learning to love you more.

This article also appeared on Josh Spear

Just as it’s title so succinctly implies, Learning To Love You More is an on-going interactive web project created by artists Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July that teaches us to explore ourselves from every angle.

 

Managed by California-based artist and designer Yuri Ono, the site challenges potential participants to complete a series of 68 assignments. New tasks are always being added and they can be completed in any order you chose. The results – whether it’s a video or picture or drawing – are submitted to the site and added to the chronicle of each task. Ranging from the artistic (#27 – Take a picture of the sun) and the anarchic (#34 – Make a protest sign and protest) to the ephemeral (#68 – Feel the news) and the sublime (#36 – Grow a garden in an unexpected spot), each new idea moves you to take on a new talent, face a new fear, or potentially dig up the past to get it done.

Since it’s creation in 2002, more than 5000 people around the world have put pieces of themselves into Learning To Love Your More. Those works have been gathered into a constantly shape-shifting exhibition and screening of the project, including a presentation at NYC’s Whitney Museum, and the project has also been documented in a new book. 

The simple power of each task and the collaboration between strangers all around the world points to one eternally poignant message. By accessing the most personal facets of your self and then having the courage to share them, you can’t help but see a beautiful truth: nobody is alone.

campbells: hunger disappears.

This time of year there’s usually a good deal of charity to go with all that holiday-driven consumerism. Here’s a great example of how the intersection of advertising and idealism can be simple, meaningful and effective.

Leo Burnett Toronto set up this “Hunger” installation with 4820 cans of Campbells soup. Shoppers were inspired to buy cans and donate them to a local food bank. As the cans were donated, “Hunger” slowly started to disappear. The visual is powerful, the marketing is subtle and in the end food gets donated to a good cause. Well done.

Via directdaily

stop the traffik: put on the red light.

I’m not sure if this is meaningful or just moderately funny. Despite the absolute seriousness of the topic, I think this is only going to get attention based on the sensationalism of the idea rather than it’s true effectiveness. Although, sensationalism is a level of effectiveness unto itself.

Stop the Traffik is a UN-based program to spread awareness on the plight of human trafficking. At a recent career fair in London, an installation secretly orchestrated by Duval Guillaume Antwerp tricked young women into a booth under the guise of “job opportunities abroad”. Once inside the women found themselves in a red-velvet draped plexi-glass display box with a pink boa thrown in for good measure. Though lacking in subtlety (do hookers still wear boas?) the idea is interesting and anything that can shed attention on the hundreds of thousands of women and girls sold into sexual slavery is obviously a good thing.

I feel half-hearted when I watch this. The cause is so dire yet the dumb-founded look on their faces isn’t really haunting – it’s more amusing. Or boring. Or puzzling. Or perplexing. I’m not sure what could have made their responses more effective. I realize that actually forcing each woman to have sex with strangers wasn’t a viable option (though that would really have driven the point home). It’s a lot like watching a really bad Candid Camera. Should I be laughing? Should I be shocked?

After the expended energy of trying to figure out what to feel, I end up feeling nothing.

Via Ad Gabber