Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Its not Greenwich Mean Time. Its all the emotions

"The Greenwich Emotion Map is a collaborative art project using BioMapping to chart an emotional landscape. Members of the community borrowed BioMapping devices and went for walks. The devices measure Galvanic skin response throughout the walk, and this suggests emotional response along the path of the walk. 'The resulting maps encourage personal reflection on the complex relationship between us, our environment and our fellow citizens. By sharing this information we can construct maps that visualise where we as a community feel stressed and excited.'" [WorldChanging]

Saturday, November 04, 2006

Inspired by William Stafford, Bob reworked this passage by Thomas De Zengotita

(found poem)

Say you car breaks down
In the middle of nowhere,
The middle of Saskatchewan, say.

You have no cell phone,
Nothing to read,
No gear to fiddle with,
You just have to wait.

Pretty soon you notice
How everything around you
Just happens to be there.

And it just happens to be there in this very
Precise but unfamiliar way. You are
So not used to this.

Every tuft of weed,
The scattered pebbles,
The lapsing fence,
The flow of clouds against the sky---
Everything is very specifically exactly
The way it is.

And none of it is for you;
Nothing here was designed to affect you;
It isn’t arranged so that you can experience it,
And didn’t plan to experience it.

There is no screen, no display, no entrance, no brochure,
Nothing special to look at,
No dramatic scenery or wildlife,
No tour guide, no campsites,
No benches, no paths, no
Viewing platform with natural-
Historical information posted
Under slanted Plexiglas lectern things.

Whatever is there is just there,
And so are you.
You begin to get a sense of what it would be like
If you weren’t the centre of it all.