The Astronaut's Guide to Interpretation

How do you feel about water? There was a time not so long ago when water was just something that came out of our taps, that we were more or less grateful for depending on our mindfulness of people for whom clean water is a rarity. Water was something we drank because we were thirsty. We boiled vegetables in it, made soup and tea, and sometimes used it to wash the car, the floor and the dog.

H₂O hasn’t changed, but our perceptions of it have. Water is now something that is privately owned, talked about in headlines either because there’s not enough of it, or too much of it, or it’s in the wrong place such as your living room in Gloucestershire. Despite its best attempts, petrol is still cheaper than water on UK forecourts. We pay a premium for water that comes with a message on the bottle. This is not just water, this is water with marketing: it’ll make us perform like top athletes, or even a volcano. Stand back!

It’s nonsense of course, and most of us know it’s nonsense, yet we are so used to everything being packaged, rebranded and marketed to us that we take the marketing of water in our collective stride. Since the 1940’s industry has changed from manufacturing articles that fulfilled genuine needs to creating, then catering for, an expanding range of confected wants. These wants are created by a marketing industry specifically designed to make us feel dissatisfied with what we have. A satisfied customer, contrary to popular myth, is no use at all to the capitalist system. Western countries now spend trillions of dollars a year delivering increasingly sophisticated and pervasive messages through channels that invade every aspect of our waking lives.

“The average American adult is exposed to over 600 advertising messages in a single 24-hour period.” -- Managing Business to Business Marketing Communications, De Bonis and Peterson.”

Perhaps we have become inured to marketing messages. We no longer think about them, but are we resistant to them, or do we simply absorb them without thinking in the doctor’s surgery, the bus stop, our kitchen... everywhere?

It seems almost as though any item, water for example, no longer has a value unless it is marketed at us. The innate meaning of things has been subverted by marketing hype which has no other meaning than to make you want them. Water which, if you live in a fortunate part of the world falls freely from the sky, which once meant life, growth, survival, now means, amongst other things, health (drink two litres per day!), status (“The official water of Wimbledon”) or nothing at all (“Gives you Volcanicity!”). With this white noise of pseudo-meaning obfuscating the real meaning of something as fundamental as water, it’s not hard to imagine that perhaps this happens with other things that we might have expected to be free of marketing messages. If something doesn’t have a label that tells us it’ll make us healthier, sexier or free then it seems we are thought to be unable to judge its value for ourselves.

That’s where interpretation comes in. Interpretation is the natural and heritage world’s marketing hype. It seems we cannot be trusted to appreciate a woodland, a meadow or a piece of coastline on our own terms. We must be told why it matters, we must have the “brand relevance” forced down our throats for fear that we might miss the significance of what we are experiencing. To walk through a flower-filled meadow on a sunny early summer day means nothing unless you are aware that three hundred years ago women from the village used to bleach linen here and it is now home to a rare form of slime mould. And of course you should also know who owns, manages and protects it.

Fifty years ago it might have been enough to fall in love with a place because of the light through the trees, the sound of the river, or the laugh of the person you were with. Nowadays your stroll needs “added value” to compete in an aggressive marketplace desperate to sell you experiences.

The motivations of much interpretation are worthy. We can all benefit from a bit of extra connection with our environment and our history. Often, however, the proliferation of interpretation panels sets up a barrier to any real connection. In the same way as many gallery goers spend more time reading the labels than looking at the Monets, interpretation sets up a layer of experience between us and the direct experience of the environment. As soon as it’s interpreted, it’s packaged.

Interpretation hopes to explain the meaning of a place, but this meaning is someone else’s no matter how artfully constructed. Is laughing with your lover in a sunny field full of poppies wrong? Chances are it will feel, if not wrong then inappropriate, if you come to an interpretation panel that tells you of the bloody carnage that once occurred where you now stand. Your personal story has no chance against a pitched battle. The more interpretation that is present, the less space we have to imbue a place with our own meanings as individuals and as communities. New meanings, personal meanings, meanings relevant to now and to the future. And if we are prevented from creating our own meanings, we will never feel ownership of a place. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe an interpretation panel in a meadow is like the US flag on the moon, it’s more about who owns it than anything else.