Behaviour: Field Day 2018

Art & Culture

"I did not direct my life. I didn’t design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That’s what life is." – B.F. Skinner

As humans, like all living beings, we have some pretty basic needs, the more we experience the world, the more our needs develop and transform. We have become aware of the anticipation that precedes an experience, a sensation, something we look forward to.

Behaviorism (or behaviourism) is a systematic approach to understanding the behavior of humans and other animals. It assumes that all behaviors are either reflexes produced by a response to certain stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual's history, including especially reinforcement and punishment, together with an individual's current motivational state and controlling stimuli. Although behaviorists generally accept the important role of inheritance in determining behavior, they focus primarily on environmental factors. (Wikipedia)

It’s how things work, every single living being. It’s called reinforcement, positive or negative in case of a bad or unpleasant experience.

Although culturally the manifestations of how we receive such feedback might change from country to country, from religion to religion, or whatever. However, we somehow all share, globally, as human beings, a very solid core set of needs and desires.

Think of the most basic needs, those that literally keep us alive – eating, sex and all that stuff.

However, amongst them there is a need for transcendence, a very primal, basic, raw, pure instinct to evade our bodily nature and to enter a completely different realm of experience. Call it religion, music, yoga, bush crafting, baking, dancing, going to football matches, whatever. We all come from very different backgrounds and according to that we develop different tastes for which we consider good or bad.

This is already getting long so let's wrap this up…

Anyway.

Raving as a form of transcendence, and how it unfolds within different cultures and subcultures.

Goal of the observation: are all humans beings ravers?

Answer: We’ll see.

(Tip: yes)

Last week marked the move of Field Day to Brockwell Park in South London. It was to be the first time that the festival took place outwith Victoria Park and there was a sense of anticipation about the move. New names would appear beneath the glow of the sunshine with festival goers embracing one another upon the green fields amidst the outback of the British summer. We used this opportunity to showcase those that danced, those that moved and those that loved. Now that the dust has settled here is Field Day 2018…