Action 3: Extending & Seeking
Action 3 required us to extend & seek beyond our workspace, which is rather difficult given the lockdown in place due to the pandemic.
Still it got me wondering ‘are we really disconnected?’ I mean, every night I sit in front of my laptop and meet my classmates & instructors who join me from different parts of the world. The screen of the laptop acts as a window that lets me see everyone in their own time zones.
It has now reached a point where I do not move around physically but every night, I share a common space with people from all around the world. It is almost as if all our systems have become portals to take us different places.
For this action I wanted to explore how could I demonstrate this connection between me and my cohort. I decided to start from my laptop, which helps me connect with my class. But that was not all, after all how much can one see through a 15.6-inch screen?
So, to expand my workspace, I decided to photograph my room, then the immediate surrounding of my room and then my house. I wondered if I could scale out this process any further. In doing so I took some screenshots of my house using Google Earth, after all using technology is the only way of getting out of your house.
Continuing this, I scaled out to a point where I could see my classmates situated in different parts of India. Although I have never met them in person, but after marking their position on the map , they seemed a little closer.
But this was not all, now I had to scale out a little further so I could see all my classmates spread around in different parts of the world. I marked their positions and connected them using lines. The result I got from was reassuring. Even in times of such uncertainty, we are in this together. It is, as if every night during class all our laptops are connected by a string and as Louise puts it during the meditation sessions before class, we share a moment while attending our classes from different parts of the world.
Putting all of this together, I realized how it takes so many levels to connect me with my cohort. I have tried to visualize this in the picture below:
