Jonathan Harris, BALLOONS OF BHUTAN
PORTRAIT OF HAPPINESS IN THE LAST HIMALAYAN KINGDOM
In Bhutan, happiness is no laughing matter — academics study it, spreadsheets track it, billboards tout it, conferences debate it, and every year, flocks of foreign intellectuals travel to Thimphu to share their ideas about what exactly makes a person happy.Instead of "Gross National Product", Bhutan uses "Gross National Happiness" to measure its socio-economic prosperity, essentially organizing its national agenda around the basic tenets of Buddhism. Bhutan's fourth king, Jigme Singe Wangchuck, invented the idea in 1972, to give his tiny country some international clout and guard against potential future invasion by its two mighty neighbors (India and China). Since then, the kingdom measures not only the economic development of the country, but also the life satisfaction of its residents, their spiritual health and happiness. Given the seriousness with which this topic is treated, I thought it would be fun to do something a little bit silly, so in late 2007, I traveled to Bhutan and spent two weeks handing out balloons.I asked people five questions pertaining to happiness: what makes them happy, what is their happiest memory, what is their favorite joke, what is their level of happiness between 1 and 10, and, if they could make one wish, what would it be. Based on each person's stated level of happiness, I inflated that number of balloons, so very happy people would be given 10 balloons and very sad people would be given only one (but hey, it's still a balloon). Then I wrote each person's wish onto a balloon of their favorite color. I repeated this process for 117 different people, from all different ages and backgrounds.On the final night, all 117 wish balloons were re-inflated and strung up at Dochula, a sacred mountain pass at 10,000 feet, leaving them to bob up and down in the wind, mingling with thousands of strands of prayer flags.
Jonathan Harris
Jonathan Harris (b. Aug 27, 1979) makes projects that reimagine how humans relate to technology and to each other. Combining elements of computer science, anthropology, visual art and storytelling, his projects range from building the world’s largest time capsule (with Yahoo!) to documenting an Alaskan Eskimo whale hunt on the Arctic Ocean (with a warm hat). Jonathan studied photography (with Emmet Gowin) and computer science (with Brian Kernighan) at Princeton University, and went on to win a 2005 Fabrica fellowship and three Webby Awards. His work has also been recognized by AIGA, Ars Electronica, the state of Vermont, Print Magazine (which named him a 2008 New Visual Artist) and The World Economic Forum (which named him a 2009 Young Global Leader). His work has been exhibited widely at MoMA (New York), Le Centre Pompidou (Paris), The Victoria & Albert Museum (London) and has been featured on CNN, BBC, and Bhutanese television. He has lectured all over the world, including at the TED Conference, Google, Princeton and Stanford Universities, and at least two hippy forest gatherings. He is the co-creator of We Feel Fine, which continuously measures the emotional temperature of the human world through large-scale blog analysis, and has made other projects about online dating, modern mythology, happiness, anonymity, news, and language. His latest project is Cowbird, a community of storytellers working to build a public library of human experience. Born in northern Vermont, he now lives in California.)
)
)
)
)
)