Waiting for...

Sit in a hotel lobby as if you are waiting for someone. No one will bother you. You can work there on your idea all day. 

So, I have a question: who ARE you waiting for? What kind of person are you expecting to connect with to help you with your idea? You can't work alone forever.

So Inclined

A highway is simply a tool. It is a series of inclined plans designed to leverage the internal combustion engine of your car to avoid having to react to the vagaries of the land. Guardrails are signs of the creation of one of these inclined planes. Go to the top of a guardrail and walk down the hill and turn around so that your eyes are even with the pavement. Your body makes the vertical side of a right triangle from your feet and head to the beginning of the slope. The inclined plane leverages distance to alleviate the effort of driving straight up the hill.

In the middle of your thoughts about geometry and physics have you also thought about the fact that you are not supposed to be there? Highways are the exclusive purview of cars. The highway experience is not supposed to include examining the infrastructure, but here you are. Disconnected once again.

Note: In the diagram above, the bottom leg of the triangle is actually straight. It's reality that is bendable. 

Projected

Fluxite:

What is the largest object you can create with the following parameters:

• Must be transportable by one person
• Must be able to be set up and taken down in 10 minutes
• Must be made of accessible materials
• Must be able to project on it from a laptop and portable projector

Storylet:

The Heretic and Analyn are shown above carrying the folded object, a laptop and a projector. They will set up the object in public places and use it to project images that relate to his ideas.

The Library Mural

This is a proposal that I first submitted for a mural at the Fairfield Woods Library in the teen center downstairs. Go see the final mural...I left a message for you there.

Tool: Publish your own books at Lulu.com

The Words

 This is a Wordle of Chris Brogan's Blog. A Wordle is an analysis of the frequency of words in any given text in a graphic form. Chris has a lot of great things to say about tools but you will notice that his most frequently used words have nothing to do with technology and everything to do with people.

As a heretic you are in need of the key words that describe the domain of your idea. You need it to search for like minded people on Twitter and to tag the content you upload so people can find you. Go to Wordle and put in the url of a blog that you are excited by or copy and paste the text from your most impassioned document. Examine the words you get and see if they speak to your idea. Try this several times.

The Möbius Strip

Fluxite:
Create a Möbius Strip. 
Write on it “Your Opinion” and “My Opinion” separated by a line “|”
Draw arrows from each text outward and away from the other text.
Continue to draw arrows outward until you no longer can.

Tool:

Instructables: Share what you know.

http://www.instructables.com/about/submit.jsp 

The Ramble Arch

There is a stone archway in the Ramble in Central Park. It's a dimensional portal. It can only be activated by people who have the ability to manipulate space and time. If you touch the edge you will see an almost imperceptible glow as if it was a photographic double image. That is because you have this ability. Remember that time when you felt that time was out of joint and you weren't sure if you knew where you were. That was it.


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Isolation

Fluxite:

 Go to a parking lot and stand in the far corner

Watch people come and go on the other side of the parking lot

Feel gravity pull you downward

Because of gravity all mass including you creates a depression in the fabric of space-time

Imagine there is a spiral in the pavement

Depending on your mood, walk into or out of the spiral

Watch people come and go on the other side of the parking lot

Quickly speak the one word that is your passion

Feel the air move around you

Enter your word in a Twitter search

Isolation is an illusion of space-time

Storylet:

 Analyn asks the Heretic once again why he does not act on his ideas.

He says he is too isolated

Analyn: “Are you crazy? Haven’t you ever heard of Tweetchat?”

Tool: Tweetchat

Why use it: You need to find the community around your idea so that you can involve them in it.

Search for your word on this Twitter chat schedule

Find a related chat and note the time

At that time, open Tweetchat and sign in with your Twitter account

Type in the name of the Twitterchat and join the conversation

Twitter Chat format:

• Usually meets weekly
• Usually monitored
• Usually archived on a website
• Begin with introductions
• Moderator asks questions and participants have a conversation about their answers
• Ends with re-introductions

Sounds Like a Disconnect

Storylet:
The Heretic sees disconnects everywhere but his silence makes him feel more and more disconnected himself. He wishes there was a way to show people how he feels.

Media: (Wait for it...)

Slipping Off the Grid by Adam Weisblatt

Fluxite:
Listen to this sound clip in the mall and count the disconnects you see.

Tool:
Soundcloud: a site that allows you to create or upload sounds and share them with others so that they can interact with you directly.

Both Sides of the Strip Mall

Storylet:

The Heretic was thinking about expanding perspectives and decided to go to the museum to see cubist art. The cubists were trying to see objects from both the front and the back at the same time. The Heretic never made it to the museum because he had to go to the strip mall first.

Tool:

Expanding Perspective

Fluxite:

Go to a drugstore chain and buy a pocket mirror. When you leave walk to the back corner of the building and use the mirror to look around the edge to the back. Imagine the strings of decisions and people and energy necessary to get your stuff to you. On the ground behind the building is a piece of discarded metal. Look at it in the mirror. Seeing things attracts them. Imagine that the mirror is a magnet, making the metal bigger than it really is. The metal is a clue in the mystery of your stuff.

Resource:

The Story of Stuff

Cubism

The Parking Garage Experientity

Tools:
YouTube Creators' Hub
The Tao te Ching

Welcome

Because blogs are read backwards in time, you will be coming across this post after a series of unusual posts that may have you scratching your head. So I’ll use this first post as an opportunity for providing an explanation. First some history:

In the 1980s, while attending the School of Visual Arts in New York, I became very interested in Performance Art because of its expansion of creativity off the canvass and into everyday life. I launched a performance art troupe called Abstractjam and we participated in the East Village Performance Art scene. Later on I developed a new Performance Art form called Exodea (outside the theater) where I would take the audience to the scene of a story so that they could participate in the performance directly.

At the same time, I was interning for an artist named Douglas Davis who took Fluxus concepts of interacting with an audience through instructions and applied them to video. When Social Media came along I thought that the Fluxus concepts were well suited for this new media. For years I had held a secret wish to return to Performance Art, my first passion and I thought Social Media would be the way to make it work.

Then I read Seth Godin’s Tribes and it resonated with my old yearnings. My tribe has always been the heretics that Godin talks about. People who see things differently and have ideas that could disrupt the status quo. We now live in a time where the status quo is in severe need of disruption but most heretics I know are stuck because they don’t have the tools to act on their ideas. I know that the technical tools are there, but there also needs to be an openness to taking action and that requires a different set of tools. I decided to create a new performance art form called an Experientity where each audience member follows instructions that leads to their own experience outside their everyday lives. Social media then becomes the ideal medium for distributing this. I am hoping to put on a real life Experientity performance night in the near future.

In the meantime, I’ve set up this blog to explore these ideas. I am telling a story of a heretic and his struggle with acting on his ideas, I am giving Fluxus like instructions for people to have their own experiences related to these concepts and I am introducing closet heretics to the technical tools that will help them explore their own ideas. Through the comments in the blog, sharing on Facebook, and hashtags (#xprentt, #hereticstoolbox) on Twitter, I hope to expand the dialog with my tribe. In the spirit of my original Abstractjam days, I am fearlessly exploring areas like video and music where I do not have especially strong skills. I believe that anyone is free to use a tool regardless of their “credentials.” I’m also hoping to involve people who do have skills and knowledge to contribute to the ongoing creativity.

Thanks for joining me on this journey.