What I think we're doing
By Ryan McDermott
(Photo credit to Chris Patrick. Thanks for the great photo, Chris!)
It’s really easy to make people scared, or to make people feel inadequete. We’re surrounded almost constantly by things that are trying to do this to us. Every billboard we see, every magazine cover we walk past, every ad we might see on television is trying to remind us that we’re inadequete. Or maybe we should be scared of something: ambiguous bad guys waiting for us to drop our vigilence so they can take advantage of it.
Get a security system, lock your doors, don’t go outside, don’t explore that thing.
Sometimes it’s class. You’re the coolest one at the party (or your ticket says so)…but you’re not really quite as cool as the people whose tickets tell them that they get to stand on the OTHER side of the velvet rope.
What are we doing
Our art is HARD. We don’t make people feel scared, or inadequete. We don’t have special sections that only the special people get access to. Everybody is special. Everybody is adequete. Nobody should be scared.
Our art is to make people feel safe. We specialize in empowering people to get out of their shell and dance, or sing, or wear a funny costume, or stay up all night doing all three. We even have a special group of people called ambassadors who exist to find people who might not be feeling very special, and figure out a way to reach out to them and change that.
We have these GIANT vehicles that ANYBODY gets to stand on top of and be both literally and figurtively 20 feet tall.
This whole thing is an art project that all of us are working really hard on, and the point of it is to do the hard thing: make people feel safe.