I started this blog last year with relatively little in the way of blog experience. I hadn't read a lot of blogs before and only had a vague sense of what I wanted to accomplish, if anything.

The idea--the metaphor--that I guess had been at the fringes of my mind since the beginning was to approach this as a sort of sketchbook, a free space to try out visual ideas, intellectual ideas and whatever else might cross my mind. It was, is, a place to get some things wrong and some things right, to hear how ideas sound in "public" rather than just bouncing around in my own head.

Someone who does this kind of thing very well is Tom Moody, whose blog makes for uneven reading precisely for that reason. He does art reviews, political rants, digital sketches, self-promotion, whatever.

I suppose what I like about this process is the idea of letting people in on my life and my art in real-time, without the delay of a carefully presented exhibition or published essay. This is not just new for me, but strikes me as a whole new way of generating and sharing information.

Some journalists and academics in this conversation agree. They predict in Utopian fashion that blogging will change the way we communicate and change the way information is generated and shared.

When Brian was in town, we talked about what a blog could be, how it could be a whole new kind of self-publishing for those of us who have more ideas than will ever be realized in our lifetime. We were on opposite sides though, as I advocated a "show everything you've got" viewpoint, while he took the viewpoint of "if my ideas are out there, someone might steal them." But I think that's an obsolete view of the way information and ideas work, a notion based largely on the idea of scarcity. The sense that there's not enough creativity in the world to go around.

Listen up: even when you give ideas away, you still possess them. And the more people are working on the same problem you are, the more likely you'll all come up with something that flies. My opinion. Brian did start a blog, though, and it will be cool to see where it goes (link to come as soon as there's something there).

I'm interested in this idea of generosity, of sharing art and ideas with people, seeing art as a collaborative enterprise rather than a solitary activity. I joked with Roi last time we hung out. I told him to please steal my idea of the maps. Take the pressure off me so I can go on to the next idea. They are endless.

In fact, I've lately thought that many of my ideas are pretty good and I want them out there with or without me. If I die without these ideas seeing the light of day, then my own death will have been an act of selfishness.

DJ Spooky has talked about moving from a paradigm in which artists make finished products to one in which art is about providing the raw materials that others can remix, remake and recombine at will. I think of this as moving from a permissions-based creative culture to a collaborative creative culture. If this shift is happening it'll be slow and not without major fights and setbacks (to wit, the litigious recording industry).

I'd like to make this blog more of a sketchbook, open up that process a little more. And then I'd like to take it one further and see what kind of art can be made in this medium. There's a huge potential here, not just as a new medium of distribution, but as a whole new art form.

We'll see.

current music: Snoop Dogg, No Limit Top Dogg