Somehow it's not cliche

I'm still at Santa Clara, though I should be going toward Davis soon. Meanwhile, while I have a few minutes on hand, I thought I'd share what I saw at the Walkers Design Museum the other day. They're doing a "Peace Starts Here" exhibit (or something along those lines -- I've forgotten the exact name). I was initially skeptical at first -- you don't spent the past however many years in a relatively liberal area without learning a thing or two about grassroot type peace movements and the quality of art that usually results -- but I was very pleased to find out that the thing was...pretty awesome actually.

There is an organization that calls itself the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation that went out and hired a design firm for the project. I've looked it up -- it's called the Chen Design Associates. The exhibit is idealistic to the point that it verges on the edges of being cliche but the visual displays and creativity managed to salvage that and make it look cool. It's quite impressive really.

My favorite is a wall where there are hooks and slips of colored paper cut out that have holes on them, and a marker. There're instructions to leave a "message of peace" on the wall, and as I went in each different time (first time to look, second time to take picture, only to have low battery message displayed on my camera, third time it isn't open, and finally the forth time where I actually got the pictures) the wall has been steadily filling up. I'll post a few pictures here, the rest (along with two of the other displays besides the wall) can be found under the Shutterfly link.







You get a fairly diverse crowd, obviously -- and I don't mean just the different languages that show up, but also the different messages indicating vastly different personality types (i.e. it's not all new-age hippies). There are the messages that say "say I love you more" and then there are the messages that say "do acid", so you get different shades in the spectrum, and it's all very neat.

Why yes, I did leave a message there too.