DAY 338

UNEXPECTED ART FORMS

Shoes on a Wire

ARTISTIC EXPRESSION OF THE COLLECTIVE SUBCONSCIOUS

The annals of urban lore have been filled with attempts to make sense of this phenomenon. Various urban legends attribute it to everyone from street gangs to satanic cults reportedly collecting tokens from their human sacrifices.

The more urbane observer casually dismisses the collection of dozens, even hundreds of shoes hanging from a single telephone wire or tree as a meaningless fad.

But could it be unplanned, collective artistic expression?

If, as psychologist Carl Jung suggested, all individual humans are united by a collective subconscious mind, why could we not spontaneously produce expressions of collective creativity?

Of course, one need not believe in a mystical, shared subconscious to make sense of the phenomenon. Maybe we’re all simply fed up with the compartmentalization and hyper-individualism characteristic of modern society. Perhaps something inside of us desperately gropes for a lost sense of community.

Do we long to be connected to each other by something more than a shared power grid?

Or are we all just really bored?

I confess, I like the thought of some cooperative project, some glowing spark of humanity that ties us all together for one brief instant—if only through a bond as fragile as a shoelace. —DJS