It's alive — and threatening to take over. Since one of my studio-mates and I started our own Social Network (working title) a couple of months back the thing has become The Thing that won't be ignored. It hangs heavily on a few ceiling hooks, on the verge of consuming what little space the three of us share. All those strands of plastic and poly stretch and strain with the weight of the project — and we're only in month 3.
The Network has been the focus of more than a few get-togethers and parties, as people pick up strands that have been left hanging by others, work them in with other strands, or back into the core, or leave them to dangle like unfinished sentences. The bits worked up by Boomer businessmen are re-incorporated by tweener girls or pulled in new directions by musicians and grandmothers, bankers and artists. And as the thing grows, conversations are born, moving as randomly as the twists and braids that move the Network in new, knotty directions.
Soon we will have no choice but to move the behemoth, hopefully to one of the many empty nearby retail storefronts for our next Social Networking open house. With more people creating tangents upon tangents, the initial concept is becoming a many tentacled movement. There is some debate on whether we should find some unified core idea, or let chaos reign.
It's a fitting project for 2012, which happens to be the United Nations Year of the Co-operatives. The Thing is morphing into a manifestation of all the waste and the excess of global competition that lies in the wake of a new wave of co-operation and collaboration, mobilized by necessity. The Thing, this Network, takes up room, gathers up scraps, and presents the possibility that something good can come of all the wreckage when we hang together for a while.
Maybe the Thing should be called Octupy.
The Network has been the focus of more than a few get-togethers and parties, as people pick up strands that have been left hanging by others, work them in with other strands, or back into the core, or leave them to dangle like unfinished sentences. The bits worked up by Boomer businessmen are re-incorporated by tweener girls or pulled in new directions by musicians and grandmothers, bankers and artists. And as the thing grows, conversations are born, moving as randomly as the twists and braids that move the Network in new, knotty directions.
Soon we will have no choice but to move the behemoth, hopefully to one of the many empty nearby retail storefronts for our next Social Networking open house. With more people creating tangents upon tangents, the initial concept is becoming a many tentacled movement. There is some debate on whether we should find some unified core idea, or let chaos reign.
It's a fitting project for 2012, which happens to be the United Nations Year of the Co-operatives. The Thing is morphing into a manifestation of all the waste and the excess of global competition that lies in the wake of a new wave of co-operation and collaboration, mobilized by necessity. The Thing, this Network, takes up room, gathers up scraps, and presents the possibility that something good can come of all the wreckage when we hang together for a while.
Maybe the Thing should be called Octupy.
