Water taps made of water

This is some excellent promotional material for Kohler, the famous faucet manufacturer. It is based on the theme of blurring the boundary between the solid and the liquid, which we usually don't get exposed to very often.

Growing phones

This quite delightfully technoromantic commercial shows cellphones emerging from flowers, as if they were a natural creation. I definitely see some early sparks here towards a new megatrend that transcends mere sustainability, and revolves around the idea that technology is going to be more fully intertwined with the natural environment, up to the smallest levels of detail.

What's your ego emission index?

The road is one of those environments where people are continuously tested on their ability to master their ego-drives. The body is driving, but the ego wants social self-reaffirmation, and seeks this in other people who can reflect their ego with their own ego. And that's often how the game is played on the road.

Now you might think that living with an ego as your constant inner companion is alright and natural. Everybody seems to have one and plays along, so it has to be good, right? This is how the world turns. Moreover, flowing along like that feels good, it's fun, it's comfortable, and you're not confronted with reflective thoughts that interrupt the flow. But the ego-mode also completely detaches you from your body. It just lives on the skills that you developed as an infant, without staying aware of what it's really doing. Your mind can send a command to your body, and your body will do it almost automatically, so why would you completely connect to it anyway? And sure, in environments where the body is not really needed but we can just sit back and passively relax, you're fine without that awareness of your inner body. But on the road, this can be a more important matter, as a slight unpredicted change can have major consequences, when paired with a fraction of distraction.

It has recently been proven by Canadian researchers Cale White and Jeff Caird that a simple conversation with someone else in the car can be enough to increase driver errors, and that the risk is greater the more you are attracted to the passenger, and the more extroverted you generally are. In addition to a higher risk to get involved in an accident, the study showed that chattering drivers also drive slower, have more anxiety, and responded less to pedestrians. An important notion here is that drivers did not alter their looking behavior, but they simply did not take in what they saw as much as they would without being engaged in the conversation. In conclusion, conversations in cars make people's minds disconnect from their bodies up to a dangerous degree.

And this concerns only conversations with other people. Consider the influence of your inner conversations and reactions of resistance on your mind-body connection as well.

Now it is not easy to reconnect the body to the mind. And probably most of us will never become the perfect 'Zen driver' that is completely focused, and acts relaxedly instead of reacting actively.

But there are a few techniques I would like to briefly share with you that I found to work in calming you down and making you more focused. The first is simply doing breath exercise. This involves trying to breath deeply, calmly, and evenly. You will be amazed how quick the mind will follow the calmness that you bring into the body.

The other technique is in my experience the best way to regain focus in a situation. And the tip is simply: focus physically! We often think of focus as a mental quality, but in practical, physical, terms, it simply means to use the muscles in your eye to focus its lens at whatever you are looking at. This way, your mind gets engaged, because it stays active in being aware of what the eye is doing, instead of habitually wandering around your field of vision. Whenever you focus your eye on the point you are looking at, you are focused. You might find this to be hard, especially when you can also see things in the corner of your eye and 'get the idea', but to drive mindfully is to focus constantly. And soon you will become very competent and alert. This state of mind of being nowhere else but in the now feels very refreshing, I can tell you.

Another way of improving our mental state comes through designing cars that give us relevant feedback at the right time. The car industry is now introducing feedback systems that make people drive more environmentally friendly, and I think a next step is to implement feedback that makes people drive more mindfully. One system you could think of recognizes when people are triggered to react to other drivers. This always adds more nervousness and takes away awareness. Such feedback needs to be very subtle and delicate, maybe even unconscious and peripheral, so as to not trigger the driver even more. I think it would be an excellent idea to introduce an 'ego-meter' that over time comes to indicate how much ego the driver exhibits. You have a bad week in which you make it regular practice to shout to other drivers, lose a little bit too much control over your gas pedal, and hit the horn as if you were playing whack-a-mole, and your ego-meter shoots up.

How I got here is an advertising campaign I recently came across, that was led by Volkswagen back in 2006. The company played on the idea that people often exhibit strange behaviors in the car because of their ego, and introduced their Passat as the car with the lowest 'Ego Emissions'. A website was even created at which you could determine your own ego emission index by the way you dressed, the car you drive, etc.





