| The art and ideals of the Mother Millennia project: a note from the artist and coordinator
The underlying intent of this project is to explore how diversity may work. My hope for the Mother Millennia website is that it might become a living example of how our differences can hold our individual and cultural identities while at the same time allowing spheres to overlap. Remembering our mothers, or hearing older relatives remember their mothers, is a human commonality that will never sound the same twice, but will always resonate with the memory and desire we all use to create ourselves. The stories on this website are sometimes painful and angry as well as happy and nostalgic. They each have the qualities of what makes an individual unique, as well as what makes you or me like any other person with a story. A second hope is to gather at least two thousand stories of Mother, related by people of as many different cultural backgrounds as possible. The stories will be a mix of fictionalized and straight memoirs, visual narrative, oral histories or any other media desired by the participants, and which can be supported by the World Wide Web. For instance, the recorded sound of a mother's laugh, or video of a dance or a birthday, or perhaps, a child's crayon portrait of her great-grandmother. Method of expression is limited only by the current state of web technology. However, it is in no case necessary for anyone wishing to contribute a story to Mother Millennia to be a user of computer technology. Many works have already come through word of mouth and by people who do not have immediate access to the web or any real interest in computers generally. As the project proceeds, the numbers of stories will increase, and they will be more and more densely linked in a variety of methods. (For Mother Millennia linking rationales, see both the Threads section and the Help section.) Visitors to this site who wish to place their own links, or even entire threads, will soon be able to do so via an online form. In the meantime, if you see a link you would like to be made on the site, or you would like to contribute a story, please email me at caguyer@vassar.edu. Carolyn Guyer Still more below: |
| Editorial policy The editorial policy of the Mother Millennia project is as inclusive as the coordinator can sustain. The only limits set on what will be accepted are instances that deliberately intend to injure others. The right of anyone wishing to publish hate propaganda is not in dispute. The World Wide Web is a technology currently open to anyone to use, and as such will afford whoever wishes to exercise such a right the room to do so. However, racist, misogynist, or other hateful material will not be placed on this site. |
| About Bandwidth While applauding the efforts of electronic artists, especially, who are attempting to push web technology, the Mother Millennia project generally utilizes a low bandwidth. This website is dedicated conceptually to the broadest possible audience and must remain accessible as far as can be managed. With that as an operating principle, there will be some exceptions afforded to works that require the use of video, sound, and graphics. These works will be marked as high bandwidth in the Story and Author Indexes. On the same note, it is understood that "accessible" refers not only to bandwidth, but also to whether any participant or audience even has the necessary equipment available to them. There will soon be a section within Mother Millennia devoted to current efforts to make computer technology available to those who have been excluded as part of economic, political, and cultural processes. |
| The Mother Millennia earth images
The use of earth photographs as the design motif in the Mother Millennia website is based on the idea that perspective is everything. Getting back to see the big picture is hard sometimes, and not even desirable all the time. Somehow we need to be able to look at most things in the world at least twice. From Jamake Highwater in his book Dance: "I was once given advice by an old Indian. 'You must learn to look at the world twice,' he told me as I sat on the floor of his immaculately swept adobe room. 'First you must bring your eyes together in front so you can see each droplet of rain on the grass, so you can see the smoke rising from an anthill in the sunshine. Nothing should escape your notice. But you must learn to look again, with your eyes at the very edge of what is visible. Now you must see dimly if you wish to see things that are dim -- visions, mist, and cloud-people. . . animals which hurry past you in the dark. You must learn to look at the world twice if you wish to see all that there is to see.'" I understand that there are other interpretiations, but for me, this quote refers to the very nature of existence. We must be able to see things (and people) as distinct and differentiated, but paradoxically, must also see that the same things (and people) can be muted or blended by similarities. It may be our oldest tension: what is individual and what is communal. The images of earth used here are to remind of that process of combining two viewpoints, and that, in an ancient sense, we all share the same mother. The source for most of the earth images used here is the Johnson Space Center website, Earth from Space, which is at: http://earth.jsc.nasa.gov/ Earth from Space is a highly recommended website. The photographs made available there are astonishingly beautiful. Included here on the Mother Millennia site are versions of the larger photos from which some of the headers and navigation bar were created. You can see just these by clicking this link. Even if you take a look at this handful of images used by Mother Millennia, however, you will still probably want to visit Earth from Space, which has posted a selection of the "best" photographs of the earth made by astronauts on NASA shuttle missions. They include views of cities, mountains, rivers, deserts, islands, agriculture, pollution, and much, much more. |
| Language versions of Mother Millennia
This project has never intended to use English solely. As an international effort, Mother Millennia accepts stories in all languages whether or not translations are available for publication. In the near future, effort will be devoted to producing multiple language versions of the entire website. Translations of all works, however, isn't likely, and so stories that are contributed in more than one language will be highly welcome. |
| Special note about the spelling of millennia
The plural of the word millennium is used in Mother Millennia as an allusion to the entire history and prehistory of the subject of Mother. All the millennia, in other words. Of course, it also refers to our particular moment in that continuum. Despite their ubiquitous use these days, millennium and millennia remain hard to spell for most of us. In itself this is hardly important, but to the extent that correct spelling gets you to this website, remember that there are two "l"s and two "n"s. |
| You can find more about how to get around in the Mother Millennia website by clicking Help in the Navigation Bar below. |
