we feel fine

Do you know of www.wefeelfine.org? I've been obsessed with this website for 3 or 4 years...back to my most demeaning job of all time-- when I was a receptionist for a children's television company. They treated me kinda like an idiot while I was translating the Japanese business deals for one of the VPs. Yeah, it was a low point.

But when your job doesn't require much of you, it means you can start writing musicals while you're there (VOTE), research the limited PhD opportunities in Scotland (or anywhere) in creative writing. Funny where things are born.

It also gives you lots of time to truly get lost on the internet. Which is what I did with the phenomenal, truly modern multi-media artist, Jonathan Harris.

All his stuff his amazing, but I used to spend ages on here, looking at the feelings pulled from blogs all across the world. In some ways, the process is more like computer science than art (essentially, it's large scale blog analysis) but the results are nothing short of luminous.

I could isolate by my area, my age group, my gender. It felt a bit like poetry and looked an awful lot like art. Especially the photo montage area that pulled photos from blogs with the feeling or a phrase posted on it. No matter what, they always seem to be inspired. Ironic or hilarious or touching. There's also the ability to email that image as a postcard to people. Beautiful.

It's also a kind of fellowship. To see who is feeling what you're feeling. And a kind of hurt to see how many days I would check the site and see the most common feeling was "abandoned."

Part of Jonathan's bio goes a little something like this: Combining elements of computer science, anthropology, visual art and storytelling, Jonathan Harris designs systems to explore and explain the human world. He has made projects about human emotion,human desire, modern mythology, science, news, anonymity and language, and created the world's largest time capsule, which was translated into 10 languages.


I mean, who is this guy, right? But it seems to me that his work is just one more really brilliant way to experience appreciation for the day to day.

It's kind of been one of my New York goals to meet him. He gives amazing lectures too. So check out We Feel Fine, which was recently made into a beautiful hardcover book. I also recommend love-lines.

Story telling. Amen, brother.

More story telling after the jump...