clouds caught at angles that reveal what they truly are: airborn rivers. As they spill over the edge of Brazil, they dump more moisture into the Atlantic than the mighty Amazon itself.

Dotted about the exhibition space are oval “forest shelters”: dwellings for intimate portraits of twelve different forest peoples. Selgado acknowledges this anthropological effort merely scratches the surface: Amazonia’s 192 distinct groups constitute the most culturally and linguistically diverse region on the planet. Capturing and communicating that diversity conveys the scale of the region even better than those cloud shots.

The Ashaninka used to trade with the Incas. When the Spanish came, their supreme god Pawa turned all the wise men into animals to keep the region’s secrets. The highland Korubo (handy with a war club) became known as mud people, lathering themselves with the stuff against mosquitoes whenever they came down off their hill. The Zo’é place nuts in the mouths of the wild pigs they have killed so the meal can join in with its own feast. The Suruwahá quite happily consume the deadly spear-tip toxin timbó, figuring its better to die young and healthy (and many do).

The more we explore, the more we find it’s the profound and sometimes disturbing differences between these peoples that matter; not their surface exoticism. In the end, faced with such extraordinary diversity, we can only look in the mirror and admit our own oddness, and with it our kinship. We, too — this is the show’s deepest lesson — are, in every possible regard, like the playful, charming, touching, sometimes terrifying subjects of Selgado’s portraits, quite impossibly strange.

Transports of delight

Posted on August 30, 2019 by simonings

Exploring Driverless: Who is in control? at London’s Science Museum for New Scientist, 31 August 2019

Durham Cathedral’s stained glass windows inspired artist Dominic Wilcox’s contribution to Driverless, a tiny but thought-provoking exhibition at London’s Science Museum.

It occurred to Wilcox that artificial intelligence could make traffic collisions a thing of the past, which means “we don’t need the protection systems that are built into contemporary cars”, he told design magazine Dezeen. “We can just have a shell of any design.”

His Stained Glass Driverless Sleeper Car of the Future is the sort of vehicle we may be driving when road safety has improved to the point where we can build cars out of whatever we want. It suggests a future in which safety is no longer a set of barriers, cages, buffers and lights, and is instead a dance of algorithms. Rather than measuring out a bike lane, say, we will have an algorithm that decides whether to leave a smaller distance to the bicycle on its left to reduce the chance of hitting a truck on its right.

What if that causes more cyclists, but fewer passengers, to die every year? Such questions aren’t new. But they are having to be asked again and in a different and disconcerting form as we move more safety systems off the roads and into vehicles.

On show is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s “Moral Machine”, a website using more than 40 million participants’ decisions on what to do in certain situations to inform our autonomous machinery design. The findings can be unsettling: would-be designers are more likely to sacrifice your safety if you are fat, a criminal or a dog

This is a show as much about possible futures as it is about the present. Interviews, archival footage, models and some interactive displays create a series of provocations, more than a fully fledged exhibition.

I especially liked the look of the MIT Senseable City Lab and the AMS Institute’s “Roboats”, currently on trial on Amsterdam’s canals. These autonomous floating platforms form spontaneous bridges and event platforms and can transport goods and people.

The exhibition spends much of its time off-road, investigating drone swarms and privacy, flocking behaviour and mine clearance, ocean mapping and planetary surveillance.

Don’t let its size put you off: this little show is full of big surprises.

The genius of making a little go a long way

Posted on November 3, 2017 by simonings

Visiting Illuminating India at London’s Science Museum for New Scientist, 10 October 2017

One can taste the boosterism in the air at London’s Science Museum as it introduces its two-gallery exhibition, Illuminating India.

There is a cafe serving excellent Indian street food. Someone next to me used the word “Commonwealth” without irony. Would there have been such a spirit without Brexit? Probably not: this is a show about the genius of another country that very much wants to project Britain’s own global aspirations. Any historian of Anglo-British relations will give a sardonic smile at this.

When you visit (and you should), try to look around the smaller, artefacts-driven gallery first.

This room tells the stories of Indian science – stories plural because there can never be one, linear account of how such dissimilar and contesting cultures struggled and more or less succeeded in understanding and exploiting a space of such extraordinary complexity.

Naturally, since India has a past to boast of, pride of place goes to its indigenous cultures. It was the Indus valley civilisation, after all, whose peoples fashioned standardised weights around 4000 years ago: items that indicate high levels of arithmetical literacy, communication and trade.

And there are reconstructions of Ayurvedic surgical instruments described in records dating back to around 500 BC. Also on show is a 1800-year-old document containing the first example of the use of zero. Wonderfully, radiocarbon dating pushed the document’s age back by 500 years just before the exhibition opened.

It is a measure of the wisdom of the curators that such an illustrious past isn’t allowed to overshadow India’s more recent achievements. For example, Jagadish Chandra Bose’s early-20th-century crescograph, designed to observe plant growth at a magnification of 10,000 times, reminds us why he is often called the father of modern Indian science.

Another winning object is Chandrasekhara Raman’s spectrometer. Raman was the first Indian to win a Nobel prize, for physics, in 1930.

And what of that other great empire far to the north? Well, there is a map of George Everest’s career-defining Great Trigonometrical Survey of India – the teamwork of 70 years distilled on a single, meticulously drawn map. And nearby are details of a recent collaboration between Surrey Satellite Technology in the UK and the Indian Space Research Organisation on the Earth-surveying NovaSAR satellite.

Some of the deeper, darker questions about Anglo-Indian relations are posed in the second, photographic half of the exhibition.

There, the anthropometric photographs of Maurice Portman make a depressingly silly impression next to the respectful, revealing and entirely unlicentious photographs Ram Singh took of the women of his own harem: powerful political players all, who shaped the country through marriage and allied treaties.

It is hard to say why the split nature of Illuminating India works as well as it does. It has something to do with the way the rooms handle political power.

India’s science, from its ancient stepwells that gathered monsoon waters to the bureaucratic and algorithmic marvel that is today’s tiffin tin-based lunch delivery system, has been driven by the complex needs of a massive population making a living.

Similarly, its doing-more-with-less style of innovation is reflected in everything from the world’s cheapest artificial leg (the Jaipur leg, made of rubber, plastic and wood) to the world’s cheapest Mars-orbiting camera.

Visitors to Illuminating India will leave thinking that technology may, after all, be making the world a better place, and that what people do is ultimately more influential than who they are.

On Saturday 30 May, fantasy takes over the future

Posted on May 6, 2015 by simonings

There’s an official webpage coming, but in the meantime, here’s a bit of mischief I’m planning with New Scientist and SCI FI LONDON in a corner of the British Film Institute on the afternoon of Saturday 30 May.

We’ll Eventbrite all this to get an idea of numbers but it’s free — drop in, heckle, throw peanuts, and above all buy me beer afterwards..

The wildest and most outlandish stories are slipping through the screens, cabinets and wall-spaces of our most treasured institutions and into the streets and squares of the real world.

Kicked off with a keynote by multi-award winning science fiction writer Alastair Reynolds, this packed afternoon of short films and discussions explores how stories, games and falsehoods are guiding us towards an uncertain tomorrow.

Curators Robert Devcic and Doug Millard lead us through a bizarre world of unreal exhibits — objects and films and documents that purport to be from future times and unreal places. These mock-ups are meant to entertain, baffle and provoke us — but what happens when we can no longer tell the difference between them and the real thing?

In the company of Pat Kane, Meg Jayanth and Shrinking Space we explore the fun and games to be had in making up and playing the future. Can we ever ready ourselves for the unexpected? And might the games we play now lead us into making the wrong choices in the future?

And Georgina Voss, Paul Graham Raven and (via Skype) Regina Pedszus, will help us discover how mock-ups, simulations and rehearsals are bearing on the real world, and making science fiction real.

Interspersed with short films, video art and live readings, New Scientist‘s afternoon at Sci Fi London will take science fiction off the screen and jam it under your skin.

Sausages of the Anti-Christ

Posted on April 20, 2015 by simonings

A visit to Cravings, at London’s Science Museum For New Scientist, 28 March 2015 (Incredibly, the subs let that headline go through on the print version)

SOME years ago, I was friendly with a family who ran a venison smokery. They were expanding their product line to include a venison salami. On one visit, they presented me with piles of sliced sausage: which recipe did I prefer?

My first mouthful was a disappointment. The sausage tasted of generic salami, hardly even of meat, and though I knew otherwise, it was hard to imagine that any deer had perished in the making of it. My second was just as bad. The body language of my hosts was revealing. My weak-beer praise simply confirmed what this conscientious family already knew: no tweaks were going to save their experiment.

