Free Idea Factory

Interrobang

It’s a punctuation mark that combines the exclamation point with the question mark. Looks like this: ‽

More info at the Wikipedia page for interrobang.

Research all documented periods throughout art history (you’ll learn some great things along the way). Make an equal number of small boxes out of archival rag paper. Collaborate with artists whose work represents each period of art history. Have each artist examine the same theme, perhaps “art itself”. Give them all specific deadlines as artist’s are often otherwise occupied with other projects and ideas. Collect all work, document it, giving proper credit to all parties involved. Compile each work representing a specific period in art history on one large piece of firm board (mat board, wood, etc.)

Matt and frame nicely.

Lastly, write an essay about the project and submit to galleries to be considered for exhibition. Then make prints of the completed artwork to share with the world.

Have you ever seen one of those powers of 10 explanations that zoom out by powers of 10, then zoom in by powers of ten? If so, hold that visual.

I want to show all the layers of encoding and then decoding that occur when something simple and digital happens. An email, or, a keystroke sent in a chat, or an X-10 camera showing a gallery patron walking in. The *thing* is not as important as being able to show all the significantly different layers. I don’t even know them all, but, I know they are myriad. I hit a key, and it’s an electrical signal that gets converted many times before it even displays on my screen. Now send it over a simple network and think of all the transforms that are happening to get different parts of the network to handle it. I want the finest level of granularity that is possible/practical/interesting. Down to binary if possible. Realtime if possible. Imagine being able to type in an arbitrary text at a terminal in a gallery and then seeing on 57 different screens each discrete step involved in IMing it to another computer at the end of the exhibit. The original text shows up colored so that when it’s encoded it’s still discernible from the parts that are its envelopes, maybe.

This is an open ended project–it would be a series of short Flash films (or Java animations, or or or) all featuring the same character.

This is going to take some explanation, and very little of it will be linear. I just have some broad brush strokes of a concept, and I’m going to need to rely on your ability to connect the dots.

Concept:

“coyote” is a similar character, but Tada is not Coyote, or Loki.

similar in that Tada is potentially archetypal, cross cultural, universal.

Tada is the bellyflop

Tada is that lock or shock of hair that springs up or out

Tada is the first tree to turn bright brilliant red in the middle of a mountainside of trees that are all still green.

Tada is a flamboyant bow before the crowd accompanied by the sound of ripping pants.

Tada is the dive into the empty pool

but Tada is not just silly or comical, Tada is the spirit of boldness incarnate, and Goethe tells us:

Whatever you would do, begin it now. Boldness has a greatness all its own.

Tada is the one ear of corn that’s 8″ above the genetically engineered carpet-even height of the rest of the field.

Tada steals the stone from the masters hand while the master is still explaining the challenge

Tada is the running squirrel

Tada was Minnesota Fats, not Willie Mosconi

What does Tada look like?

Maybe he’s a walking jangle of letters in the shape of a person, but with swagger for sure.

Maybe he lives in a world where all the objects are composed of their spellings:

       c
       o
      ooo
     ooooo
     ooooo
   r ooooo r
    rooooor
    rooooor
     rooor
       N
       N
       N
       N

Maybe he himself is made up of the letters T a d a

Maybe he walks around and his shape is defined by the limits of his never quite stopped motion.

Tada is like a jangle of springs wound too tight and occasionally Tada BOINGS into being in just the right, or sometimes just the wrong, place.

So, what I’m thinking is a series animated cartoons with this character of Tada. I see Tada all around me, every day. I can give as many scenes of Tada at his best as you can animate. We could start with one or two and just keep adding to them. The key would be for there to be as much latitude as possible in what Tada looks like, so Tada can look like anything. That’s why my original thought was a jangle of letters in a world built out of letterforms. But it doesn’t have to be that. We’d just need to capture this essence of the character of Tada in some way that would allow Tada to be recognized in a wide variety of situations. Always different, always identifiably the same. He goes “sproing”, and is slightly unkempt.

Tada is Gene Wilder’s Willie Wonka when you first see him and his cane gets stuck in the sidewalk and he falls….into a somersault.

Tada is the Emcee who pulls back the curtain with a sweepingly proud gesture to reveal the set crew still at work setting up.

Tada is a bit of Popeye and bit of Crocodile Dundee.

Tada is what it means to make a crazy wild guess and be right.

Tada knew it all along.

Andy Warhol once said: Nothing looks cooler than someone completely unafraid of looking uncool.

Tada is beginner’s luck.

Tada is irrepressible.

Tada doesn’t always win, but Tada never gives up.

The key is this Tada-ness is something we see all the time, and it’s this mix of bold, confident, foolish, often right, sometimes wrong, always enthusiastic.

This idea is for a way of more effectively responding to businesses whose practices are objectionable. Don’t simply not give them your money, which doesn’t have much effect because those businesses have little way of measuring what it is they lost, because they never know what they lost. Instead, almost give them your money, and then cancel your transaction and state explicitly your reason for canceling.

For example, instead of not shopping at a merchant’s website because the merchant has a privacy policy you don’t agree with, place a very large order, and then immediately cancel it (or, actually, these days you can just load it all in your shopping cart and then exit the website–they track abandoned carts), and tell them in an email WHY you canceled that order.

A thousand customers who didn’t walk in the door won’t register on any decision-maker’s reports. A large amount of cash money that almost got spent, and then didn’t, absolutely will show up.

This is an idea for a group blog literary journal called (in my idea) subgenre. It would be built by editors willing to provide content in their chosen narrowed range, but it would be open to a nearly unlimited set of narrowed ranges–if what the editor does puts in them contact with a steady stream of some particular kind of poem and they felt they could manage to select one for featuring every month or so, then they’d be qualified. As a starting point, consider the following: concrete poetry, visual poetry, lyric poetry, formal poetry, haiku, doggerel, digital poetry, poetry in translation, language poetry. But do not
be limited by these. The editor’s ability to provide an example a month would be sufficient to declare it a viable category.

This idea is for a web journal called (in my idea anyway) Instantiation. It would looking to publish statements of poetics, manifestos, mission statements, or even loosely structured goals for the finished pieces side-by-side with examples of poems which realize (or attempt to realize) the statements.

This idea is for an online journal focused on Close Readings—Pick a poem, any poem, and go through it with a fine-toothed mental comb and share your understandings/observations/criticism. For an archetypal example of what the online journal would be looking for, please see Charles Alexander’s close reading of Elizabeth Bishop posted to the SUNY-Buffalo Poetics list in April of 2006 at http://tinyurl.com/w3elu.

The Clicker is a device that’s a little more complicated than the kind used for dog training, and a little simpler than the kind used by umpires to keep track of balls, strikes, and outs. But it makes a good, solid sound like the former and keeps track of numbers like the other. There should be two buttons on it, PLUS and MINUS. It should keep track of a grand total, a yearly total, and a daily total. It comes packaged with a sheet that gives “suggested” values for various events in life that can score points. Good Hair Day? Plus 5 points! Forgot to call you Mom on Mother’s day? Minus 50 points. And encourage users to make up their own scores for their own daily ups and downs. The goals are to be able to keep track of both the good thing and the bad things that happen to us (so we’re not so fixated on the negative all the time), and, to be able to answer the question, ‘How are you doing?” in an objective fashion. How am I doing? Well, I’m having a GREAT day (1180 points before noon!), but I’m still down for the year, though, overall, life IS good, see, it’s Life 1,543,790 and me 2,347,120.

This idea is for a T-Shirt that just has three words in large block letters that proclaim: Stop Marketing Me