May 25, 2007, 11:53 am

I spent the better part of this week at Noel's remote studio, next to the Credit River, working on the template for the new model. Trying to translate large CAD files inside of Illustrator was difficult at times; my computer and I had a few fights, but I think we kissed and made up this morning. There were a lot of unintentionally overlapping ideas that flowed around me, and I'm still trying to connect all of them together this morning.

My creative process has been possibly too romanticized. I never realized, or thought to realize that the creative process isn't something that should just stir when you're in the right mood at the right time of day, but it's something that should be channeled and focused when I need it. This idea was announced after my explanation of my grinding halt of music creation as of late and it tucked itself somewhere deep in my brain. To be an artist over and above creating and working to change things is to be able to do those things when I need to and not just when I think I'm able to to.

I find myself trying to place so many ideas and seeds of ideas and wondering if I'm the only one who has trouble keeping up. There are so many things to read and understand and digest and filter into some other grand idea or umbrella that I worry it will all run away before I can do anything with it.

On a more pleasant note, I came up with a few huge ideas (in scale, not in importance):

1. Building an incredibly large wind sculpture that will play a specific scale of notes depending on the wind. The idea and placement of this sculpture would be somewhere in Sandwich in West Windsor to recognize the historical importance of the area in regards to the Underground Railroad. The wind from the south would make these large sculptures play some simplified version of a song of historical importance... the problem is its borderline over-connectedness. There is a song that would tell the path of the underground railroad, but this combined with its geographic placement and the potential for interactive applications - without thinking too deeply, lighting that is responsive to human presence - all of this may be too connected, too symbolic and I suppose, in reality, too large a scale of project for the immediate future.

2. Creating a large arching drainage system for my dreamed green roof atop one of the barns on my parents' property, filtering into a large pond, and running the water back for irrigation. It could create this incredible physical art and sort of function as a closed system, neither draining water from the "grid" nor leaving the green roof plants to run dry.

I'm working on making my way through Jitter tutorials, the goal to detect motion in a variety of ways. My final project for Digital Media and Interactivity in the spring was a piece that detected motion within a small range of colour, there's certainly a long ways to go.

There's also a call for abstracts for a surveillance and security conference. Danielle and I had an engaged conversation about the perceived importance of security devices and the real implications of the technologies. Many things to write about, but finding the time will prove difficult.

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