Gratuitous photos from yesterday's bike ride.

On my way to the library I came across about 50 business cards scattered along the road as it passed an intersection. These cards are made of heavy translucent plastic, with a tough layer of blue ink and black lettering. Almost the thickness of a credit card. Very durable. So durable that they had survived being run over. The various scratch marks made them interesting, so I stopped to pick up a few.


 While I was doing that, two women came along and as they crossed the road, one stopped to pick up a bunch of the cards, and then offered them to me. I asked her if she wanted to keep any of them. She said no, so I took the stack, and they continued on. A moment later another woman came by and said something I didn't understand, so I asked her to repeat it. She said, 'whatcha gonna do with those?' I said I didn't know, but that they were too interesting to pass up. Maybe I'd write something over the top and hand them out to friends, or make sculptures with them.


 She said 'they make good ice scrapers'. I laughed, and said, 'When do we ever have ice around here?' She said 'it gets that way at my sister's sometimes, and those plastic cards come in real handy'. So I said that settled the question of what I was gonna do with them. I'd give 'em to my friends as ice scrapers! She laughed, and went on her way.


 What's just as interesting is the fact that these women stopped to engage with a complete stranger. It reminds me that there are various activities that will induce complete strangers to strike up friendly conversations with each other, as with the aerial photo of Moseley that I found in the rubbish and which prompted five conversations within the space of an afternoon, as I carried it home. Litter-picking seems like one of those activities. If I wanted to talk with more people, I could scatter these cards again and again, then start picking them up when people approached. This coud be an art project aimed solely at conversations with strangers. The trick would be to write a funding proposal to emphasise the artistic quality of the spontaneous interaction. There might be a difficulty in documenting the activity, as people tend to avoid interaction when there's a camera around.