Still Bloody Brainstorming...

So I'm still spewing out half-developed possibilities without any sign of committing to one of them... I think it's time to stop thinking and talk some of these things out with a variety of people...

However, the idea for today is as follows... I've always been really impressed and interested by Orsen Welles' radio adaptation of "The War Of The Worlds" in 1938. For any of you who don't know the story, here is a brief explanation http://www.transparencynow.com/welles.htm. I understand the trouble that causing the public to believe they are being invaded by space aliens creates; however the fact that a large number of people actually fell for a radioplay that wasn't even intentionally out to fool them is incredible. I always read about the angry backlash that Welles' radioplay created at the time, with people trying to implement legislature to prevent things like it from ever happening again...

But then you think about mass media today, and every pop singer lipsyncs, we watch terribly obvious staged reality TV; and essentially my first instinct is that anything the mass media says to me HAS GOT to be some sort of fabrication... So, 70 years after Orsen Welles, it seems like everyone wants to try and recreate the stir he caused but we're all so bloody jaded because of the constant bombardment of 'instigated panic' that it doesn't even have an effect... It's like in shopping malls when the fire alarms go off, nobody even flinches, they plug their ears, keep buying their groceries and give the ceiling dirty looks as if they are pissed off that someone is disturbing their shopping spree in order to save them from being burned alive.

So I guess the idea that comes from that, is, with the so-called 'democratization' of mass media through blogs, youtube, myspace, etc. is it possible to subvert our jadedness from years of not wanting to believe anything? Are people beginning to trust my blog or my youtube video moreso than CNN? That may be a little much, but I think it would be very interesting to cause some kind of stir by getting a whole web of seemingly unconnected people to post videos/blog entries/etc. about something that is between ridiculous and believable... Maybe not an alien invasion, but something of the sort... The only problem is doing it in a way that (a) doesn't get me arrested (b) doesn't actually cause any real harm to anyone (c) once explained, will actually leave an impact on people and inspire some questions in them as to how truth sustains itself through a mass media that is authored by anyone and everyone. It'd be really fun to author a series of interconnected postings and release them slowly and sporatically enough to be believable.

Ghosts Of The City (Part 2)

Last year I made a series of concrete poems that I entitled "The Ghosts of The City". The image above gives an idea of the form the poetry took... The idea was that the lines all ran together, meeting eachother perpendicularly, and interesecting like the streets of a city (as if the page is a top-down view of city streets). The interesting thing I discovered when I finished the series was that it was fun to see people interact with the words and choose their path through the text. I was thinking that it may be interesting to expand on this idea and create a huge epic poem of some sort following the same format, and then create an installation out of it. The installation would essentially be a projection of the poem onto the floor and people would literally walk along the lines as they read, turning and following their own unique paths as the lines would scroll according to their movements...

Unrelated to that, my friend and I always get into pseudo-intellectual rants about reality and the like, and a while ago a somewhat interesting idea stumbled out of my brain... We were talking about utopias and the possibilities that 'cyberspace' give us to create our own individual reality... So the interesting idea we got talking about was that (perhaps) reality is the mashed-together product of every individual brain's projected utopian reality. I want a tree to be 15' tall, and you want it to be 5' tall, so we both percieve it as 10'... Throw in a billion or so projections and it's pretty radical that we percieve anything at all (under that hypothetical condition).

Neither of us have much training in philosophy but I think that this is an interesting idea to explore, especially with virtual reality becoming more and more realistic. Perhaps I could make a peice where users defined a whole series of parameters to create their own VR utopia, and then a computer combines all of that data to define the same parameters in a 'collaborative-non-utopia' which represents the product of all participant's creations. I find the thought that 'imperfection' can be born out of the product of many 'perfections' to be interesting. It's like you and 5 random people throwing your very favorite color of paint at a wall and ending up with an ugly shit-brown mess.

Another level of the collaborative brainstorm...

During a brainstorming wander about the city tonight (accompanied by the almighty soundtrack of Mum) I further developed my collaboration idea...

The idea of creating a series of artworks in partnership with a variety of people is decent, but not really something that jumps out as incredibly interesting to me. So I had a quick chat with my sister, who thought the idea was neat, in it's possibilities of examining the psychology of my connections with my collaborators (she mentioned color theory, etc.). I agreed and mulled it over on my walk home.

With that in mind I thought of how to differentiate each of my collaborators so that there would actually be some interesting patterns/subtexts that may emerge when veiwers were able to see the entire collection together at the end of the year. This led me to two small revisions to my 'collaboration' project idea.

#1. Everyone I collaborate with has to be someone I have not known before the collaboration begins.

#2. Each of my collaborators must come from a significantly different walk of life... Whether it be their class, ethnic background, orientation, etc. (It may be interesting to focus on the ideals of my collaborators rather than class or ethnicity specifically... E.G. what they find most important in life, money, love, success, family, etc.) I'm still mulling this over. But the point is that I can envision two very different voices coming from me between when I am collaborating with a homeless youth versus my well-to-do grandmother's knitting club leader...

Although I am still hesitant about the entire collaborative thesis idea, I feel as though these new criteria help to refine the peice as something that is inherently social/politically-oriented and also much more interesting (as well as a greater challenge).

The Year Begins...

The year has begun and it's time to decide on a thesis...

I dedicated some time to brainstorming throughout the summer months but was unable to blow myself away with a well-defined idea. I came up with a few interesting concepts that were very loosely developed but I am having a hard time coming up with something that is attainable, yet challenging enough to be a satisfying use of two terms. Here are a few of the rough brainstorms I came up with:

(1) A project based on the idea of collaboration. Over the course of the school year, I would produce many (estimated 10-20) pieces through collaboration with various artists (from within both the Ryerson community and outside it as well). For the new media festival, I would create an installation to showcase these various pieces. The installation would feature my physical body at it's center, with strings/wires connecting me to each of the pieces through a web of artworks which share me as their common thread.

(2) Ross Lavery approached me with the idea of creating a live musical performance as our thesis. The performance would feature live electronic music while a responsive visual projection would act as a visual backdrop to the musical narrative. This is something I've been very interested in doing as a personal project for years but I am not entirely sure how to make it a more relevant artwork.

(3) I really have no idea what to make of this, but I lately I keep being impressed by things that happen very subtly over long periods of time. For example, how the ocean smooths a rock, but there is no one point when the rock transitions between being rough and smooth since everything happens so gradually. I think that this is a pretty interesting idea and would like to somehow create a physical piece which manifests that concept and perhaps somehow relates it to the way that social codes/morals are slowly assimilated into, and transform culture (or something of that sort).

(4) I also have an interest in building some sort of online multi-user application. But I haven't really come up with any sort of concept of what the app would do... I think that http://www.ff0000.com is a radical aesthetic and a really well-executed 'avatar chat', and I'd like to do something similar but with more depth than just chatting (some sort of experiment/simulation of some kind)...

All of these ideas peak my interest, but none of them seem to fit the ideal I'd like to strive toward. A large obstacle for me is that I would like to try and create something less personal and more socially/politically relevant to a large number of people. I feel as though many of my pieces from the past have been introverted studies of myself and I would like try something conceptually different from that.