Free Idea Factory

I find myself planning to talk to certain people about certain things the next time I see them. I’d love an iPhone application that lets me construct a kind of to-do list but organized around the names of people who may or may not be in my address book. I’d like it to have some scheduling abilities to, so that I could easily enter, store, and retrieve information clusters like:

Bob

• talk about great idea
• ask about his nobel prize
• remind him about the $20 he owes

may see him at party next Friday

Then I’d want to be able to scroll though the list and have it maybe self-sort based on projected time of meeting.

I’ve heard several stories of artists forced to abandon storage units or old apartments in a hurry who had to discard or otherwise leave behind large portions of their work.

Seems like it would be a viable business to form a non-profit organization that could go pick up the art and give the artist a receipt for a donation at some reasonable amount; this way the artist could at least get a bit of a tax deduction for the donation, and, the organization could then redonate the art back to community projects and use it in auctions to raise money for community projects.

The Cranky Cats

Last night I thought of a cool book form that would be perfect for a long manscript of poems that ranged from the very short to the very long (gee, think I’m reading a mansuscript like that right now?). The book would have a custom trim such that the cover and beginning pages were small, even tiny, and it would gradually flare out (a diagonal cut rather than a vertical cut) until reaching full-size.

Side view of a normal book looks like this: |_|

Side vie of this book would look like this: /_\

So, from a top view, instead of being a rectangulare cube, it would be closer to a flat topped pyramid.

An automatic rebus-maker that takes arbitrary texts as input and then converts certain words to pictures that have been pulled from Google images and then re-sized to fit the format required by the chosen font.

A series of art pieces specifically designed to be submitted (and hung) in group shows. The pieces would perform, as purely as possible, nothing but to recontextualize the pieces hung on either side of it. For example:

Two swoopy arrows, one that ends up pointing left, one that ends up pointing right, the title of the piece (or perhaps incorporated right into the piece) is: the one to the left is awesome, the one to the right, not so great.

An image of a person making a disgusted face. Title of the piece (or incorporated into the piece) is: eew, why do I have to be across from that piece?

Other phrases possible (I’ll leave the working out of the accompanying image as an exercise for the reader):

• Definitely the best piece in this room.
• Some of us may be upside down, I’m not naming any names, but, look at the one on my right.
• The jury was really sleeping on that one three over, don’t you think?
• What’s a nice piece of art like me doing in a place like this?
• They only put me here because the artist left of this can’t stand the artist right of this. And vice versa. Oddly enough, they both like me.
• The first piece in the show is always the best. The last piece is always the one that makes the least sense.

Infinite perfect copyability has always made it a challenge for photographers to make it in the fine art world, because the fine art world is about selling unique items, and a print (analog or digital it doesn’t matter–or at least it didn’t used to matter, this idea may give digital an advantage) is by its very nature one of potentially many.

I’ve seen various photographers adopt various strategies–the most common I see is signing and numbering a limited edition of prints. This is not a bad solution, but, it effectively limits the possible high end. A photographer makes an edition of x number at $x.xx per print and solves for a reasonable value after already recognizing that the value is being artificially reduced by a market that views “copies” as lessening a value. So a search for a sweetspot of pricing happens. The more I make the less each is worth, but, the beginning value is too low because even the theoretical possibility of more is enough to make the item less “rare”.

But what if an SD card were manufactured that were write-only, tamper-proof (well, that would show visible evidence of tampering if it were to occur), and would erase itself after one unlocking.

Now a photographer could offer for sale the SD card and its original contents. The images could be previewed on a digital frame or other device, but to make a copy of any image or all images would require activation of the key that would erase the contents after copying. The buyer would own his copy of the data, along with the ability to make more copies or prints as desired. It breaks the unique-object chain after the first buyer, so it doesn’t totally solve the problem, but it does give a buyer/collector something of far more value than a print of an image the photographer retains.

Excepted from an email from 2006 inviting collaborative help from someone who was not interested.

—

Here’s what it is:

Mortimer J. Adler created this thing he calls the Synopticon, it’s basically the 102 “Great Ideas”. He contends that every idea there is can be situated cleanly within one of these 102, without there being a compelling need to add a 103rd.

Which is kind of neat, but the real meat (for this project) is this list of 102 ideas, because they’re all abstract nouns, or abstract concepts, anyway, which makes them ripe for interpretation, which to poets means making metaphors.

