The View From Here

Apparently, we can’t all just get along. For every one of the seven billion people in this world, there are just as many different perspectives, built by every experience we have. As experiences compound, we choose what we believe in, and then we spend the rest of our lives seeking out justifications and rationalizations 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. It’s the human condition, closed-mindedness has to be written in our genetic code somewhere. But 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 be able to easily understand one another, we can certainly learn to respect each other.