I remember standing in a room full of paintings at my last solo show and wondering "is this all there is?" I still love the paintings, but there wasn't much to think about. I decided I should do what I found most interesting.
It wasn't long before I had hundreds of audio and video clips, digital images, and ideas -- and figured out that "having ideas" was my favorite part of art.
But I needed to organize them, so I created the database. I hoped it would give me a sense of how the ideas add up, and help me identify the most promising ones. I broke the ideas up by form (e.g., pictures, video), category (topic), and rated them by difficulty and "value."
(The tree on this site's home page shows how each idea fits in the database's categories. The image here is the full category portion of the tree, between the root and ideas.)
It became obvious after a while that I was more interested in the things I found along the way than in producing the ideas. I knew that some were too large (or poorly defined) to be realized, but they had me thinking about fundamental things I had no reason to consider before, and making connections that felt deep.
I could go on and on here, and that's part of the attraction of being interested in a lot of different things: you get a sense of how forms (pictures, film, writing) are related; of how they work and how our minds work; and of how art and the way we see it evolves with technology.
The database is part of my effort to distill and connect all those things; maybe I'll never see what it all "adds up to," but patterns have emerged and brought some of the substance to the surface for me.
[ Picture of the Idea Database ]