I am playing around with ideas in my head about this final project we are doing. I would like to do something big, larger than life. I would like to address a larger-than-life issue in a creative way and create some sort of event or proposal for an event that would open people's eyes to issues. One thing about events like this is they actually have to be worth while for people to go to, you can plan the most elaborate, meaningful event but if no one participates than no one was affected by it, and it was merely a waste of time and resources for all parties. So, addressing big issues in a fun or exciting or interesting way.
My first ideas were as follows;
-global warming
-world hunger
Now I will elaborate:
-global warming - many people are skeptical this is occuring, not because of factual evidence but because of the placement of doubt by certain parties who have an interest in the continued use of fossil fuels, mainly oil. Some people I have encountered do not believe it could occur because nature is much too powerful, the world too large, to be truly changed and affected by the actions of people, its inhabitants. Many events have been done in order to show the photos of the melting ice-caps, however I feel that paints a grim picture and, quite frankly, it has been done. My event for this topic would serve to highlight the power that people actually do have in changing and affecting the environment. The power of human impact if you will. This could be demonstrated by maybe filming a scene at a beach, or some place like this where each person who walked by would simply place a rock in a small stream, or take one shovel full of sand and move it to a different location, and at the end of this, perhaps the small stream would be averted, surely disturbed, and the shovel fulls of sand would certainly create a hole in one location and a large pile in the other, depending on the traffic on the beach. I abandoned this idea because I am not sure I could get a beach to agree to this, and also because of the drought issues and such.
-world hunger - in order to create increased awareness of world hunger, I thought I could take small object, perhaps a ritz cracker, or an oreo, or a grape, and to ask a fairly large group of people to split this small piece of sustinance between them. This could be repeated with slightly larger food objects like a graham cracker or larger baked good of some kind, or watermelon slice, even something as large as a watermellon providing a massive group with just a knife and having them split it between them. The point of this activity could be one of several things, at the end of the exercize everyone could be asked to imagine if what they had in their hand was the only sustinance they were going to have for a day, a week, maybe longer. Interview could be conducted after with each person asking why they chose the size of item they did, and if they could go back would they change the size in any way and why. It could also point to which cultures took larger pieces than others if it were a multicultural group, also the sizes they took if they were told that what they took had to last them a day or a year. I think that would not only be eye opening for the participants and on-lookers, but it would also be somewhat of a social experiment, revealing the tendencies of certain cultures and just people in general in their interest of self-preservation, and perhaps how they react when they step into the shoes of someone who struggles to find enough to survive.
