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.