I’m hooked up with a great bunch of visual poets now (through a range of activitities) so I was thinking it would be a wicked cool, long term, project to put out a call for submissions, maybe monthly or bi-monthly, for work that fits the concept of idea N (where N is one of these 102 Great Ideas).

And work through them all.

So it’d end up with these galleries (102 total/only) of visual poets’ take on each of these concepts. Or visual artists. Or poets, too, it’d be an open type call, but the key determining factor in inclusion would be that the submission be a) good and b) that it fit the exact format restriction (I’m thinking along the lines of a 400×400 px .jpg or something like that–but, it could also be anything that can be dropped into Flash, I suppose–a movie even). I want them all to be exactly the same “frame” so that the design and upkeep can be simple, simple. I want to be able to review the submissions and just drop them in a directory and push a button or two and have them be up. Which is to say, I want to have one look, a shell of a design, that is the same for every idea/issue/call, so that there’s continuity throughout the time it takes to work through them all.

There will probably also be limited bio information too, as in: title, author, author email, author website URL, that kind of thing.

It’s really basically like making a themed monthly magazine that isn’t designed to run forever, it’s designed to run for exactly 102 issues. Period. Ever.

And submissions for any given issue will never really close (until some point a while beyond the last one) on any given issue–if a year from now someone wants to submit to the first issue, they could. And would even be encouraged to do so. It really circumvents a lot of traditional notions of publishing, which I like.

So what I’m looking for is a design that will scale to allow maybe as few as 2 and as many as, oh, gosh, maybe 50(??) pieces per issue, and have navigation that grows as the number of issues grows. I want to release the “great ideas” one at a time, over the course of 102 months or 102 bi-months, rather than list them all as forthcoming. So that aspect of the navigation will need to scale a bit too.

I think I want to call it “Respond” but I’m not sold on that 100%. I don’t want to call it Synopticon, I don’t think, but I may want to reference the history of it somewhere. Ideally, though, I’d want that information to be known as a kind of spoiler–if people want to know, I guess I have to say the ideas aren’t my own, but I don’t want people looking ahead to see what’s coming if I can avoid it. I want it to be a regular and ongoing process of prompt and response–because the whole Big Point is artists responding to these abstract
concepts–which is a) what artists are really good at and b) what other humans turn to artists FOR.

I’d need the design in advance of the first call for submissions, because I need to decide on what the exact file specifications are going to be, and I don’t want to compromise the design decisions by making up some random set of specs that have to be designed around. I have the ability (and I want to exercise this ability for ease of administration) to dictate file type and size in absolute uncompromising terms, but have no particular prior preference for any given size or aspect ratio or anything like that. I’m guessing a thumbnails and pop-up full-sized images is a workable concept, but if there’s some other schema that makes more sense I’m totally open to anything that looks good and is easy to admin once it’s built.

Does this sound like something you’d be interested in? What I’m proposing is that if you can design it and host it, I’ll do all the editorial and promotion work and the upkeep. Once the design and interface are in place, it should be a really low-impact project for us both, relatively speaking–a lot of bang for the effort-buck.

I genuinely believe this can be a hugely successful project. Like, cover story international coverage successful. It is calling vispo to do what it does best, and calling on all kinds of artists to give
people what people want from them–help in understanding these great abstract ideas. And the web is the perfect place for it. And the publishing innovation of every issue remaining open keeps it from
getting stale, and will allow momentum to grow in really exciting ways.

The Sticky Pickles

A laminated business-card sized piece that contains the convention city’s most common (basic) menu terms defined and translated into the major conventioneer languages. Terms like: vegetarian, beef, pork, chicken, etc. would help visitors navigate menus. Recently I was in Germany for two weeks, and when you travel on business you eat out for pretty much every meal. There were quite a few terms in each city I was in that kept appearing, and I would eventually learn them, over time, but having a cheat sheet would have helped a lot. There’s a core set of terms that every city shares, but then there’s also a specialized set of terms that’s unique to every city. Maybe one side of the card is general and one side is city-specific. Philly has cheesesteak lingo (wiz wit?), Scrapple, etc., Chicago has deep dish or thin crust, italian beef or combo (you want that wet?), Dusseldorf has Lieberkase which has neither liver nor cheese in it, even though it translates to livercheese, and the list goes on and on.

Cards could be printed in large numbers and sold by the convention centers, as well as by restaurants popular with conventioneers. Many shows it might even be profitable to have a booth at the show that sells the cards to attendees as well as exhibitors. Lots of potentional ways to bundle/package/market them. Heck it could even be a promo item for a company that offers translation services.