torvike

To communicate with my parents and extended family. At age 1 I started to feel a bit hungry and decided I should start speaking so that my parents would feed me.

And this series of events has led to my favorite interactive art piece ever.

Handprints.

Little tiny handprints at the bottom. Big teenager and adult sized handprints at the top. Handprints upon handprints upon handprints, a modern day continuation of an ancient tradition.

Most of the people who contributed were probably doing so because they thought it would be fun, not for any deep philosophical reason. Heck, you can tell based on the height of the larger handprints that their owners were having a jumping competition. They didn’t think about the fact that they were creating art in the exact same way the earliest humans created art. They didn’t think about the fact that humans have always been and will always be humans, and the ways we interact with each other and the world have always stayed the same in the most important ways.

I found a TTS voice that was perfect for an audio version of this post.