I’ve never been much of a blogger although I religiously record my notes and drawings in sketch books. So here it goes, my first post. I suppose I will treat this as a public digital diary.
I’d like to start off my first blog post with a look back at a particularly ambition and heartbreaking project that I worked on right after graduating from college. As a side note, if anyone says that they know exactly what they’re doing after school, they’re a liar. Tell them I said that.
I started an art collective in the spring and summer of 2012 with a group three other friends from school with idealist goals of changing the world through art, technology and music. In the course of about 5 months, the collective (cleverly named Bit-by-Bit Media Labs, BXB Media Labs) quickly dissipated. I learned a lot.
I think we all sort of cringe at our overly ambitious projects, which inevitably imply heated arguments and inflated egos. And although the members of our hip and now defunct art collective, moved on to bigger and better things I think that summer taught us a lot.
People love lists. I know, I’m also a marketer. Lists rate very well in SEO rankings. Whatever, here’s my list of three things that I learned:
1. Be patient
2. Be honorable
3. Listen
In retrospect, I understand that I just couldn’t wait for something amazing to happen to our group – get a grant, build an electronic instrument, put on a show. This past me – unable to wait, unable to sit still made me come off as pushy. If you didn’t know, the term pushy is code for bitchy – pretty much the end of all professional women. My impatience put our little group on edge and stalled projects.
Truthfully, BXB Media Labs did some amazing things considering we had no experience doing what we were doing.
Whatever had broke up the band so to speak, what brought us together was the vision to do this: to create technologically savvy and artistically satisfying universes of stories.
Now, I suppose my art collective is much smaller. I collaborate with one other person – music mastermind Scott Tooby and we’re developing musical instruments and I’m chipping away at a long comic book. Is a long comic book called a graphic novel?
I don’t know. All I know is that to move towards the future in a positive way, I have to mediate for a while on the past.
Thanks for reading my writing and following. I hope to bring beauty into this world in any weird way I can.