Inspiration

I love participation art. By this I mean projects that invite the public to participate, especially those that ask people to reveal something about themselves to the world. A good example of this is PostSecret, a project where people send in anonymous postcards with their secrets written on them and then the most compelling ones are posted to the website. I love reading through the secrets every Sunday. Many of them are things I think or feel too, so it's like this constant reminder that I am part of the human race and not just..."other". Also, it takes courage to write your secrets down and release them into the universe, and it gives me hope that so many of my fellow humans have this courage and are able to experience the release. I haven't sent in any of my own secrets yet, but someday....

Another great example of participation art is the website Learning To Love You More. On this site, the moderators create specific (usually simple) art assignments and invite the public to do them and send in the results, which are posted online. Not only do I find it fascinating to see how all of these different people interpret the same instructions, I also feel totally inspired by the fact that these people participated at all. It's similar to how I felt when I watched the inauguration yesterday. There were thousands and thousands of people at the capitol, as far as the eye could see and farther, and it was such an uplifting feeling to realize that all of these people were inspired by this person, this idea of change, and all of them felt so strongly that they had to travel from their homes to this one place to see him sworn in and hear him speak. So that's kind of how I feel when I see everyone's collected inspiration on the LTLYM site.

A site that's less about participation art but still inspires me and makes me happy when I look at it is You Are Remarkable. They do have a bit of an art project in the works though. They've asked readers of the site to send messages to people in their lives that they think are wonderful and include the web address of the site so those people will come check it out and post the messages that were sent to them. I guess it's part art project, part buzz-generating effort, but I still like any idea that inspires people to contact the people they love and tell them how great they are. We don't do enough of that, in my opinion. We always just assume that those people know what we think of them. They probably don't.

Which makes me think...maybe I will tell them...

xo,
C