The Bright Orange Book Project

My Story

I recall with a sense of wonder, when, as an elementary student, our class project was to write messages on tiny slips of paper with a way to get back to us, attached them to the string of a helium balloon, and release them into the world.

Remembering doing this, together, conjures up a sense of hopefulness and the early impression that we were all part of one, small world — and that if we reach out to one another, we may find commonality.

Of course, the chances of getting a message back were small, but when someone did reach out back to one of us, it was a warm, generous and high-spirited celebratory experience, a sense of bridging the gaps among people.

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In today’s highly interconnected ever-smaller-world, far more cynical and fast-moving than that elementary school class in the 1970s, the gap remains and is perhaps even more pronounced than ever before. If we don’t do something about it, the world threatens to tear itself apart.

Why? The world, our species, is fragmented and incoherent. Because of internet technology and advances in computing, we are being woven together faster than we can comprehend. Our global society is made of multiple competing and independent states, vying for control, blind to the suffering caused by diversion of resources available for the betterment of humanity to agents of destruction.

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If the world has the potential to evolve a planetary consciousness, it is at best in an infantile or embryonic state. If the planet is a brain, then we as individual are like neurons. Our time scale is much faster than that of the global emergent consciousness, and our efforts to communicate with the world flit away faster than can be caught on an evolutionary time scale. Our only chance for the world to speak with itself is to design a series of projects articulating messages over longer time scales, and repeating those messages often enough to register and foment change. The Big Questions Project is the first of these efforts.

Grant

What is the Bright Orange Book Project?

The purpose of the Bright Orange Book Project is to execute a collective artistic “happening”, sparking an immediate and enduring positive impact on the state of the world at the level of global organization by creating awareness of and collective reflection upon the major challenges which face us as a human family. A hands-on approach, holding a real object, writing rather than typing, brings us back to more fundamental ways of relating and connecting. By leveraging collective intelligence, we may leverage the power of the group to solve humanity's greatest problems.

The Project is a collective journaling project taking place over the course of 3-6 months and resulting in the collection of handwritten personal responses to major life questions.

The Project will be mirrored in the digital realm, where all things are possible. Robots and drones, selfies, videos, contests, you name it.

The tools being used to build this intervention lie within the overlap of psychoanalysis and culture, public art, and social activism.

The collected writings will be analyzed for content and data, and selections will be published as a book. This happening will reverberate throughout the physical and virtual worlds.