Music fades in to Joni Mitchell gloriously hitting the high notes of 'Carey'.
"maybe i'll go to amsterdam, maybe i'll go to rome, and rent me a grand piano, and put some flowers round the room."
the lifelove of that song! having an adventure to go play the piano somewhere beautiful; or paint and write and gather data that describes and exalts our human condition.
I propose to visit vanGogh sites; his museums, the places he prolifically produced art, Stand where he stood when he painted "View of the Sea at Scheveningen", http://www.scheveningen-info.com/Tools/webcam.html maybe make an ephemeral art project on the beach that would be on the webcam for any or none to see.
On the way, try to capture as much digital data as i can, describe it, and share it, because art and the web are about sharing.
Kesey said Shakespeare today wouldn't write with a quill pen, "he would use the best tool he could find. Right now, the best tool is the video camera".
In a scene in the movie Slacker they read Joyce's _Ulysses_ and throw a tent and typewriter off a bridge into a river as a symbolic act.
Linklater's Slacker will be a prime stylistic inspiration. Slacker stands alone, fractally. Each scene is as beautifully complex alone individually as it is when mixed with the movie and combined as the whole.
Richard said "movies are photography 24 times a second." And a picture is worth a thousand words. Part of the project will clip along at 24000 words per second. But the strongest part must be the textual tale of the travels; because my religion is the primacy of text; I would like to say ascii text but fear sounding jingoistic, not patriotic.
One thematic device will be to contrast the relative permanance of civilization infrastructure with the impermanence of the digital. Disks die, computers crash and obsolesce. That's why i think art is about making stuff and why my preferred medium is metal. I make copper windchime art out of harddisk platters.
Maybe on the curse that I conquer all others and win this links.net travel contest, I could sell them to pay for this pyrrhic victory pilgramage.
I love filming and painting and photographing infrastructure. I always drive around the backs of stripmalls where the trashbins, step-down transformers, telephone lines and electric meters are; the pipes, wires, waterways, and antennaes are the circulatatory systems of civilization; infrastructure. If I could produce a piece of pages as profound and entertaining as Stephenson's Mother Earth Motherboard article of wired 4.12, google motherboard mother earth; i'd consider it a supersuccess.
Part of the projects infrastructure will be interviews with writers and artists and geeks via email or recorded telephone call: ken babbs, richard linklater, christopher hitchens, todd brendan fahey, jorn barger; I could rattle off dozens more, but surely could find five or mabye fifty who would reply.
......
OK, 2.75 hours to deadline till my entry is due. been deliberating for
weeks these words; wanting to win; why? goto the best book ever told.
http://www.trentu.ca/jjoyce/ulys2.htm
where daedalus' schoolboys ponder pyrrhic victory: "another victory
like that and we're done for"; thats why. its a pyrric victory, it is not a luxurious prize.
Been taking moon movies w/ my nightshot sony. getting good results. resolving stars you cant see. getting the moon in great detail. pictureing the pleiades (actually not w/ the waxing fullmoon,, earlier, i've got the tape) finally fixed my mac today, notquite ontime but this entry must be text based. i wanted to prove flashy stuff i could pull off w/ digital devices. this was before understanding the significance of the gps/qtvr/openartists project possibilities not fully described here below.
How about this,, go to famous vanGogh spots, grab a gps signal, then take extensive quicktime vr datacollection photos. If you havent seen the quicktime vr of the SF Bay, where you can stand at a picture of the bay, click alcatraz, and go there; and click around the prision with full 'being there' details, then you need to! ponder the possibilites; planetwide!
I'm not a quicktime vr expert, never seen the authoring tools, but i've seen what this file format can do and it is exciting. Get motivated as artists, to share "where we're coming from" and we have a web artistic movement! with tangible ties to real locations on the earth, and pictures to prove place.
Also, i thought about a funding idea. make a machine to sell. make a better bigtrak toy. they were the coolest robot toy; justin's probably too young. you can buy 'em on ebay for lots, call this something different but emulate the wonderful simple control functions. Make it hackable. this is a little last minute manic, but im not afraid of the simple basic PIC STAMP robotics or to grasp at straws to show funding initiative.
mapping parts of the planet with quicktimevr is a super-interesting project. maybe propose protocols to share qtvr worldmapping data with anyone who wants to. all could contribute.
superimpose our own artisitc web-based gps qtvr datacollection and share it.
eternally tie place to picture to time.