The "SketchSpace" concept:

I enjoyed thinking about this idea as it does present a serious challenge. It seems to me a challenge related to the idea of transparency in communication. It is a wonderful theory, but very difficult in practice. There are so many ways that I experiment and play with my ideas. Every idea I have starts as a fascination in my head. If it is worthy is starts to manifest in searches on the internet and bookmarked sites that provide me with illumination on the possibilities and realities of my idea. This usually leads to diagrams, sketches, and writing in my sketchbook. I will embark on a variety of conversations on the possibilities of my idea with some trusted and respected friends. I will tinker with devices and physical concepts related to my new obsession, because by now it is an obsession. If it continues to prove itself as a good idea worthy of creation I will start to give it form, whatever that may be. This is where I start to invest money in the project. And it is at this stage that I consider "documenting" it on the internet, usually in the hopes that I can find someone else to pay for it. Eventually, I finish the project and of course I want an easy way to share it and get some exposure for it. This is where I turn, in earnest, to digital documentation.

For me the act of putting this convoluted process of mine online at every step is simply a chore. It is really a pain to try to digitize my ideas and upload them. And if I actually did that for every sketch and idea I create, I would get little else done. Instead I can imagine a new set of digital tools to help an artist track and document their musings. There are a number of points where my practice intersects directly with the public digital realm: Google searches and bookmarks, then final documentation. There are certainly public bookmarking sites, but keeping bookmarks organized is a challenge. And who remembers all the Google searches they have executed? And of course final documentation is pretty late in the game to consider it a sketch.

I have found that what would be ideal for me is a sort of automation and tracking around my own actions. A sort of self-surveillance could be employed to create the shareable media needed for the digital realm. Of course if I recorded every conversation I had about an idea, just the act of editing would waste valuable time unless it was dead simple and provided me with a chance to reflect on what had been said without burdening me with the task of editing.

I tend to keep folders of files pertinent to ideas that I am working out. I put in these folders any PDFs, audio, video, or images I find that are helpful in thinking about my projects. I don't want to always upload and build a page for these, and I certainly don't want to update them as they are ever growing. Instead a nice little script that could be attached to them would work nicely. Let's say this little script simply checks every so often to see if there are new additions to the folder. If there are, it simply uploads them via FTP and edits the HTML of the webpage attached to the folder. And what if this script was part of a set of tools that could be used to log my own activities on the internet and allow me to assign related searches to the projects I am thinking about. As well as providing a simple cut and paste editor for recorded media with the ability to compress, tag, and archive all additional materials including code and what-not and publish them or not on an FTP space.

So, maybe I am lazy, but the extra effort of documentation just seems to kill my enjoyment of my own thoughts. And that is essentially why I make art: because I have been so thoroughly entertained by a thought that I want to share it. And by share it I mean build the idea not the reference to it.

~e.t.