Things We Love... Concept

The Things We Love... Story Listening Workshops collect joyful stories by encouraging people to record things they love to happen in the world.

How it Works

Oil pastels and drawing paper are provided at each workshop event for people to generate colourful pictures and word phrases. Each story told is logged in a central story log, with the name of the story teller, a description of the story, and the time the story was told. At the end of each event, all stories pictures are photographed, and added to a carefully curated collection.

Story tellers are invited to leave an email address so we can stay in touch. Story tellers are told when their story is added to the collection, and where they can view it on-line. Story tellers are also invited to become story listeners, and to seek more joyful stories.

Story listeners are invited to help with future story listening workshops. Story listeners are also invited to help with curating the collection of stories. Story listeners who help with more than one workshop event are invited to hold their own workshop events and to contribute to curating the collection of stories.

The story collection is permanently presented in our on-line gallery.

Digital Curation

We photograph all stories, and all the photos we take at the events are uploaded to flickr (a popular photo sharing website). Logged story details are put into the photo description.

The gallery is intended to display a careful selection from each workshop, mainly to concentrate the affect. Our current policy, derived entirely by accident, is for the gallery story selection to be self-selected by the story author in this way: only stories logged at the workshop by the author are entered into the gallery. This seems to separate the more considered contributions, and generate the most good feelings for the general visitor.

One World, One Love, One Story

We do hope to compose the stories into one big story, as a networked narrative, but it's still early days at the mo.

Book Series

We are thinking whether publishing a series of books might be interesting....

Extract From a Letter to a Friend

August, 2008

'Thank you for your advice. Yeah, I don't think I'll try to combine it with some kind of coding. I'm rather proud of its distinct distance from conventional code and coding. You may not believe this, but I'm very happy you think it looks like a community arts/art expression project. It hadn't occurred to me before, but that's exactly what it is. I don't know what the first way into self-expression is, but perhaps talking about things you like is the most obvious place to start. Haven't given it too much thought, but it's interesting how many people have said nobody asks them that anymore.... But that's not really the aim.

I'm sure it's a hopeless piece of art. Following Deleuze and Guattari in What Is Philosophy, I can see that it preserves almost nothing, it doesn't even stand up on it's own:

What's interesting me about it is the direction of travel. We don't start with the voiceless community or the non-expressive individual. We start quite far away, developing process supports in a conventional manner; connecting with working process and improving capabilities. Less is more, so we start chucking out stuff we don't need.

First goes management because command and control doesn't work any longer. Then things change, so we chuck out the Grand Plan and the Grand Process. Then we chuck out the tools, because 'the conceptual components are taking most of the time' so tools don't matter very much. Then we chuck out thinking up ideas for solutions, because they cause arguments and we can agreeably elaborate the problem.

So what's left? Quite a lot: services, codes, people, and their stories. We can forget about services and the codes they use, because that's just what we did yesterday so it's boring. Then, we just have the people, and their stories. People let people down. And only some of those stories are things people truly love to happen.

So... the project may be to listen to what people have to report about such things, what have they seen on their travels that people actually love to happen in life? I don't think I'm at all interested in giving people an opportunity to express themselves. But rather to intercept and relay joyful happenings, of any kind, even if it didn't ever happen to them.

It's the recording that counts (hence the story log, photos, and gallery), not really the expressing. The focus is on the audience, not the performance. Here people graduate from the stage to the stalls, from the pulpit to the pews. Story tellers are asked to become story listeners. That's why it has the unusual name "Story Listening" rather than the more usual "Story Telling". The point is not to indulge the 'expressing subject and the empty proposition' (to quote our French friends) but rather to introduce a fairly common recording device (the community art/art expression project - thank you for the name) and to arrange the consumption of experience in general, such that we establish a flow of desirable World stories. But what for?

I'm playing around with how to interrupt this flow, how to consume it, what recording devices could be used, what it it might be desirable to produce. Not sure. Have one or two ideas. But so far I've found the stories very life-affirming to look at, and good feelings are surely worth producing. Mostly, the stories aren't merely childish, but Jem's story does remind us not to lose our inner 6 year old. :-) They aren't always about green things and being outside, but it's a broad theme. They aren't all done by several people, but people always seem interested in what others are drawing, and sometimes even join in.

But this is surely neither art, nor science, nor philosophy. '...it seems that there is extracted from chaos the shadow of the "people to come" in the form that art, but also philosophy and science, summon forth: mass-people, world-people, brain-people, chaos-people -- non-thinking though that lodges in the three, like Klee's nonconceptual concept or Kandinsky's internal silence. It is here that concepts, sensations, and functions become undecidable, at the same time as philosophy, art, and science become indiscernible, as if they shared the same shadow that extends itself across their different nature and constantly accompanies them.' [closing lines of What Is Philosophy?]

The overall desire driving the project is probably to increase the circulation of mass, world, brain, chaos, people stories. And so there should be more emphasis on seeking temporal narratives rather than physical objects.

(Should like to learn more about community art/art expression. Do people like them to happen? Are they often coupled with a subsequent community regeneration project stage?)'