In Fall 2009, Waffle Shop (Pittsburgh, PA) hosted Visionary Ideas for this World or Another, a companion event to the exhibition I curated at Carnegie Mellon University’s Miller Gallery, 29 Chains to the Moon. For Visionary Ideas for this World or Another, participants were invited to “pitch” their radical, imaginative and plum loony ideas for improving life of on Earth or beyond. Ideas range from reducing the size of humans by 2%, to creating “a sport to unite us all” called “Consciousness Ball”– a sci-fi riff on Buckminster Fuller’s World Game. Jon Rubin just sent this edited version of the event, which took place at the spectacular setting of East Liberty Presbyterian Church. I accidentally opened the video twice, and enjoyed listening to the proposals as an asynchronous cacophony. Try it!

Click to watch video from "Visionary Ideas for this World or Another"

Earlier this year I was tossing around the idea of creating a “human disco ball” with my friend Mark Allen. From the many occasions when I’ve worn sequins, I imagined that an entire room full of people/volunteers/performers in sequins with directed light had the potential to create a Busby-Berkeley-meets-Joshua-Light-Show singular psychedelic experience. But Marge Meyers at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry just informed me that someone already did something like this almost twenty years ago at Carnegie Mellon University… Click image below to watch the fantastic video.

Seth Riskin, 1992

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, Well…How did I get here?

– Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime (1984)

Presently, I am having the above awakening. It’s as though I aged from 14 to 40 in a flash, and all the memories in between were accidentally deleted from my hard drive. How did I get here? What am I expected to do? Whose house is this, and most importantly, who are these people in the house? They’re freaking me out.

It’s often assumed that artists are exempt from the social realities of adulthood, jobs, parenthood, finances, and civic duty. Not so. Increasingly, artists are grappling with the challenge of being creative persons with unavoidably uncreative roles within society. Few well-known Western artists have escaped dependence on civilization and the rules of participation. (Even Gauguin failed in his attempt to escape Europe for the perceived Utopia of Polynesia, where he ultimately found that societal laws applied there too– he died just prior to serving a three month prison sentence for breaking local ordinances.) Read my q and a with husband and wife artist collaborators, Jennifer & Kevin McCoy on glasstire.com.

Jennifer & Kevin McCoy, Courtesy Postmasters Gallery

Yesterday I received a curious message from artist Lee Walton.

“At this very moment, a man is locked up to a park bench at Union Square Park in San Francisco. To unlock him, find the woman in the red scarf at the Atlas Cafe in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She is the only one who has the combination to the lock. She will give it to you. Can you find a way to set this man free? He is hungry and wants to go home.” Read the rest of this post on Indirect Collaboration: Collective Creativity on the Web.