not really spam i hope, just sending out compliments and friendly e-mails to friends. i find i get so much spam and rejection e-mails or sometimes cruel retorts from people that it would be great to receive regular positive e-mail. maybe it’s something one could sign up for. sorry i haven’t had any new ideas to share for ages. i’m surprised how fast time passes.
This is an email from a while back where I was proposing a collaborative project to someone. The project never bloomed between us.
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A long while ago I told you I was thinking about a project that required as much conceptual design help as coding help (though it needs both). I’ve been occasionally making notes towards explaining that concept ever since. Here’s what I’ve got so far. Read through when you have a chance and let me know any thoughts or questions you might have. This is not a small project, and has no deadline.
It’s like a blog, only it isn’t.
It’s comprised of an ongoing aggregation of new material, but it isn’t sorted chronologically, and it isn’t sorted by category, and it isn’t unsorted.
It isn’t random.
It’s isn’t about a zeitgiest sort of gathering together of the random, either (which is what I think Jim’s [that’s Jim Andrews] dbCinema does).
It is about connections between things, and thus its shape should help identify those connections, but, without pre-determining those connections.
It’s like a Poincare map of what I know.
Content granules could be text, images, links, images, code, embedded video, just about anything. I can format them however the coded presentation needs, but I should be able to just drop them in a directory somewhere and have them be assimilated into the whole.
I want each visit to the place to be a unique presentation of the material, but, not a random presentation of the material. It should dance. It can compile nightly rather than change per load.
Much of it will be zen or aphoristic in nature–like for example, near my house they recently tore down a McDonald’s restaurant, and built a new one right next door to where it used to be. I don’t know what this
means. But I hope that it adds up to something when placed alongside, within, among, other points of observations this-myself has made/will make.
I don’t really want people to be able to direct their own way through the material, but, they should be able to control their pace of ingestion.
Things can overlap. Things should overlap. Things do overlap. Blend. Mix. Misinform each other.
Carolyn Forche has said that as a species, we may be losing the ability for sustained contemplation. For a long time that bothered me and I worked against it, trying to find ways to hold attentions long enough to initiate and sustain contemplation. Now I think that it’s a given, and there’s no need to fear it, instead, as an artist, I want to embrace it and see where it goes–because it IS the current and future reality. There is no putting the genie back in the bottle. So, what happens if we say things are moving too fast for contemplation, what does that mean for cognition? Cognition doesn’t stop, it adapts, it improvises, it overcomes. Meaning-making doesn’t cease because contemplation has become impossible. Meaning-making continues in new ways. I want to explore the limits of those ways, and I do not believe it is the readers job to make all the meaning.
What I love about your snow pieces recently is that they say, by consistent method of transformation, something about vision and atmosphere by using letterforms. I want the structure of this project to say something about how the meaning I take from the world translates into the meaning made from it by others. It’s not random, it’s not specified by me, it’s a transaction between more than just reader and writer, it’s an ongoing and fluid complex and variously-weighted interaction between us all.
I don’t know how these things I want to put in here are connected, but they are, and the way is not arbitrary. In a way it feels like I’m asking you to help find the meaning in my life’s observations. In a
way, I am. What I want to do is what a lot of artists want to do, I want to find a way to make the particulars of my experience function as metaphor for the experiences of others.
Maybe a thousand different random methods of organization–a random of randomness against which the pattern of experience could differentiate itself from the random. I don’t know. And that’s sort of the point.
This is really philosophical as much as programmatical.
How do you make meaning in your life? This is what a content presentation schema should emulate.
I don’t want people to be able to comment directly, like with the current blog paradigm, but, I would like for there to be a way that what’s built can be used by others in a way that is connective but a way that fosters creative connection rather than vapidity. You can comment by participating in a meaningful fashion only. By adding to the overall ball of meaning.
I’m picturing what one artist creates as a sphere that is expanding outward with each added data point. Another artist might wish to take something within that sphere as a departure point or connective tissue
to their own expanding sphere. The interface should allow this kind of appropriation, but, also require that they take more than they bargained for, more than they asked for, more than they wanted. To take any given unit of information, they should have to also take hunks of connective tissues and the units of information most immediately connected. Because information is like that. There are no facts in isolation, there are no meanings in isolation, there is always context, and we don’t control all of the context of the words we use. Thus, a user browsing their own sphere will come in contact with material they themselves may not have seen.