Especially the television commercials VW made were on the spot:









Again, I think it's a wonderful idea to encourage people to drive more calmly, worry less about what others are doing, and have them use their ego-meter to its fullest potential.

feminine control over nature

In a world that is still very much dictated by male dominance, it's nice to see a feminine version of this human value. I sort of like the feel of this, woman and nature becoming one, resulting in a transcendent transformation.

Coca Cola and the new humanity

I never thought I would be posting something from Coca Cola, but this commercial is pretty well done and very actual. If there's anything like illusory happiness, it's the Coca Cola type of happiness. If there's anything like an illusory self, it's embodied in the digital avatar. We seem to be heading towards a surreal world of tempting transitory illusions indeed, but let's not forget that happiness as chosen by yourself is the only transcendent and invulnerable form of happiness. Another thing, this commercial makes the classical McLuhanesque mistake of projecting the contents of an older medium, the virtual screen-based world, onto a new medium, namely what we call the 'real' or 'physical' world.

As to conclude as usual with a more abstract statement: we will need to learn to holistically re-ecologize ourselves in a functional niche of our technobiological future, in which we empathically co-evolve with anything we perceive as an other to in the end become one with it.

Honey, can you walk out the fish today?

The content of car commercials was already peaking in far-fetchedness, but this is just insane. Apparently if you drive a Volkswagen Spacefox, why not go for the Fishdog as well?

Liquid manufacturing processes

Yes, nanotechnology could dissolve the prevailing dichotomy of ugly and incomprehensible product insides and shiny looking, clean outsides. Then any angular, flat shape would probably serve nothing more than a temporary crystallization in a nostalgic reference to a time when we still thought our bodies to be media for translating mental chunks of information into abstract machine interfaces. Our extreme collective fear of physical death makes us regressively try to shape a safe womb of technology, but has us live as abstract entities, who turn out to have never fully lived in the end.

Let's throw away our fears and fragile identifications to completely go liquid, soft and organic. Let's risk dying anytime we interact with machines, but in the moment at least be in a perfect resonance with them, and with ourselves. Let's start to taste the machine.

Cardboard cars

Audi Q5: Unbox The Box

If only it were that easy. I'm sorry car manufacturers, but all cars are still fundamentally functionalistic boxes, all attempts to make the experience more humane compromising with the inherently inhuman system underlying its manufacture and distribution. Of course I'm not going to talk about the third industrial revolution, for now just enjoy this little video for the Audi Q5.

Web 782.0?

Nike has taken on the idea that in the future, products might not be mass manufactured by people, but just emerge from nature when we have genetically altered it or taught it certain behavioural patterns. Where insects can now be seen as nature's robots, uncontrollable and unpredictable, they soon could be people's robots. If controlled through the internet, online and offline webs can finally merge.

Yes, paradigm changes are still slowly creeping in... this is not merely nice imagery.

Regressive self-transformations

A movie you might find eerie at first, it shows a boy who wants to transform into a mouse because this would save him money on renting a living space. But seen the developments in genetic engineering, something like this may well be possible one day. But the question that radically challenges self-concepts then is; is this new form then still the same 'person' it used to be? According to me, a self-concept, probably including a name, is just a social construct. When it is not useful anymore, we might as well treat a new embodiment as a new person. Did the old person die, then? Yes, if people's concepts about that person are not relevant and useful anymore at all you could say he died.

In my opinion,  people inherently live by concepts and nothing but concepts, which are illusions. We have no truth; truth is constituted by the illusions that are most useful. This is a pragmatist stance, but in a world so complex as it will be, this is the most useful stance according to me; it makes you flow along with these developments instead having to go through clash after clash with internal beliefs you try to maintain.

Now we have rather static implicit conventions on this, but these sort of developments will make the world so complex that we need to explicitly start discussing these now perhaps seemingly absurd topics. We need to develop an intelligence based not on old, rational, science, but on practical embodiment theory. We need to learn and get a feeling for the relationship between bodies and their environments, and how the two can be attuned to each other to result in the most meaning, or happiness for the individual. Then, we will be able to think more creatively and analytically about how our bodies should be constituted so we feel at home with them, rather than regressing to static images already present in the mind, like that of a mouse in the case of the Halifax commercial.