Maeda's SIMPLICITY

Simple Relief Drive Ends (For Now)

We officially closed our Asian relief drive yesterday around noon and will continue to support the relief efforts in different ways. We encourage others to do the same if you can afford to do so. Within a week we had sold all of the prints that I've carried around with me for close to ten years now. It does indeed feel better to have less tangible things that clutter your mind, and more intangible thoughts that can form in the void.

Last week we processed a flurry of addresses in regards to the shipping of the prints. I was personally surprised by all the different addresses within the U.S. with names of states that I never use on a daily basis. Sure, I memorized them as a child to take geography tests, but a place like "Kansas" can still seem as exotic to me as Thailand.

I made my own mini-map (on the right) in the fashionable "red-/blue-state" method that we heard so much about during the U.S. election. The red states correspond to ones from where we received requests. Of course I'm not saying anything subtly or overtly political about states that I mark as red versus blue, nor have I come to any groundbreaing conclusion like the folks that tell us that the U.S. is actually not blue nor red but purple. The exercise of painting the states gave me the sense that the U.S. is a pretty big place given that you can't even see my tiny state of Massachusetts on my micro-map. And the fact that we're just one country in an even bigger planet of Earth within an even bigger universe ... is getting me sleepy. I will dream of being a tiny pink dot fixed upon the surface of a gigantic sphere, that probably bears the politically fashionable shade of purple.

Posted by maeda at January 18, 2005 12:38 AM