Free Idea Factory

hang small mirrors from the ceiling and also words on strings. let the breeze blow through the room and see how the reflection changes. wriite a poem as you walk through the words and mirrors

this idea is based on a few things: Susan G. Wooldridge’s book “Foolsgold, Making Something into Nothing and freeing your creative progress” (Harmony Books, 2007) and also the collage boxes of Joseph Cornell…

take a small box or bag out with you on walkabout. collect stuff that resonates and make a collage box of your own. photograph it. do it daily for a week. go to different parts of town or country.

post the results on a blog and tell us all about it

Put poetry in bottles or little boats and throw into the sea or rivers. Let it find a reader, if ever. There would be something very special and intimate about the relationship between writer and potrntial reader when the work had to survive in this way.

write a short poem and then change it in every way visually and systematically. make it a left-based spaced poem, center it, add spaces, make it vertical. spin it round, set it in motion if you can. i use an old program called microsoft photodraw to do this, but there are others.

Last post reminded me of another big idea. Night time. Have someone stationed in each room of a very large building and be in contact by radio/mobile phone with them all. By having them control the lights in their room, spell out letters and words pixel style. A performance seen over a whole city.

A black t-shirt with white printing, in that all too familiar font from the ridiculously regularly ripped-off slogan Got Milk that reads simply: Got It.

Attach large pages together at their four corners with jewelry loops to create one enormous sheet that will move in the wind beautifully. Write something on those pages, or paint them. A quilt of words. Hang it out on someone’s clothesline in the middle of the night. Sneak off.

Hi folks
Sometime may get round to this. Project involving printing the word `HERE` in large letters on a piece of cloth, placing it in various places in the landscape and photographing it. Use the map reference as title for each piece.

and then interview yourself about it. write a manifesto, share it with others. make it real. write work in support of the movement.

There’s a problem with the way the check gets dropped in most restaurants. The default behavior is the server sets down the check and says “I’ll take that when you’re ready.” and walks away. Even if I’m ready right now, and visibly scrambling for my wallet. What is really being said is, “I’ll come back later to take that when I’m ready, and hopefully you are too, as long is it isn’t right now, because that would be hugely awkward for some inexpressible reason.” This often leaves me sitting there a lot longer than necessary (and the server should want to turn the table, too). What needs to happen is for the server to say, “When you’re ready, I can take that.” and then pause for a beat to see if I’m lunging for my wallet because we need to get out of there.