Ordinary Aura

i''m not so sure I'm ready to get more specific about space ideas - I'm enjoying learning about everyone, but i think we're too all over the place to talk about projects.

I'd like to spend more time first on content, just as we have been. I need to do finish some longer writing/reading about aura. presence, absence, sound...

I'm also seeing some pretty strong differences in how we all work - though i can appreciate looking atand even sometimes creating drawings and paintings, making them is not how i discover things about the world. i wonder how that's gonna play out. seth seems to be less inclined that way too.

I too am interested in the play/non-play between those makers who sort through and find content largely by making (myself being one of the principal players of that ilk in this grouping)and those who sort through by nailing content first (or mostly) before heading on to the work. I am hesitant to say this is a painting/"new media" thing, but I am somewhat reminded of grad school days, when all the video people had to trudge through the painters studios for grad seminar, Berkeley being reluctant to have medium-specific departments. In truth, I am weary of the supposed critical polarities...seems an especially academic delight to posit medium standoffs.
In our instance, specific content is bringing us all into the same room...though of course in reading through the blog's flurry, we are taking varied spinoffs.
I do agree with Kevin in thinking about the space. Though I'd love to see those who have not post what's going on in their minds and/or studios, I'm not sure how much planning of the space we can do yet. I know what's in my studio now is going to look wholly different in 3 months time. Instead, might we mine through and pull out recurrant themes, and dig deeper?
Because in truth, though we are all approaching the same issues, we are not all going to be able to easily collaborate on physical objects/images for instance--and I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing.
The most logical collaboration in my mind seems to be this book idea...

It may turn out that the only literal collaboration, the only single project that we all work on as a group, is this blog, the brainstorming that goes into all our individual work. It's true that the division of media is pretty wide, and it's also true, as Kevin suggested, that I don't really sketch or paint as part of the process. My version of the sketch is something like the tree and circle experiments I've posted. This is because there's a lot of technical stuff, coding and so forth, that has to happen before my work really exists at all.

That said, I am getting a lot out of the conversation so far, and I think it would be a good idea to focus in some way -- if not on the space yet, then perhaps on particular concepts, as Kevin and Barbara have both suggested. Thinking about the space seemed like a good idea last night, but on reflection it seems like it'll cause us to oversimplify our ideas at this point.

That said, I'm about to post yet another tree image, not Shaker this time. I can say about my own project-oriented thinking that right now, the big project I first proposed is seeming conceptually unwieldy to me -- how would people navigate it; how would it work? -- and I've been drawn more and more to Shaker imagery and practice, both conceptually and as a visual means of organizing the ideas that are coalescing in the back of my head. I've got a lot more research to do, but I'm moving now in the direction of more than one project, based on text generated randomly from given sources, growing out according to pre-ordained visual structures (like trees). These could be projected in the space; I'm also vaguely toying with the idea of creating these dynamic projects as image-generating machines, and saving and printing out particular images or stages. I've always been attracted to selling art on T-shirts, for instance. But I digress.