Seth's music is so great. We are at war today. Missiles are being launched back and forth. I just finished Jarhead about the last war with Iraq. One thing I can do about it is to send out peaceful messages into the network that may take root in the art life of others. "Mail art is the big back and forth without bombs." For instance, I enjoyed going to the Zilker Botanical Gardens yesterday and painting my own Van Gogh of the iris beds. Only a few yellow iris were blooming and fluttering in the light breeze. I wore my Panama hat and had a nice time with India ink and French watercolors. The garden's parking lot was full and there were mothers, grandmothers, and families with small children running around or more usual toddling around. Later in the day some teenagers came and ran around the dinosaur garden. I never found the dino footprint but I saw some petrified turtle parts.
The next use of John M's expertise is to think about marketing my dissertation as a book. Anna suggests calling it From Bunnies to Bytes. I have a meeting with Jon L this evening to discuss book possibilities, the exhibition, and maybe even the documentation. I did not do any more formatting but I did receive good ideas about the 40 interviews at the end of the diss, to put them all in to one appendix labeled "Appendix A: Interviews" and them list them under that title.
I read the Dalai Lama chapter on a new model for intimacy yesterday. "...we have within our power the means to avoid [feeling something missing in our lives and lack of intimacy]; we need only courageously expand our concept of intimacy to include all the other forms that surround us on a daily basis. By broadening our definition of intimacy we open ourselves to discovering many new and equally satisfying ways of connecting with others." (Dalai Lama, Art of Happiness, p. 83) I've been thinking about blogs and message boards in terms of this concept of intimacy. Distributed communities connect people who talk to each other in technological spaces about intimate as well as public issues. Bloggers reflect on their personal changes and special interests, and through search and wandering, they run into people with common interests, passions, or problems. How do people use blogs to play in the realms of personal public space in relation to intimacy?
