Process

Okay what exactly are we hoping to achieve here? I guess I should be blogging about it, as we go, then you can all follow what’s happening and what we are trying to create and achieve.
I first came across Anjie’s site during the summer and found a lot of her ideas to be very inspiring. I find when you work with others or at least bounce ideas off one another and feed each other inspiration new possibilities emerge and new directions can occur.  I also learned about ‘thing a day’ on Anjies site and this seemed like an excellent idea to me. I approached Anjie and asked if she would be interested in working on a blog format and dialoguing our creativity. The process is to undertake a creative activity every day for a month and thus instil the ‘habit’.
Now this may seem a bit strange as we both are regularly creative anyway. So to refine the concept even further another premise is to try new things that we wouldn’t normally try. Push the envelope, so to speak. Due to time commitments we have decided that January would be the best month to undertake the project. In the meantime we thought it would be good to blog about ideas, concepts, thoughts and plans.
I guess it’s like the stone in the pond, ripple effect. I may come up with a notion and blog it and Anjie may have a different take and inspire my creativity in a new direction. Rather than doing all our planning and debating offline (400 miles between us) or between private emails – we thought part of the process should be to blog from the start.
I/we also envisaged that we may just get other peoples creative habit going so they too could work on getting the habit. There is a school of thought in psychology that states that it only takes 6 weeks to establish or eradicate a learned behaviour. If that is the case or you but into that theory then perhaps it will only take a short while to develop the creative habit.
At this moment in time I’m imagining all the things that I could do throughout January. I’m playing with the possibilities of what media I can work with and what new skills I could learn. I’ve also come to realise that there will, by necessity, be some amount of preparation involved. I don’t imagine for one minute that I’m going to wake up on the 1st of January and think right let’s get cracking. I’m starting to think about collecting materials and equipment. At the same time this isn’t meant to be scripted in anyway. 
I’m thinking about being eco friendly and recycling and up cycling. Perhaps Freecycle would be a good place to get materials. There is so much dying back in the garden and leaves falling everywhere perhaps some materials should be gathered from Nature.
Anyway if I remember correctly I think Anjie took part in thing a day in the past and maybe she will blog a little about that and her experience of that.
Anjie did they have a time restriction on the amount of time invested in being creative everyday?
Which also leads us towards needing a definition of what we mean by create and creativity. I will blog in depth about that in the coming days.
So in short – to recap. In January don’t think new exercise regime, don’t bother joining a gym and scrap any ideas of a diet. Feed your creativity and join us here.

One Thing Leads to Another

With searching for inspiration on the internet one thing leads to another. I began looking at Halloween imagery, which lead me onto Mexican Day of the Dead skeletons, as well as the fantastic imagery surrounding that celebration. I particularly liked the papier mache figures painted in vibrant colours displayed in dioramas this lead me to this www.smartwentcrazy.com

"52 Weeks is the collaborative effort of artists Jason Andrew McHenry and Christopher J. Dyer. The project was a yearlong visual diary and journal presented in weekly increments. Each artist presented fifty-two boxes, for a total of one-hundred and four separate pieces.

The visual entries center around pre-existing, 4×6×2 inch shadow boxes. Found objects, ephemera, and original art were collected and manipulated over the week’s time to create distinct and personal assemblages.

Accompanying these visual entries are written journals specific to each artist. The written journals predominantly contain explicit documentation of the box contents, but also include writings and notations of a more introspective and creative nature.

The friendship between 52 Weeks creators spans nearly two decades, and their collaborative efforts have produced a large catalog of artistic work. They notably served as co-founders of the critically acclaimed Holy Mackerel Press which published limited edition art-bound volumes by poets such as Tom Peters and Dr. Martin McGovern. They have been including in numerous gallery showings in Saint Louis, Denver, Los Angeles and Seattle.

The 52 Weeks project went on a small gallery tour through the Pacific Northwest and was featured at Bumbershoot in Seattle where it garnered praise and was optioned by a local gallery. After the final opening every piece was sold and the artists both left town. [They have not seen one another since then.]"

This is an idea I like and think could be explored and tailored to your own circumstances, a memory box.

Beginnings. . . . .

Where to Start?

Well this is the start of a blog – a dialogue between two creative people and for the world to browse on, add to and interject!

Join us, watch us, criticise us but add to the equation.

Create

Creativity is a mental and social process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts. Creativity is fuelled by the process of either conscious or unconscious insight. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity

Blog - a journal or diary that is posted on the Internet

Blog
A blog is often a mixture of what is happening in a person's life and what is happening on the Web, a kind of hybrid diary/guide site, although there are as many unique types of blogs as there are people. People maintained blogs long before the term was coined, but the trend gained momentum with the introduction of automated published systems, most notably Blogger at blogger.com.

http://www.blog-connection.com/blog-definition.htm

3. http://nimblecare.wordpress.com/

I think it is a platform for me:

-To express myself
-To share the experience I have
-To share the knowledge I have
-To learn from other people

13. http://spanish-podcast.com/

If I had to define what a blog is now, in 2008, I’d say that blogs are an early 21st-century version of the public town square. Humans have always had a need for social contact and for information and blogs provide a platform for both.

Dialogue

Conversation, Interview, Discussion, Discourse, Talk, Exchange of Ideas, Information Flow.

Collaboration is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together in an intersection of common goals — for example, an intellectual endeavor.

Here we are collaborating in a creative process and at the same time challenging our own creativity.

Save the Day – 1^st January, 2010

http://www.toxel.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/poweroutlets15.jpg