Learning To Love You More

I came across the website Learning To Love You More by Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher. Miranda July wrote and directed the wonderfully brilliant movie Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005). Okay, back to the website, or project, because its much more than a website. Its simultaneously a communal art project and catalog of mundane, human everydayness. Brilliant. I love it.

Learning to Love You More is both a web site and series of non-web presentations comprised of work made by the general public in response to assignments given by artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher. Yuri Ono designs and manages the web site.

Participants accept an assignment, complete it by following the simple but specific instructions, send in the required report (photograph, text, video, etc), and see their work posted on-line. Like a recipe, meditation practice, or familiar song, the prescriptive nature of these assignments is intended to guide people towards their own experience.

Since Learning To Love You More is also an ever-changing series of exhibitions, screenings and radio broadcasts presented all over the world, participant’s documentation is also their submission for possible inclusion in one of these presentations. Past presentations have taken place at venues that include The Whitney Museum in NYC, Rhodes College in Memphis, TN, Aurora Picture Show in Houston, TX, The Seattle Art Museum in Seattle, WA, the Wattis Institute in San Francisco CA, among others.

Since LTLYM inception in 2002 over 8000 people have participated in the project.

Assignments include such things as make a documentary video of a small child (#3), photograph a scar and write about it (#11), take a picture of stangers holding hands (#30), take a flash photo under your bed (#50), and make an encouraging banner (#63).

You’ve definitely got to check out the website for all of the assignments as well as the reports.