First lets look at wikipedia's definition of Humans.
Humans are bipedal primates belonging to the species Homo sapiens (Latin: "wise man" or "knowing man") in Hominidae, the great ape family.[2][3] They are the only surviving members of the genus Homo. Humans have a highly developed brain, capable of abstract reasoning, language, introspection, and problem solving. This mental capability, combined with an erect body carriage that frees the arms for manipulating objects, has allowed humans to make far greater use of tools than any other species.Mitochondrial DNA and fossil evidence indicates that modern humans originated in Africa about 200,000 years ago.[4] Humans are widespread in every continent except Antarctica, with a total population of 6.8 billion as of November 2009.[5]
Like most higher primates, humans are social by nature. However, humans are uniquely adept at utilizing systems of communication for self-expression, the exchange of ideas, and organization. Humans create complex social structures composed of many cooperating and competing groups, from families to nations. Social interactions between humans have established an extremely wide variety of values, social norms, and rituals, which together form the basis of human society. Humans have a marked appreciation for beauty and aesthetics which, combined with the human desire for self-expression, has led to cultural innovations such as art, literature and music.
Humans are noted for their desire to understand and influence their environment, seeking to explain and manipulate natural phenomena through science, philosophy, mythology and religion. This natural curiosity has led to the development of advanced tools and skills, which are passed down culturally; humans are the only species known to build fires, cook their food, clothe themselves, and use numerous other technologies.
From a boy I realized my love for nature. My curiosity with what made our world work. It was clear early on the synergetic nature of our universe was scientifically unbelievable. I spent years collecting and observing plants and animals in their natural and in my artificial environments. As a child it was easy to see the importance of a natural relationship with a living organism and the environment around it. Simple by just understanding that every animal I had in captivity died where as the same groups of wild life would continue to prosper outside my window.
Through out my last few years at Lassiter High School I worked at Pike Family Nurseries. I started off loading cars with mulch and pine straw and on my free time began to study the plants around the green house. With in time I had learned 95% of the plants sold by that store. I was recognized for my hard work and interest in learning about the horticulture so I was offered a chance to take classes provided by Pike Family Nurseries in order to try and pass the Georgia Green House Associations yearly plant professional exam for Georgia. The class gave me hands on experience with many plants native to my home of Georgia. The knowledge gained helped me build on those idea's of synergetic relationships I had formed as a child and it became clear that I was on to something real.
I graduated from Lassiter High School in 2004 and was forced to quit my job at Pike Family Nurseries because I was attending Reinhardt College in Waleska, Georgia. Reinhardt was a small Methodist College north of Marietta. My sister attended Reinhardt graduating a couple years before me. Her friends all seemed very nice and the community at the school seemed strong and full of loving spirit. Upon arrival at the introduction ceremony I was rushed like cattle in to small categories of different majors and interests. It was no longer about learning together as a whole, but now focusing our attention on 1 topic. Ignoring my interest for nature, biology, and the wonder and enjoyment our universe brings me I decided to major in Film and minor in photography. I finished my first year at Reinhardt with all A's and B's doing very well in all of my classes. I grew to become friends with the schools photography professor who showed me the first steps in the dark room. He was the only teacher I have every had that did not restrict my idea's or tell me something was right or wrong. This was contrary for the rest of my experience at Reinhardt. The students would section themselves in to small groups and clicks that intern left me an outsider. I made friends with a few people from high school and a couple other lost souls I found while studying in the library. I found the school to be rather close minded and although the North Georgia scenery was always nice to explore I needed a change. I moved to downtown Atlanta the following semester and attended Georgia Perimeter College. Here I was among groups of people from all races and age groups. Everyone I met at Perimeter was eager to learn and appreciative of the opportunity to be in school. I once again found myself droning through the crowds to get to class, but there was always someone I could talk to and bring forth an interesting conversation with. After I had built my transfer credits up and proceeded to transfer to Georgia State University where I spent the next to years studying film and photography.