The world can be both non-random and meaningless.
I don’t intend for this to “work” with other existing blogging paradigms. In fact, I’d like for it to specifically NOT work with existing blogging paradigms. I would like for links TO it to be redirected away from it if they’re not OF it, not from others within the “closed” system. But, others should be able to freely and easily set up their own ball of interconnected data points.
Usernames are assigned numbers. Passwords are assigned, unbreakably huge and impossible to remember. I want to avoid the ability to personalize on any level OUTSIDE the actual content.
All for now, more as it develops inside my head.
Regards,
Dan
We drink hot coffee with cream. We drink hot tea with cream. We drink iced coffee with cream. Why don’t we drink iced tea with cream? I’m trying it out the next time I can remember to order my iced tea without lemon.
A local candidate for office here is running with signs that have his first name HUGE instead of his last name, like usual. Because his name is LOU it makes it pretty simple to imagine an uppercase Helvitica T that one could simply staple to the right hand edge of the sign, making it LOUT.
Creativity is often more about the process than any specific result, or an orientation towards new ways of approaching things if you will. While we may start out intending to achieve something in particular, the lessons we learn along the way have the power to transform our whole way of thinking and subsequently being. When we seek out creativity, we open ourselves up to a multiplicity of new ideas and experiences.
This post is not particularly a specific Free Idea Factory idea, but rather a gateway to perhaps producing some new Free Idea Factory ideas and finding appropriate applications for them.
While doing some online research, I came across a great collection of Free Creative Thinking Tools, compiled by Chuck Frey of innovationtools.com. The list of links to these tools can be found here.They are free and include downloadable text-based tools and web-based creativity tools.
An example of one of the tools listed is Jump Start. This online tool, provided by Idea Champions, first asks you to state your problem or challenge. Next, it generates a list of random adjectives, and inserts them into questions to help you to generate fresh ideas and insights (example: “What insights or ideas about my challenge do I get from the word ‘unbreakable?’”). Next, Jump Start asks you to record the underlying principle that is embodied in your favorite idea from the previous step. It also asks you to record any new, actionable ideas are sparked by this underlying principle. Finally, this online tool asks you to enter the subject, e-mail address and name of someone to whom you’d like to send your new idea — someone whose support and collaboration you need to help make the idea a reality.
Describing how a fish tastes is notoriously difficult. Having dinner at a nice place last weekend, and listening to the server do a pretty standard (thus highly ineffective) job of describing the fish we’d never heard of, I thought that it would be a smart thing for an upscale restaurant to do to cook off a couple of pieces of the exotic fish special for that evening and offer a scant forkful to anyone interested in giving it a taste before they ordered. The dish wouldn’t have to be hot, it could just be explained that the chef cooked a bit of the fish earlier this afternoon, and what you’ll be tasting is cooked the same, but, is a tiny tasty chilled version of it. Texture, taste, and even preparation are now all accounted for in one little smidgen. Sales of these fishes would go nowhere but up.
Take a photo of every single person you know. Hang them in a gallery. Run colored string between the pictures. Color code the strong to indicate the nature of the relationship.
Watching the Olympics, thinking about that guy or that woman running dead last in whatever event and simultaneously wondering how the hell they can be so slacker as to be last and how awesome they must be to even make it to the Olympic finals. What does that feel like, to be so amazingly good and in last place. A book with interviews with last place finishers in world class competition could record those feelings.
A juried art exhibit of crayon art produced by fine artists. Could be done either as an “open” project where artists could submit any kind of work, or, could be fun to limit it to actually coloring pages from a coloring book.
A chain of restaurants that attempt to be as authentic as possible, not just in the food and the decor, but down to every possible detail. It should be, for the diner, like stepping into another country. The wait staff should speak only the native language, the menus in the native language, even change the money at the door if that can be done legally into the native country’s currency. All menu items and ingredients should be as authentic to the native country the restaurant is representing as possible.
It should be like taking a vacation to another country for the time you’re in the place. Not “mostly” but “maximally” so.
People Pointing Here