I'm an artist. I work with words, images, film, photography, sound and music. I've always had an inner urge to create things, to make sense out of the world through different forms. I love people, I love the world. And I am endlessly curious about what makes us human, why we make peace or war, how we struggle and survive.

 

I had this vision many years ago, when I came home from working in a war zone. The contrast was too great, between this real world of suffering I had just been in, and the 'safe' world of my home city, where every public space was taken up by billboards full of messages that play on our weaknesses, our insecurities, our need for meaning, that ignored the hard realities for so many people living on this planet. It felt like we were being distracted, and lied to, and manipulated into a false sense of security and distraction. I imagined a world where our public message system was instead filled with inspiring, authentic words and images, and symbols and myths that would help us connect, transform and transcend the mess we've collectively made.

 

I had this dream of the mass media communications being purely for their own sake, not for money or attention or manipulation in any way. Of course as an artist I cannot afford an international multi-media billboard campaign, so this idea has been stopped and started multiple times. I wondered if the time would ever be right for this hopeful and idealistic project. But suddenly here we are, the human race, quieting at last, stuck in our homes like prisoners, facing mortality, confronting our fears.

 

This Quarantime has forced us to connect, to hope, to collectively dream better realities, to face our sorrows and regrets. It is a terrible time, but also a beautiful time. So it feels like a good time to speak truths, to connect to each other, to be openhearted, to look together for solutions to age old problems. Einstein said that we 'cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them' and this seems more true than ever now. This is clearly a time for a change in global consciousness. This is our tipping point, we're at it. If this pandemic ended tomorrow and we went back to our usual ways, we would have failed on so many levels.

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So my understanding is that human consciousness is how we made the world as it is, and only a new consciousness can rebuild it for the better. Consciousness, whether individual, local, national or global, has 'constituent parts' made from words, images, ideas, thoughts, beliefs, mental and emotional programs, feelings, rituals. We're a complex species, and we do not fully understand ourselves or our place in the universe. Maybe we never will, maybe it is just a bit too late, now that we have such powerful tools of destruction in our hands and the courage of toddlers.

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But I thought about art, and the way, at it's best, it is still a relatively censorship-free zone for expression. I thought about museums and galleries and public spaces, closed now and having to rethink their purpose in the light of vast changes in society. And I remembered the quote from the artist Hans Haacke that 'Museums are managers of consciousness. They give us an interpretation of history, of how to view the world and locate ourselves in it. They are, if you want to put it in positive terms, great educational institutions. If you want to put it in negative terms, they are propaganda machines.' This made me think about how museums house collections of objects, and things, and themes, each representing an artist's focus on some thought, feeling, process, idea, reality. These collections are an organisation of meanings.

 

And I thought about how each and everyone of us is a kind of 'collection', of memories and beliefs and feelings and ideas. I'm so curious about what makes you 'you', about how you feel about the world, about what you wish and hope for, what you dream of, what your ideas are for change, what kind of a world you want to live in. I love the idea that each of us, a unique personal 'collection', has something powerful to offer. I love the quote from Joseph Beuys 'Every human being is an artist', with the inherent challenge to participate in the creation of a better world. I believe this, we all create our own lives and homes and realities, some more consciously than others, but we are all capable of imagining something and making it real. Everything in the human world was created this way!

 

I thought about billboards, online and in reality, and how they infiltrate our subconsciousness, they quietly suggest to us what we 'should or could be', what is 'normal', what to do with our lives and time and money. I noticed that because the words and images did not have a tagline of the name of the writer or agency behind them, they somehow seemed 'objective' when they are not. Above all, I thought about how important it is that words mean what they mean, that we can trust the words that are, after all, the blueprint we build the world from. I thought about what our 'global psyche' would look and feel like if we 'reprogrammed' ourselves for the better. Now that billboards online seem as real as billboards in the physical world, and have greater reach than a small local billboard, and now that we are all collectively locked down at home with this small window of the computer screen to look into and out of, this seems the right time to co-create this project, with your participation. To those who have already contributed some questions and answers, thank you so much, and to those who will do so in the future, thank you again. Please share wherever you can, and please participate. This is not about my personal 'collections', this is meant to be about ours. 

 

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