27th Birthday Pictures

For my 27th birthday I asked everyone I knew to send me a picture (a photo they took preferably) alongside birthday wishes. This is part of a series I am working on … asking for 25 “Stories When You Were 25” two years ago, and doing some audio interviews at 26.

These idea all seem to stem from this collective creation work I have been continually fascinated by. The premise that the idea comes from me, but the content comes from the crowd.

I think these photos are particularly poignant because, in this Social Media dominated world, we are so focused on capturing the moment, that we sometimes forget that we should appreciate each moment afterwards… The process of looking back, while not something that is particularly my forte (re: memory loss in improv), is fun in and of itself.

Also, we take so many photos… I thought maybe it would be a nice opportunity to show someone who cares (me) a photo that they have taken but maybe not had the motivation/impulse/desire to share with anyone in particular yet. Maybe they had the most amazing they ever took and wanted to share that as well.

Other examples of these kind of works include:

• timmikulaisgreat.com - a secret santa gift I curated for the man himself… asking the crowd to write reasons why they thought Tim was great. This content was aggregated in a database of nearly 165 reasons Tim is great.
• thecouriers.org - a collaboration with amazing Winnipeg Artist Caitlin Curtis… we used Amazon Turk to collect lost love letters. One day we will improvise on lost love letters, finally bringing some finality to their purgatory-like existence.