As my friends discovered, you don’t need to be a big food processor to hit big problems. Since mass production renders the best ingredients to tasteless slurry, your job is to rescue, recreate or, frankly, fake the tastes and aromas you killed off in making your product.

The keen home cook’s first-aid kit includes fat, salt and sugar. But the food industry also uses (among many other extras) acids, enzymes, texturisers, blood plasma and grim-sounding powdered dairy essences. In Swallow This, the latest of a string of superior industry exposés, food journalist Joanna Blythman explains how far manufacturers will go to produce cheap foods that taste consistent, while retaining that “just-cooked” feel.

Her page about salami, for example, features company literature describing a meat glue made from the enzyme transglutaminase, blended with animal protein and vitamin B9: “Salami Dry Express B9 decreases ripening time by up to 20 per cent, creates a more… appealing colour in less time, offers improved casing peeling and… sausage aroma. Improved slicing properties reduce wastage by up to five per cent, while shorter processing and storage times also provide financial advantages.”

Each promise listed sounds reasonable. But taken together, they suggest an approach to food that can only disgust consumers. And this, chiefly, is why the food processing industry is growing ever more secretive, ever more insincere, and, more worryingly still, ever more removed from the real science of nutrition. Its prime concern is not food, but keeping up appearances.

Everyone imagines they want an authentic home-cooked meal, even as they “require honeyed cakes, unguents and the like”. This nice turn of phrase belongs to the Greek Cynic Diogenes, one of the philosophers in Michel Onfray’s slim, sly volume of essays called Appetites for Thought. Rather in the spirit of Bruces’ Song, Monty Python’s dipsomaniacal summary of the Western philosophical tradition, Onfray dishes out morsels under chapter headings like “Nietzsche; or The Sausages of the Anti-Christ”.

His simple thesis, that our minds are ruled by our stomachs, acquired a graphic reality in 2006, when Molly Smith, a 16-year-old from Cambridgeshire, UK, received a life-saving transplant. She had been born with much of her intestinal tract missing, and had never experienced hunger, thirst or any food cravings. When Molly finally ate her first solid food – a banana – she felt the stirrings of new sensations. Her guts were beginning to talk to her.

Molly’s is one of the more startling stories told in Cravings, at London’s Science Museum. The rich, mysterious, two-way dialogue between gut and brain that so entertained Onfray is its central theme, and serves as a playful entrée to health advice.

Though the exhibition is full of cautionary information about fat and sugar levels in many processed foods, it left this visitor hankering for the museum café. This is no bad thing. Food, any kind of food, is better than the alternative. And an exhibition about appetite ought to pique it.

Swallow This: Serving up the food industry’s darkest secrets, Joanna Blythman (4th Estate).
Appetites for Thought: Philosophers and food, Michel Onfray (Reaktion Books).

What colour is the moon?

Posted on February 10, 2012 by simonings

Thursday, 1 March at 4pm – my Science Museum debut!

We humans acquired the means, very late in our evolution, to perceive a world of colour – and every day we spend phenomenal amounts of energy making the world even more colourful than it would otherwise be, with face paints and aniline dyes, fabrics and photographs, paints, powders and moving images everywhere.

But the further we leave our terrestrial environments behind, the more we confront a relatively colourless universe. At best, the Martian sky is mauve. The rings of Saturn are dun brown. The Moon is black and white. Or is it? Today, with a decent telescope and a digital camera, any keen amateur astronomer can demonstrate that the Moon is full of colour – but can our unaided eyes, so spoiled by life on earth, ever appreciate its de-saturated motley?

Exposed to radiations from which they were normally shielded by the Earth’s atmosphere, the earliest astronauts – balloonists with the US Air Force’s Man High and Excelsior projects –saw colours they conspicuously failed to identify on a Pantone chart. There are, after all, new colours to be discovered in space – but to see them, we need new eyes…

What Colour is the Moon? is a journey in space and time. We will see how colours, colour words, and the demands of art and industry have altered and enriched our understanding of colour. On the way we’ll re-enact Edwin Land’s startling “retinex” experiments in colour vision, and enjoy some (literally) dazzling optical illusions.

And we’ll journey across the lunar surface, taking in a spectrum that stretches from the sky-blue cast of the Mare Tranquillitatis, through the mysterious mustards near the crater Aristarchus to the red-brick “lakes” west of Montes Haemus.

The talk will be in the Science Museum’s Lecture Theatre on the ground floor of the museum. It’s open to all. No booking is necessary and seats are available on a first come first serve basis.