you see all the points all the
it's incredible it is the network and in my case the network has been important in media because i get to connect to people isn't it amazing through that
i connect to people and the way that i've been doing it has been multifaceted for example i get people to dress up their vacuum cleaners
i put together projects like earth sandwich where i ask people to try and simultaneously place two pieces of bread perfectly opposite each other on the earth
and people started laying bread in tribute and eventually a team was able to do it between new zealand and spain it's pretty incredible the
connecting to people in projects like youngmenowme for example in youngmenowme the audience was asked to find a childhood photograph of themselves and restage it as an adult
this is the same person top photo james bottom photo
this was a mother 's day
my favorite of these photos which i couldn't find is there's a picture of a thirty year old woman or so with a little baby on her lap and the next photo is a two hundred and twenty lb man with a tiny little old lady peaking over his shoulder
but this project changed the way that i thought about connecting to people this is project called ray and what happened was i was sent this piece of audio and had no idea who generated the audio somebody said
you have to listen to this and this is what came to me
hi my name is ray and on yesterday my daughter called me because she was stressed out because of things that were going on on her job that she felt was quite unfair
being quite disturbed she called for comfort and i didn't really know what to tell her because we have to deal with so much mess in our society so i was led to write this song just for her
just to give her some encouragement while dealing with stress and pressures on her job and
i figured i'd put it on the internet for all employees under stress to help you better deal with what you're going through on you job here 's how the song goes
i'm about to
i'm about to
if you don't leave me alone a a you gonna have to send me home
about to whip somebody 's
so i was so moved by this this is incredible this was connecting right this was at a distance realizing that someone was feeling something wanting to affect them in a particular way using media to do it putting it online and realizing that there was a greater impact
this was incredible this is what i wanted to do so the first thing i thought of is we have to thank him and i asked my audience i said listen to this piece of audio we have to remix it he 's got a great voice
it's actually in the key of b flat and have to do something with it hundreds of remixes came back lots of different attempts one stood out in particular it was done by a guy named goose
you
me
top downloads on a whole bunch of music streaming services
of audio and the fact that his daughter was upset
in two weeks they found him i received and email and it said hi i'm
i heard you were looking for me
i was like yeah ray it's been an interesting two weeks and so i flew to st louis and met ray and he 's a preacher
among other things so but anyways here
in amsterdam on every street corner and it's sort of a metaphor for me for the virtual world i look at this photo and he seems really interested in what's going on with that button but it doesn't seem like he is really that interested in crossing the street
and it makes me think
of this on street corners everywhere people are looking at their cellphones and it's easy to to dismiss this as some sort of bad trend in human culture
but the truth is life is being lived there when they smile
right you've seen people stop
all of a sudden life is being lived there somewhere up in that weird dense network and this is it right to feel and be felt it's the fundamental
force that we're all after we can build all sorts of environments to make it a little bit easier but ultimately what we're trying to do is really connect with one other person
and that's not always going to happen in physical spaces it's also going to now happen in virtual spaces and we have to get better at figuring that out
i think of the people that build all this technology in the network a lot of them aren't very good at connecting with people this is kind of like something i used to do in
third grade
so here 's a series of projects over the last few years where i've been inspired by trying to figure out how to really facilitate close connection
was sort of meaningless like on the route to the bus stop to a neighbor 's house and take it inside of google streetview
and i promise you if you take that walk inside google streetview you come to a moment where something comes back and hits you in the face
and i collected those moments the photos inside google streetview and the memories specifically our conversation started with me saying i 'm bored and her replying when i'm bored i eat pretzels i remember this distinctly because it came up a lot
right after he told me and my brother he was going to be separating from my mom i remember walking to a convenience store and getting a cherry cola they used some of the morbidly artist footage a close up of chad 's shoes in the middle of the highway i guess the shoes came off when he was hit
he slept over at my house once and he left his pillow it had chad written in magic marker on it he died long after he left the pillow at my house but we never got around to returning it
a hotline where people could leave voicemails of their pain not necessarilyrelated to that event and people called in and left messages like this
not alone
and i am
and when i
even the smallest act of kindness can make me cry like even people in convenience stores saying
looking
so what i did was i took those voicemails and with their permission converted them to mp three s and distributed them to sound editors who created short sounds using just
those voicemails and those were then distributed
to djs who have made hundreds of songs using that source material
we don't have time to play much of it you can look at
fifty two to forty eight with love was a project around the time of the last election cycle where mccain and obama both in their speeches after the election talked about reconciliation and i was like what the hell does that look like
so i thought well let 's just give it a try let 's have people hold up signs about reconciliation and so some really nice things came together i voted
blue i voted red together for our future these are very very cute little things right some came from the winning party dear forty eight i promise to listen to you to fight for you to respect you always some came
from the party who had just lost from a forty eight to a fifty two may your party 's leadership be as classy as you but i doubt it
some message boards apparently found it to be a little patronizing which i could also see and so i started getting amazing amounts of hate mail
death threats even and one guy in particular kept on writing me these pretty awful messages and he was dressed as batman and he said i 'm dressed as batman to hide my identity just in case i thought the real
like phew it's not him so what i did unfortunately i was harboring all this kind of awful experience and this pain inside of
and it started to eat away at my psyche and i was protecting the project from it i realized i was protecting it i didn't want this special little group of photographs to get
sullied in some way so what i did i took all those emails and i put them together into something called angrigami which was an origami template made out of this sort of vile stuff and i asked people to send me beautiful things made out of the angrigami
but this was the emotional moment one of my viewer 's uncles died on a particular day and he chose to commemorate it with a piece of hate
it's amazing the last thing i'm going to tell you about is a series of projects called songs you already know where the idea was i was trying to figure out to address particular kinds of emotions
with group projects so one of them was fairly straightforward a guy said that his daughter got scared at night and could i write a song for her his daughter and i said oh yeah i'll try to write a mantra that she can sing to herself to help herself go to sleep and this was scared
is a song that i sing when
is
so i wrote that song right thank you so the nice thing was is he walked by his daughter 's room at some point and she actually was singing that song to herself so i was like awesome this is great
then i got this email and there's a little bit of a backstory to this and i don't have much time but the idea was that at one point i did a project called facebook me equals you where i wanted to experience what it was like to live as another person
so i asked for people 's usernames and passwords to be sent to me and i got a lot like thirty in a half an hour and i shut that part down and i chose two people to be and i asked them to send me
know i had one but anyway this same person laura ended up emailing me a little bit after that project and i felt badly for not having done a good job and she said i 'm really anxious i just moved to a new town
i have this new job and i've just had this incredibleamount of anxiety so she had seen the scared song and wondered if i could do something so i asked her what does it feel like
when you feel this way and she wrote a sort of descriptive set of what it felt like to have had this anxiety and so what i decided to do i said okay i'll think about it and so quietly in the background i started sending people this
so i asked people whether they had basic audio capabilities just so they could sing along to the song with headphones on so i could just get their voices back and this is the kind of thing that i got back
that's one of the better ones really but what's awesome is
as i started getting more and more and more of them all of a sudden i had thirty forty voices from around the world and when you put them together something magical happens
know you've forgotten about me
say thanks for even considering it and then a few days later i sent her this
the
and
be
thank you
生词表: