📝Insider #4 - TinyPeople

A passage from "SneakyArt of Vancouver"

Oct 03, 2021

👋 Hello.

This is Insider Post #4. I am sharing a passage from my current book-in-progress - SneakyArt of Vancouver. I don’t write enough for it. I should be doing more. I promise to do more.

This passage is about the TinyPeople I have found since moving to this part of the world.

I have over 500 TinyPeople of Vancouver in my sketchbooks. It is not difficult to build such a collection. Once you begin to notice, they’re everywhere.

I drew some while looking out of a cafe window, one block away from my apartment building. The colour of the traffic light would make them stop for a few moments, paused in space as they waited for time to pass them by. When it did, the lights changed, and they walked away from my world.

I drew some more while sitting outside the Vancouver Art Gallery in the heart of downtown. The square is a popular site for protests and social activism, but that morning it was empty. I would watch TinyPeople approach from the far distance, growing slowly bigger as they neared me. They are always going from one to place to another. They’re always doing things.

I drew some TinyPeople from a bench under the shade of a tree, and others while sitting on the grass in the park, and still others while strolling along the sea-wall. I drew TinyPeople sweltering under a summer noon sun. I drew TinyPeople with their forms silhouetted by the sun setting over pacific waters. Silhouette drawings are a kind of chiaroscuro, a word I like very much.

As far as I can tell, no one was drawn twice.

As far as I can tell, no one found out, before or after.

It was very hush hush.

Very sneaky.

Who are TinyPeople?

TinyPeople passed through my world, just like so many people who pass through your world everyday.

More than a hundred years ago, when photography was still new to the world, people believed that to have a picture taken was to lose a portion of your soul. That by ceding your image, you had ceded a little part of your self.

Like a horcrux, it meant that while you may live forever, you are now lesser than what you were before.

But we know that it is not so. In fact, we are infinitely reproducible. We leave images of ourselves every time we pass through the worlds of other people. These images are often faint impressions - unnoticed and quickly forgotten. That’s because neither side is really paying attention to the incredible fact of what just happened.

TinyPeople on a busy downtown intersection.

What are TinyPeople?

TinyPeople are drawings snatched out of the ether of time and space. The drawing is a record of an impression that never happened before and will never happen again - not in this same way, not in this same space, not in this same time. It marks a unique intersection of worlds.

It is a non-fungible token of a complex, ever-changing reality.

The drawing bears all the features I was able to notice in the short duration of our intersection. It is a distillation of unique personhood to its most fundamental physical attributes.

It is a reduction, in the way that every distillation is a reduction. But that is not bad. Reductions are such a human thing. If we could capture - or even sense - all the information of the lives that passed through ours, the truth would overwhelm us. The rich complexity of life and multi-dimensional brilliance of existence would leave us gawking, unable to do anything at all. Our systems would be shot.

TinyPeople are a distillation by the artist to speak coherently about the world they see, and thus reveal the way that they see the world.

TinyPeople in the park, during my #OneWeek100People challenge.

Where are TinyPeople?

TinyPeople are everywhere.

Why are TinyPeople?

In the existentialist scheme of things, one could divide any world into subjects and objects. Subjects are free agents - capable of defining their own identity, to do anything and to be anything. Objects are not free - their identity is assigned to them by subjects. A person can be a subject that objectifies other people in their world. But in the world of another person, the same subject could be just an object.

TinyPeople are objects inside my world.

A philosopher-couple talked and debated and wrote a lot of things about existentialism more than 50 years ago. One was a little man called Jean Paul Sartre. He wrote - “Hell is other people.” - because the presence of other people made him conscious of his own objectification in their eyes. Sartre’s partner was Simone de Beauvoir. Being a woman, she was acutely aware that at least half of humanity did not have the privilege of being a subject at will, that it was unavoidable to be an object. She said that the lived experience of all humanity was to be both subject and object, and that human existence operated in the fuzziness of these definitions. The truth is ambiguous, she said, the world is meaningless, and that is good thing. Both of them sought the absolute freedom of the individual. Sartre said that true freedom was to be a subject and not an object. Simone de Beauvoir wrote a book called the Ethics of Ambiguity.

TinyPeople are objects in my world, just as I am an object in theirs.

We may not notice TinyPeople because our lives are so busy, and our attention so distracted. But we would immediately notice the absence of TinyPeople from our world. It is how we define a dystopia - a place without the people whom we do not know but who nonetheless make it livable.

TinyPeople make our worlds richer, and we do the same for them. It is an unspoken symbiotic relationship.

What should I do?

The next time you are at a window, or navigating the sea of humanity on a busy street, or traveling in a train or plane or bus, look around and say - “Thank you, TinyPeople!”

But not very loudly, not so they might hear. They may not understand what you mean. Remember, in their world, you are TinyPeople.