So, I recently was going back through my
365 days self-portrait project on flickr, and I was remembering how much fun it was to have a specific tiny encapsulated goal for each day of the year. The photo gave each day a small additional layer of complexity and expectation, even if it was something that I was scrambling to do right before bed.
I also liked the fact that I could add a small bit of detail about my day to the photo and this could act as a mini-blog documenting the highlights of each particular day. (This was actually surprisingly useful recently when I went back and looked at
photos of the time in Spring 2008 when Jess and I had the flu and past-Colin had conscientiously recorded my fever temperature for each day.)
So, there were aspects of the 365 project that were really great, but there were also aspects that were kind of silly. Having to stick yourself in each photo made it a bit too narcissistic and also made many of the photos feel very contrived. I considered this time around doing just a straight-up photo-a-day project similar to what Jess has been
doing, but I realized that even taking photos feels too limiting.
Instead, I'm going to attempt to "make" something every day for the next 365 days. The things that I make will hopefully be a wide mix of simple/complex, surprising/mundane, inspiring/delightful/silly/absurd. They will include cooking, welding, coding, painting, planting, writing, or anything else that strikes my fancy.
I want a place where I can keep a significant record of each thing that I make. For many tangible things that will include photos and possibly movies. For virtual things, I would ideally like to capture the thing itself on this webpage, (source code, flex swfs, proce55ing code, etc.) That should hopefully make this blog both an archive and also a playground.
Another obvious goal of putting these projects online is to get feedback, criticism, inspiration, and motivation from all of my friends, family, and strangers. I'm hoping that people will enjoy the things that I make and provide me with the occasional boot if I start to fall behind.
I've created a home for this project over on extrareal.com. You can find it at
http://www.extrareal.com/blog/. I've been making things for the past week and feel that now is a good time to make the project public. I'll try and cross-post in LJ, Twitter, FB, etc, but in general the blog (and RSS feed) will be the best place to see what I'm making.
Thanks everyone!