I do not understand why I went to school for film. I never enjoyed going to the movies as a child. I would usually find myself nodding off to sleep and creating better stories in my sub conscious. Perhaps knowing I harnessed the ability to create moving images far more interesting then those based around money and advertisement. Let me make this clear, I do not regret studying film in school, I just realized there are greater possibilities in the use of media, film, and video production that those that our popular among modern society. I spent daunting hours, days, weeks, and sometimes months analyzing scenes from films. The more films I was forced to watch the more I realized it is not about each scene, film, or even region in which the film was created. Cinema is motion pictures, collectively as an art. These films were made to impose on ones believes, thoughts, or emotions. Films are teaching tools. Many are used to help express the suppression of the film maker or the region in which it was created. Politics, religion, money, power, and greed have all for the years held restrictions and regulations on what is acceptable for us (the viewer) to participate in. And for me I found it disturbing that we as homo-sapiens are not in control of the forces around us. And the most disheartening discovery is that we are not harnessing what we do know in ways that benefit humanity and life on earth.
This was quite a hard discovery to make while spending 40 plus hours a week studying, writing, and working on projects for school. To this day I look back at what I was going through internally and can not figure out how I was able to push my way through school. It was the summer of 2007 when I began free thinking. I took everything that I was told or shown my whole life and started new. I began observing things for myself with out the impressions from my friends and family or that of media. I should mention that after graduating high school I had stopped watching television completely. I feel this was a major roll in to getting to where I am today.
Furthermore, I strived on to do well in college and spent the last year of school in the dark room. I fell in love with the process of creating images and gained a love for the camera. I believe the camera is where my passion for film had come from in the beginning. The camera is to me like becoming a different being. I can manipulate the eye to create images that were not normally visible to my naked eye. This was always difficult to explain to my photography teachers who would always stress a right and a wrong way to exposure, shutter speed, and other photographic characteristics. It wasn't until reading Critique of Judgement by Immanuel Kant till I realized there was no right or wrong and in fact I could use these suggestions for different purposes to help build idea's outside of what the art faculties standards were.
The judgement of taste, by which an object is declared to be beautiful under the condition of a definite concept, is not pure. There are two kinds of beauty: free beauty (pulchritudo vaga) or merely dependent beauty (pulchritudo adhaerens). The first presupposes no concept of what the object ought to be; the second does presuppose such a concept and the perfection of the object in accordance therewith. The first is called the (self-subsistent) beauty of this or that thing; the second, as dependent upon a concept (conditioned beauty), is ascribed to Objects which come under the concept of particular purpose.
Flowers are free natural beauties. Hardly anyone but a botanist knows what sort of a thing a flower ought to be; and even he, though recognizing in the flower the reproductive organ of the plant, pays no regard to this natural purpose if he is passing judgement on the flower by Taste. There is then at the basis of this judgement no perfection of any kind, no internal purposiveness, to which the collection of the manifold is referred. - Kant
Therefore, it was no longer a question of whether I should always take a picture with a definite concept dependent on beauty. I began thinking about Taste, Beauty, Good, and the Sublime. I started doing more research on artists that where never shown to me me in art history. Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenburg, Marcel Duchamp, and the list goes on and on. I began looking more in to film in discovering works by Nam June, Bill Viola, Phil Niblock, and so many others. I have since the seventh grade spent at least an hour out of my day writing folk songs on my guitar and once finding out about John Cage now I focus 24 hours a day listening to the most beautiful music I have ever heard. That of which that is all around me at all times. The sounds that come from mans creations as well as those produced by the wild. Where I am going with this is that their are people that have expressed idea's that are so important in understanding that we do not teach in our schools. We could learn from a lot of these artists. Art and science go hand and hand and we can use art as a tool that would be more profitable than the daily biased news and shoot em' up television shows. Television and the internet all of which is becoming one, is the most important characteristic of this era. Internet can be free. It is all around us and only needs to be tuned in. You say, "How could we have the internet for free?" Consumerism is my answer. This is frowned upon by most of the anti-american americans, but in reality consumerism is what makes the most sense. The more consumers wanting something the more work will be put forth in to having it. We will never let the satellites and towers become unattended. We rely on them to much. Our ongoing progression towards a technological evolution is apparent and exciting for me. We are becoming more concerned with alternative energy sources and cleaner living. We are working every day to try to come up with new ways of living. The importance of local farming has even made its way in to the Kroger of Moreland as well as the local health food stores.
