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.
Not exactly illusions of grandeur, but always wanted to write the Biggest Poem in the World. 500m letters, 1 mile long phrases, about two or three miles out from a busy airport, so that it can be read from the air. Might help nervous flyers.
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.
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.
With the ubiquitousness of camera phones these days the time is ripe for a photoblog that consists of documentation of bathroom graffiti. I know there’s blogs out there documenting street art (Wooster Collective is my favorite), but this more behind-closed-stall-doors work is in need of the same treatment.
In literacy training I learned a technique to help new writers overcome their reluctance to write, or their discomfort with writing (it differs from speaking or reading because it’s a commitment to the action that is not so easy to retract–if you say or read something wrong you can always backpeddle with “Oh right, that’s what I meant to say.” but if you write it down, it’s there in print and much more difficult to gloss over as anything other than a mistake), and I thought it could be a good method for beating writer’s block for some people (though, I don’t know for sure, I’ve never actually experienced writer’s block myself, and can’t even imagine what it would be like…I need a writer’s cork most of the time) because it gets the brain into the writing state of mind in a way that’s completely non-threatening. It gets the engine started without the worry of where are we going. The technique (like all good techniques) is very simple. Fill a page with writing. Write anything at all. Write your name, write the letter “m”, write blah blah blah, write words you see around you, copy out of a book within reach, write anything until you fill a single page. Then throw it away.
I don’t get the fascination with ever longer pepper mills when the total output of each grind is largely unaffected. A product I would buy if it were available would be a pepper mill that had a dinner plate sized dispenser part–it would need to have several concentric and simultaneously operating grinding elements to work properly, but, there are definitely times when I’d like to make a single half-twist of a mill and end up with complete coverage of a plate with an even layer of freshly ground pepper.
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.
You know those Tibetan prayer wheels, which spin in the wind. I always wanted to make some with text around the rim. They can be left out, so the poems are always being performed.
Take something that you really value, that you personally have made (a poem, a painting, a sculpture, what ever…) and break it. Discard it and don’t look back. You can always remake something (though you will need to learn to become comfortable with it being slightly different (for better or worse).
Often times I have found that clinging on to ‘a masterpiece’ (and most of the time it’s really not, though it may be a personal triumph, which is surely nothing to discount) inhibits you from producing 10 new things of which 4 might be to your liking. And maybe 2 are of equal or greater merit than the first object you parted with. That’s a 50% increase in masterpieces!
When we hold onto past ideas too tightly, it may very well inhibit us from coming up with new ones. Creativity involves a need to develop. Being creative involves an element of never being completely satisfied. That’s not to say that the process won’t be rewarding though. Nothing is ever really done in my opinion as far as art goes. But it can be developed enough to share with others. When that’s the case, finish out the body of work or move on to the next idea.
This idea was born out of experiences I had with Skip Sensbach of Green Dog Pottery in Dallas, Pa. He was the one who introduced me to breaking pots, sculptures, and a host of other things I liked. My favorite piece that I broke was a 2 foot tall wine cask that was shaped like a womans leg with fishnet stockings.
Variation:
To reduce the wasteful element of breaking something of value (which I’m personally OK with because of what it may yield) you can give away the object as well. Or you can break it and reuse those broken pieces to make something even cooler if your up for the challenge.
People Pointing Here