Panasonic Pavilion ---


---  Time Capsule2/2

Ueshima:	There is nothing as unattractive to us today as the time capsule created with the encyclopedic outlook of the 18th century.  Here is something you are leaving to the next age, so what's the point of making it using standards of taxonomy from the past?  It would be so much more interesting if you could package subtle signs such as biases in human understanding, or differences in ways of seeing.  Until the 19th century, people's desires were focused outward:  the English went to China because they wanted tea, and to India for pepper.  In the 20th century, the object of individual desire was turned inwards, and as people began looking only at themselves, their interest in time became interest in themselves.  If they had interest in anything else, they would not care about time.  Interest in oneself boils down to wanting to know where one came from, and whence one is going.  The past, present and future are bound to oneself, so one's relationship with time, and of course this brings us back to time capsules again, is defined by this condition of closure.

Ito:	The times are inevitably turned inwards, toward the self?

Ueshima:	Yes, and this is evident all around us.  The 1980s saw the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the Chernobyl nuclear accident.  I would say the survival of organisms resides in scale and diversity.  The 1980s were a time of crisis for diversity, with the fall of communism, the destruction of the Berlin wall and the freeze in space exploration symptoms of this crisis.  The multiplicity of choices available to us was eliminated.  Since all of these coincidentally happened in the 1980s, we say it is symbolic, but I disagree.  I think the 20th century as a whole has fundamentally been a time of diminishing diversity, and the events of the 1980s were a culmination of the direction the century had been taking.

Ito:	And borders are disappearing as well.  The reason such words as



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