Let me try to explain my wide range of topics and stories here. We all have a primal relationship with Nature. These were the experiences I started feeling as a boy playing in the creeks and woods. These are the same feelings a experienced while studying plants. We have experiences with nature from conscious memory that lingers from the forgotten prehistory of mankind. Some feel as if it is a spiritual belief and that I can agree. For me it is very spiritual and beautiful. We have been provided a planet that is absolutely the most suitable for human life. Unfortunately us silly humans have forgot our responsibility on planet earth as well as the success of humanity.
George Catlin once wrote in 1841,
Many are the rudeness and wilds in Nature's works, which are destined to fall before t he deadly axe and desolating hands of cultivating man; and so amongst her ranks of the living, of beast and human, we often find noble stamps, or beautiful colours, to which our admiration clings; and even in the overwhelming march of civilized improvements and refinements do we love to cherish their existence, and lend our efforts to preserve them in their primitive rudeness.
I can see humanity wanting to do what is best for survival. We are just trapped in road that have been paved for us. It is important for us to continue our research in understand what it is we are doing here on Space Ship Earth. We need to feel comfortable asking the question why. We can work together and to understand biophilia, which is defined as the innate tendency to affiliate with life and lifelike processes. I am interested in wondering where I am, what it is I am doing, how it is effecting what is around me, how is what around me effecting what I am doing.
With this said I am devoting my life to understanding the processes in which we can help benefit humanity and the overall success of life on planet earth. Furthermore, I am willing to do all I can to invest my energy in to understanding wild nature and human nature and our synergetic relationship with one another. Most importantly I am going to use my knowledge of film theory and the understanding of media to convey my idea's free on the internet. I have a plan to develop online television the works as a symbiotic relationship with humans and technology bringing forth a new form of education superior to our understanding of the universe and the human psyche. We all have been given such a wonderful biosphere and I know in the hearts of everyone our deepest level of moral concern lies within our planet's well being.
I will leave you with a passage from The Creation by E.O. Wilson,
What precisely, then, is human nature? that is one of the great questions of both science and philosophy. It is not the genes that prescribe human nature. It is not the cultural universals, such as incest taboos, rites of passage, and creation myths. Those are the products of human nature. Rather, human nature is the hereditary rules of mental development. the rules are expressed in the molecular pathways that create cells and tissue, particularly those of the sensory and nervous system. The rules are also prescribed in the cells and tissues that generate mind and behavior. They are manifested as biases in the way our senses perceive the world. They appear as the properties of language and symbolic coding by which we represent the world. The developmental rules are not absolute. Instead they are generate the options we open to ourselves. They render some choices more pleasing than others: music yes, they crying of a baby no.
The developmental rules are in an early stage of exploration by psychologist and biologists. Even so, the few that are known range over diverse categories of behavior and culture. They affect how we clarify colors in accordance with the innate coding of cell reception and transmission within the retina. They bias our aesthetic response to visual design according to elementary abstract shape and degree of complexity.
It is time to overcome our phobia's and to explore our deepest interested. Let's pull down the walls and barriers we have created and work together not as different countries, colors, faiths, or wealth. We are all humans. We are all part of the same genetic structure and we all have been given the right to live. I am currently seeking for grants and funding to help me continue my goal of educating through digital media and the internet and spreading idea's applicable to the survival of our beautiful Space Ship Earth. I will continue to educate myself on a wide amount of topics relating to out survival and the understanding of human nature. Hoping to find the right group of researchers to help me with my quest as well as revisiting a university. I would be appreciative of any feed back or questions relating to my studies and or any help with continuing my work.
Live open, honest, and true to yourself,
Scott B. McKibben
scottmckibbenphotography@gmail.com
