Skip to main content

Artifcatual Communication: The follow up

The fourth post I wrote on this blog was called Artifactual Communication.  It came to me one day a couple of days after I started the blog when I overhead my husband listening to a talk about it on the internet.  It started to turn some gears in my mind and I can still remember the rush of endorphins that coarsed through me as I turned an out of context, random idea into something personal.  I knew little about artifactual communication, still don't, but the general concept struck a chord as I began my journey paying closer attention to my surroundings.

Since then, that post has been viewed more than any other post I've written.  People in Thailand, Australia, Ukraine, the U.K., Brazil and Indonesia and South Africa have read it and it makes me want to know what they were looking for.  Did they find it in the post? Maybe  or maybe not, but somehow, in a tenuous way, we connected, however briefly.

Life got exceedingly hectic in the intervening months and my desk has become considerably more cluttered since then, as my writing style continues to evolve and change.  A messy desk in itself is a sign of how I work and compartmentalise.  It goes from sprawling mess to carefully organised on a regular basis (with heavy emphasis on the messy side).  I can't help thinking though that this post first got me practising how to better observe myself and clock my surroundings.  

New questions have cropped up for me on this topic. What do my apps and wallpaper on my iphone say about me?  Something or nothing? Or some things.  I'm a consumer, a person with kids (why else would I have Dream Dresses on my phone?), a person who likes to play with photography.  Do they say something different about me than what my bedrooms and backpacks and living spaces have been saying about me all along or is their a river running through connecting them all? My online abode is crafted carefully. What posts I pick to post, what items I like and what I comment (and how) on facebook, on twitter and here on the blog has usurped my original focus on my physical space and flung it into the digital world some of us are so heavily ensconced in.  

As a kid I had a little house under the stairs (another day I'll tell that story) and bedrooms that I constantly re-decorated.  In high school I had a locker, then I had a dorm room, a first apartment, followed by a backpack.  The backpack got followed up by a purse.  Then I had a classroom at my first job and then another one and then a cubicle. Then I had a first house and a baby's room to decorate and now I have a phone and an online identity to furnish.  Upon examination, they all have so much to say about me. They also say so little.  Sometimes I am too tired to care what picture I post or which ornament I choose to decorate my space with but I suppose a lack of artifacts speaks just as loudly as dirty laundry on the kitchen floor, a witty anecdote on facebook and lilacs in a vase which are all artifacts communicating volumes about me.

How about you?  Do you have dirty laundry in your kitchen too?  

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I entered August without you.

 I won't visit you this month.  You won't call. I will raid your garden and you won't get any of the vegetables. I will make plans without telling you about them. We'll go to the store and not buy you one single thing. Whole books will be read and I will not tell you which ones. I will watch movies and not inform you. The nasturiums will ripen. Last month was different. I changed my schedule and took time off work to be with you.   I dropped all kinds of plans for us to be together. You sent me messages, I received them. I picked up food that I thought you would like at the store and sent you pictures of every beautiful thing I saw. I sang with you. We watched the Great Canadian Baking Show. You chose the recipe for the garlic scape pesto and gave me instructions for making the gooseberry jam. I am in August without you. You are in July.
1 comment
Read more

Fists full of lettuce

 It is a pot of a variety of lettuce plants. It was planted by my mom.  She has been living with Stage 4 bile duct cancer for at least 1.5 years (that we know of, probably a lot longer).  Standing and gardening are becoming harder as time goes on. She learned about gardening from her dad as a kid and kept on gardening every year of her adult life.  Sometimes the gardens were tiny or rudimentary, but with the help of my dad , they have become major and, at times elaborate, growing projects over the years.  Now it is a collection of raised beds and regular beds that hold a host of plants, vegetable and flowers. Something that was clear that first spring with Stage 4 cancer is that gardening would continue in a big way, cancer or no cancer.  It was important to order the seeds and start them inside and get them planted outside, no matter what. Spending time together in the summer with cancer now consistently involves gardening and following instructions. Plant...
Post a Comment
Read more

Keep telling yourself that.

We talk to ourselves everyday, all day (and night) for the whole of our lives. We started talking to ourselves before we knew we were a self, we forget what we said because we forget everything from before...when we were too young and busy developing our brain to remember those early years. There is still lingering residue of long forgotten conversations I have had with myself as a toddler sitting around in the crevices...sloughing off occasionally into words I tell myself still.   We talk non-stop, and not just with dialogue.  Our goosebumps communicate to us, our tingly feelings, our neurons, our peripheal vision.  They are all submitting data into our self and expecting us to react, respond or all to often, expecting what they are sending us will be ignored. After all that talking, you'd think we'd know what we think about most things, but occasionally we are stumped.  Unless we stop what we are doing and really concentrate sometimes that voice(s) ...
1 comment
Read more