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

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.

if you have or can get a good digital recorder, you can do it that way:
carry it around with you and record the various whooshes of water and traffic, clicks and clacks and whacks of movement…

if you have no recorder, spend a day focusing on sound as you wander…translate it into text.

start a poem or story or doodle what have you and mail it to buddy a. buddy a will add a bit and pass it to buddy b and so on. could be just two people or more…

a variation of this is to play the surrealist exquisite corpse game thru the mail…via postcards or letters.

i love the idea of mail art.

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

various textures and colours and words for colours pop up on the screen of a website

you write something based on what you see, what it makes you think of, feel, smell, taste….

especially handy for synaesthetes.

great colour sites:

Pigments Through the Ages

The Colour Experience

Colour Terms from the Phrontistery, a thinking place

note that i am excited and interested in colour and would love to share and exchange ideas, links and references related to colour, creativity and inspiration.

to be done by a group or alone or with imaginary friends, if you desire

take your cameras out into the wild and look for as many instances of the alphabet in nature as you can find. you can decide whether you want to include artificial examples, such as letters found on signs and billboards or just natural ones.

for example check out the minimalist concrete poetry of mIEKAL aND, a look at rock formations and caves, the physical substance of language

Recently i had the pleasure of hearing Christian Bök’s amazing sound poetry. Speaking with Frank Davey and Christian at a recent conference at the Univeristy of Ottawa called “Re: reading the postmodern,” i mused about the possibilities of taking sound poetry, having it recorded by speech recognition software and then having the result transcribed to be performed once again by the poet and done all over again.

I refer readers to the interesting work of sound poets as featured on Ubuweb.com in the sound poetry section, Experiments in Disintegrating Language / Konkrete Canticle (1971).

This is perhaps just the beginnings of an idea or perhaps it has been done before. I offer it as a spring board to you who enjoy sound play.