1. Take a photo of yourself in various locations.
2. Post the photos close to where you took them.
I wanted to share with you a cool letter I received this week about an activity from the Guerilla Art Kit. I love seeing what people are doing with it. I excerpted some of the letter here, the photos are from the event:
Dear Keri,
I am a teacher of English working in a small industrial town close to Rouen, Normandy, France. At the end of the school year I asked my students (15/16 years old) to write a short diary about their guerilla art activity. My idea was inspired by your Guerilla Art Kit which I had found in the Beaubourg Museum Bookshop in Paris. So I told my students about your book, about guerilla art, about the sense of connection to the environment. They were interested by your ideas and we decided to act this way:
I let each of them choose a place of our school. I took a picture of them (a part of them actually, their hand, their hair, their foot…their choice) in that chosen environment and printed it on normal paper. They stuck the picture close to where it was taken, so people might question themselves when they spotted the picture. In order to feel the experience, they didn’t know where the others had taken and stuck the picture. So they could wander around the school and find the photos. They thought it was exciting, like a treasure hunt, and therefore they also watched other people finding the picture. They weren’t to react if someone ripped the picture, only to report, but it actually didn’t happen: the other students or members of the staff only watched them and you could see their puzzled expression! All this was to be written in their diary.
from Gekko Hopman

“…You need to realize something else: you can lead a perfectly good and satisfactory life even if you’re not a writer [artist]. When i figured out that i could be perfectly happy and not be a writer, i became a better writer. The unhappiest people in the world may be the ones who think their happiness depends on artistic success of some kind.” ~Wendell Berry
(excerpted fron an interview in this month’s sun, my favorite read)

my mailperson listens to a transistor radio out loud while he does his route. I don’t know why this pleases me so but it does. he listens every day to a sports station, sometimes to a live game of some kind. I don’t know enough about sports to be able to identify his game of preference. Baseball maybe? It seems so old fashioned these days to listen outloud to a game on the radio. I can hear him coming from down the street. a daily sound installation of distant announcer voices, slowly becoming louder and louder until I hear the sound of footsteps on my front porch. my anticipation grows as getting the mail is one of my favourite things. always has been.
I believe good things come in the mail. even bills, though they cause financial stress at times, they at least remind me that I am still alive and kicking, still an active participant in this crazy place, (being the planet). I always look forward to the surprises that the mail brings in the form of postcards from strangers, cards from friends who I see all to little, words from far away places on the other side of the earth. people thinking about me enough to write something, and then take a trip to the mailbox.
i like thinking about the fact that letter mail involves a physical experience of the world, an action. I picture every person going about their days, and at some point having to make a little journey. what did they see on the way? did they run into someone they know? an old friend or neighbor perhaps? did they notice the ground as they walked?

I was totally flattered and excited to be invited to speak at this years Foo Camp, but I can’t go for a couple of reasons. 1. because it is too close to another speaking engagement. and 2. I have a nursing infant in tow and they don’t allow families (it’s a camping situation). I send out a friendly yet hearty plea to Tim O’Reilly to make exceptions for nursing moms in the future!
it’s too bad because I have a lot to talk about lately and I think I figured out how to fix all of the problems of the universe. i guess you’ll have to wait until next year.
(you think i’m joking but really i’m not.)
p.s. Tim, i really like what you are doing and particularly loved your speech, “Why I Love Hackers”. keep up the good work!
update: I received an email from Sara at Foo, who wanted to let me know that they do accommodate nursing moms at foo and have had a few in the past. This was not mentioned on their site so I jumped to conclusions. My mistake. Thank you Sara for clearing that up! I meant no harm in my post about it.