Sandboard Awakening! How Objects Reshape Our Inner and Outer Worlds
This short essay explores how objects that are a part of our everyday lives, have a much greater agency and impact on our lives than we are consciously aware of. These objects are not simply tools for us to use, but they change the way we think, the way look and the way we perceive. They impact on our inner-worlds and the outer world we engage with.
Context
Last week I was on holiday with my 9 year old son Albert in Morocco. It was a much needed break and I wanted to have a special time bonding father and son. My hope was also to enrich his experience, creating developmental opportunities that school education can’t reach i.e. to engage with different cultures, foods, people, animals and landscapes. We had a real adventure together, walking in the Atlas mountains, sharing mint tea with Berber families playing music together on their picnic. We also went horse and camel riding on the beach, followed by swims in the lovely surfing waves. Albert used the international language of football to meet and play barefoot beach soccer with local children. We eat fish tagine in roadside cafes, shared a hamman together and enjoyed haggling and drinking tea in the grand souk of Taroudant. Morocco was very hospitable and kind to us!
An object that changed the landscape
One part of the holiday took us to the ‘mini-sahara’, an area of huge sand dunes by the coast between Agadir and Essouria. We arrived at a carpark near to dunes, where men selling drinks and hiring sandboards (skateboards without wheels) intended for sand surfing on the dunes. Albert was excited and keen to try this so we hired a board and walked off to the dunes. We had a lot of fun boarding together down the steep dunes, it was one of Alberts holiday highlights. Yet it also made me think about how that one sandboard changed the landscape around us.
The open spaces, the beautiful shapes of the huge golden dunes set against the blue-grey sea, and big skies almost disappeared. The landscape shrank, and became a back-drop for the adventure playground we had discovered. We searched for the best and steepest slopes to sandsurf down. Our gaze turned from the expansive space around us, from the textures, curves and shapes, and was reduced to the hills we were surfing down. When I realised this, I left Albert to practice his sand-surfing and went for a short walk. I regained some wider perspective and enjoyed being in this desert landscape, but the deep experience of being in nature, of absorbing this sublime landscape was lost.
Later in the holiday we drove to the Atlas mountains and on another day wandered in the desert and visited a lush oasis. These experiences were enjoyed without an ‘object of play’, and our experience was very different.
Watching Albert in the desert was special. His attention and gaze went to the micro and macro, loving being in this huge ‘empty’ space, and then spotting small plants and insects and later catching frogs in the oasis. Time also slowed down for a while and he and I just absorbed this gorgeous, rich landscape.
This is not a judgment statement about what is right or wrong. We loved the sand surfing and we loved being in the desert. However I was awakened again to the awareness of how objects have agency in our lives, way beyond what their purpose is. An object in any given context, changes us, in more ways than how we visually look at things. When studying at Lancaster University I listened to, John Law, Bruno Latour and Annemarie Mol, explore how objects have agency in organisations and our lives in their developing ‘Actor-Network-Theory.’
Objects change our inner and outer landscapes
A few years ago I went on a bicycle touring holiday with a group. We travelled to France by coach with our bikes in tow. I was sat by a shy and nervous man, who I was to share a room with on our 7 day tour. On the journey to France I was filled with dread as he was not an easy person to talk to or be with. When we arrived and got changed into our cycling attire and got onto our bikes, this man had a personality change. He smiled, shared stories of previous cycling trips, and offered some good advice. Over the next 24 hours he revealed a wonderfully dry sense of humour. The object of a bike had transformed him from a withdrawn man lacking social confidence, into a confident, funny and generous personality. The man and bike became one, and he was home.
Thinking inside the box
In contemporary times technological objects have imposed themselves upon us, having a profound impact on our lives. We find ourselves tethered to our smart phones and other mobile devices. Unwilling slaves to these machines. These objects shrink our gaze, reducing engagement with the living world around us. They limit our experience, grab at our attention sucking our capacity to be present in the here and now, denying us the pleasures of listening to the silence, or to natures sounds, city soundscapes, or even to each other. These objects limit our experiences in two ways. Firstly, as many critics point out, the effects of algorithms guide our attention to constantly feed our desires, so that our feelings and views are at first reaffirmed, and later amplified. We become digitally distanced from others who think differently, hence the rise of conspiracy theories and the culture wars. What is less discussed is how these mobile objects, such as smart phones and laptops physically impose themselves on us, beckoning our gaze to their small screens. Our worlds becomes mediated through small retangular flat screens. We look into these objects and our worlds shrink, we literally reduce the world around us, thinking only ‘inside the box’. I am convinced that people on sidewalks have become much less aware of their surroundings. White objects hang from their ears, and rectangular objects held in their hands change how they experience the world around them, and how they live in the world.
"What objects transform how you see the world or yourself?"
Conclusion
Objects change how we experience the world around us, how we feel, where our attention goes, and how we relate to others and to ourselves. A bicycle can change our self-image, our confidence and our sense of freedom the for better. A sandboard can transform the landscape, turning wild open spaces into an amusement park, and our mobile devices can shrink our worlds, and suck us into smaller spaces.
Objects are all around us, they are part of our worlds, they work together to become our scaffolds, enabling us humans to live in diverse places, and experience phenomenal lives. Yet objects can also reduce our worlds, creating tunnel visions, reductionist experiences and multiple blindspots. How we engage with objects and how they engage with us, is a key question of our times.