School of Critical Design Co-founder and cultural semiotician Gemma Jones sat down for a long-distance chat with Fellow Ted Hunt to talk about his latest project, Circa Lunar
G: Hi Ted, congratulations on funding Circa Lunar! This project is a continuation of your work with redesigning time, or rather redesigning our relationship with time. How has researching Circa Lunar deepened your understanding of this relationship?
T: Thanks Gemma, and thanks to the School of Critical Design for generously supporting the crowdfunding campaigns as a patron to both Circa Solar and Circa Lunar.
One of the first learnings from Circa Lunar came from moving up a [temporal order-of-magnitude](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(time)#:~:text=An order of magnitude of,second" or "year".) from Circa Solar - that is from daily variations in day/night cycles to monthly variations in lunar phases. Where Circa Solar sought to redesign the clock as a tool for the daily measurement of time, Circa Lunar looks to redesign the calendar as a tool for the monthly and yearly measure of time. In this research I reflected on the same cyclical and rhythmic patterns in day/night cycles of Circa Solar, but I also took notice of more interpretative narratives of time that tend to manifest over longer durations. Humans have always found mystery and myth within the moon as our nearest celestial neighbour, and we have always projected various meanings onto its consistent, but ever varyinging presence in our lives.
In the Kickstarter video for Circa Solar I stated that "it is no surprise that we refer to 'telling the time', as time is a story that we each tell and we each are told". When I created that video it was just a pithy way of critiquing the 'social construct' of modern mechanical time, but through Circa Lunar I began to appreciate that the stories we use to understand and relate to time are often as important as time itself, if not more important.
Finally, during the research process I read that Homo Sapiens’ earliest relationships to mapping our exterior reality was in mapping the stars and celestial cycles, rather than mapping land and geography (above). I found this profoundly significant in a much broader human context, the fact that our imaginations stretched far into the cosmos long before we'd begun to assume we can take ownership of land and form national identities to fight over. So I now like to think that 'we were celestial before we were terrestrial'.
G: That’s beautiful! The moon has been our far-near forever. The mythology around the moon goes way back in every culture and is still present in language from ‘lunatic’ to ‘menstruation’ to ‘Monday’. So we live with the remnants of these lunar ideas of mystery, cyclical change and orbit yet our dominant ideas of change and time mapping is quite detached from these foundational mythologies. Do you have examples of cultures or subcultures where lunar thinking still shapes life? And what could reintroducing lunar symbolism into how we live our lives do for us now?
T: The Islamic Calendar, also known as Hijri, is a 'lunar visibility calendar'. A month is measured from apparent New Moon to New Moon, with the first visible observation of a New Crescent Moon (the very first appearance of the Sun's light upon the Moon's surface after a New Moon) marking the commencement of key religious events such as Ramadan. Today Ramadan is practiced by many of the 1.8 billion Muslims living worldwide, so here alone we can see lunar thinking still significantly shaping human life and lives. In non-human domains it is known that oysters, like many marine animals, spawn in almost exact synchronicity with lunar cycles - and will even do so when put into sealed environments preventing exposure to the light cycles of lunar phases, suggesting that the phenomenon is entirely intrinsic.
In answer to the question of what reintroducing lunar symbolism into our lives might do for us, our current scientific understanding of the Moon's influence upon our psychology and physiology is still significantly limited in comparison to our understanding of daily and seasonal circadian rhythms related to the Sun. But initial research has shown a correlation between lunar cycles and stress (particularly for females), so this could be one pragmatic application for individuals and organisations.
However, I'm hesitant to be too didactic about the potential 'impacts' and 'applications'. In designing and developing Circa Solar I began from a very theoretical position on its impacts, but once the app was made into a reality and I began to use it in my everyday life a whole new series of emergent properties began to transpire (as I documented for my talk on the project for the School of Critical Design last year as pictured below). These impacts ranged from varying seasonal levels of productivity and bias towards certain types of work, to my ability to navigate a day far more intuitively when viewing it as a single rotation rather than two rotations of 12 hours, to appreciating a decelerated lifestyle especially regarding travel, to vividly experiencing the velocity of going around the corner of the solar system at solstices, and increasingly adopting a view of shared solidarity with the 99.99% of non-human life who are mostly also governed by circadian cycles. I started to go to sleep A LOT earlier in winter also.
So now I'm hoping that Circa Lunar might manifest its own entirely unexpected emergent properties, and that these might be unique to whoever is looking to 'attune to the moon' and find meanings within its phases. I guess as always with semiotics, meaning changes with time, so for me it's fascinating to imagine what new meanings might be (re)interpreted from the moon's symbolism in the near or far future.
G: I love this aspect of your work, and other applied critical designs; that it triggers an encounter with phenomena or systems that helps us really question or tune into our reality. In terms of our relationship with nature and natural systems, it seems part of how we have come to abuse nature is through its abstraction, our separation from its cycles and patterns. With Circa Lunar and Circa Solar we’re given a new way to re-signify ourselves as natural beings. And the mystery and aesthetic language around the moon I think is a powerful hook for people. You reference the moon’s hypothesised effects on the female body, and this is part of the emergent language of menstruation products and even some skincare brands. The moon bridges rooted spiritual or cosmic ideas and the scientific. I think segments of culture are really seeking to explore the space between the so-called ‘rational’ and the ‘spiritual’. How do you see that relationship evolving?
One of the things I found most interesting about Circa Solar as an applied critical design and speculative design project was that it was using natural reality as its stimulus rather than the fictions or leaps of imagination usually associated with these fields of design. And in this regard 'truth was stranger than fiction' as they say. So these Circa projects are, in a very similar way to Thomas Thwaites renowned Goat Man project, trying to open a space for us to ask what we have in common with non-human organisms, and what we might have lost in decoupling ourselves from those fundamental commonalities and replacing them with artificial alternatives.
I totally agree about the moon acting as a conduit between 'rational' and 'spiritual' dimensions, it is both objectively apparent and subjectively experienced by all of us. Yet there is seemingly a complete absence of research into its effects upon us, which I can only hypothesise is down to a patriarchal and scientific fear of 'weirdness' and anything perceived as being 'irrational'' (arguably as a means of 'othering' feminine and indigenous dimensions of knowledge #IMO). The Moon's huge gravitational force upon the Earth governs the tides and the oceans, that's a hell of a lot of water to move about twice a day! The human body is made up of 60% water while both the human brain and heart are composed of 73% water, and yet most suggestions that the moon might have causality or correlation upon our psychology is quite literally still treated as complete 'lunacy' in the eyes of science.
My own hope in how this relationship between rational and spiritual, between objective and subjective, might evolve is currently tending towards the implicit rather than explicit. So rather than solar and lunar time seeking to replace the mechanical clock and Gregorian calendar (although this is technically possible), the enduring patterns found within solar and lunar time are reconsidered and readopted. This might materialise as an appreciation of time which is cyclical rather than linear, rhythmic rather than rigid, exists on a spectrum rather than in units, and is considered over the long-term rather than short-term. All of these attributes can be found in using the Sun as a clock and the Moon as a calendar, and whose pragmatic adoption might also have seismic implications upon some of our most urgent issues and challenges. As we've discussed before it's probably no coincidence that what was known as sustainability is increasingly evolving into 'regenerative' and 'circular economy' mindsets and models. The future's cyclical.
