The View From Here
Madison Jennings
Apparently, we can’t all just get along. There are seven billion people in the world, and there are just as many different perspectives. It often seems that we choose what to believe, and we spend the rest of our lives seeking justifications for those beliefs, all the while separating our unique worlds from those of everyone else until we come to the conclusion that we, individually, are ultimately right, making everyone else ultimately wrong.
Is it the human condition? Is closed-mindedness written in our genetic code somewhere? If we could manage to look past the specific positions that we hold, we would find that the reasons we, collectively, believe what we do are typically pretty similar, even if those beliefs are worlds apart. The View From Here examines a collection of unique perspectives and then redacts them, removing the polarizing elements and thus the “rightness” (or “wrongness,” depending on where you’re standing) from them. Through a series of posters, an interactive webpage, and an online introspective experience, the project illustrates that while we may not agree with one another, we can certainly learn to understand and respect each other.