Some years ago, I attended an interactive festival of the arts in which the amateur participants, as a collective performance piece, created a temporary city in the most featureless and least welcoming parts of a desert in Nevada. The bad memories my encounter with that festival and those who devote their lives to it have long since come to outweigh the good, which is why I leave it unnamed, but it remains as source of many interesting concepts - and even more dull ones, but those we can forget. By their own account, back when their company was perhaps still worth seeking, some in the community observed that this festival was a place where one could go to see a thousand grand ideas executed poorly - an honest assessment, but not really a damning one, under the circumstances.
Many of those creating work for the festival each seemed to feel the need to create something completely original, beginning each project from scratch, after learning of the theme for the year, whose announcement was often delayed for months, perhaps to build up suspense, or perhaps because even by San Francisco standards, the organizers were really full of themselves. This limited preparation time, which busy people had to squeeze into their schedules, were they lucky enough to be gainfully employed enough to afford some of the grand projects they planned. This meant that when some of the experiments went wrong, as any sort of engineering project will tend to, at first, those working on the projects would find themselves without the time needed to work the bugs out of what they were doing. They sometimes failed where nobody could have succeeded, without incredibly good luck.
Thus the Time Warp Cafe, a project I considered, but eventually decided to not try to bring to that desert. The "time warp" alluded to wasn't going to be one to eras past, but to events past. We'd find camp or project ideas that others had worked on, and build on what they did, openly acknowledging our debt to them. One would walk in, perhaps in 2007, and find that in our camp, the 2004 theme was being followed in the newer work, with the themes of years before showing up in pieces that would recall the fictional history of the camp; doing the pieces we might have created, had we been there for the years we missed, working with those present - or something vaguely reminiscent of that. Walking into the camp would be like stepping into that time warp, going back in time and maybe slightly sideways.
The festival, as I said, is perhaps best avoided this year, the community having been ruined in part by the substance abuse of many of those present, and the ambitions of a group of organizers who thought that they could turn rebellion into a commodity - but interactive art and community as ideas, are bigger than any one group or event. My lingering thought is that if I found participants, we might create smaller events here at home - deliberately not going off into any wildernesses. Keep it at home, maybe in a county forest preserve or a city park accessible using public transportation, so that nobody who comes by feels free to go all "Lord of the Flies" on us, as these predecessors did at their event.
No admission cost, no conspicuous consumption, just humble little things that we can afford in these downsized and downscaled times, made with love and without the thought that we might build a following or an income out of this. What would be the name of this event? Why would it need one? Name it, and you make the intangible concrete and waiting to be taken by those with a misplaced sense of ambition. Just make it into "that thing we did last year", however, and you leave any would-be entrepeneur with nothing to take over. The gathering disperses at the end, and is over, and as for which gathering in the future could be seen as its continuation - who can say?
What is the purpose of this blog? I am well aware of Yahoo's past and its history of abandoning projects. Yahoo 360 could transition its way into oblivion with little notice, so what I'm not going to do on 360 is create posts that I would want others to link to, or would be heartbroken to lose. That eliminates a lot of possibilities in blogging, but not all of them.
360, even in mismanaged decline, sees a lot of traffic. If I'm planning an event and want people to come and maybe give feedback on the plans, I want them to see the notice. The traffic will help. I might not be so concerned with whether or not anybody can see it after the event is over, so the life expectancy of the blog is less of an issue. If I'm giving out updates on what I'm doing on a few different sites, so that those following me know where on earth I am, in virtual terms, and where they might look for new material without wading through a lot they've already seen - again, we have something useful at the time, that won't be so useful, later.
This kind of time specific material will be what this blog will be used for, serving as a companion to "En Transit" - hence the tagline - and will be associated with my Upcoming profile. Assuming either see real use. I still don't know if there is interest in what I'm proposing, any group to be found.
Using the form to request to become my contact would, at this moment, probably be a waste of your time, because I'm spending most of my time online away from Yahoo. Your request would probably expire before I ever saw it. However, I do have a homegroup located at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Joseph_Dunphy/
which you can post to, once you join, in order to get into contact with me. It's a moderated list, so don't worry that you'll be spamming it. I'll see your message, copy it for my records, delete it and then get in touch with you. If there ever is a "you", which, when one writes a blog, is usually the question on one's mind, isn't it? Is the counter being run up by humans, by the spiders or is Yahoo fibbing to us? I don't know.
But maybe I'll find out.
