This is an idea that I’ve been kicking around for a long time now, but never to the point where I’m satisfied enough to move forward. I’ll share it now, though, just to get it off my chest.

The aim is to develop a publication that would “come into itself” over the course of assembly. An exercise/experiment in the editorial process, it will be made up of numerous contributions from a variety of participants. Each contributor will receive everything that has come before, and will be given ample time to spend with the whole-to-date, so that the entirety will be internalized prior to the development of a new contribution.

Each new piece will not (necessarily) be a response to the piece directly prior, but instead should be written with a sense of the publication as a whole to date. Contributions are to be understood as anything that will function in print – essays, photography, art, misdirections, musical scores, etc.

And then on to the next person. So that with each contribution the publication grows more unified and more complex. Over the course of the project an organic whole will be built.

There are problems with this structure. It is infeasible, increasingly so with each new contribution.

Is the selection of each contributor the only top-down editorial choice made? And who wants to be the last person to contribute? Straddled with a stitched-together Frankenstein of a magazine, the texts and images all tugging in different directions?

Welcome back to the Patent Office! Here are some ideas I’ve had for 15m radio dramas:

The night before
he can’t remember
wakes up but can’t see
now what

Two guys are racing on foot through a very crowded city. It’s the day of a festival – everyone’s out in costumes and singing songs, playing ball, having street BBQs. It is clear that the first man who reaches the river wins something tangible, that there is more at stake here than just pride.
The men begin the race far apart, so they never know where the other is in relation – whether he’s closing in on you, or taking a totally different route, or even whether he’s reached the finish line.
We follow one of the two men over the course of the race. The city is heavily secured, with travel between one zone and another a locked-down transaction of papers and assurances. Every few minutes, the man reaches another zone.

AND

He weaves through the city – running next to the animals that have been brought out to march the streets, the elephants and the zebras, and the high school bands, and the general pandemonium. He begins to realize that the man he’s racing is somewhere nearby, maybe he catches glimpses of him.

OR

The man gets lost

OR

He eats a hot dog

AND

he calls it a fucking day.

She’s been hired to babysit two teenagers too old to need a babysitter. They intimidate her, bully her, drive her into the attic. She cowers there, listening from the door as the two girls wreck havok in the house below.

A man tries to break an awkward habit of beginning all his conversations with outright lies. Each time he has to explain away or justify the lie before it gets out of control. After each encounter he engages himself in a righteous monologue about this habit.
–I can break this habit.
–Don’t lie to me, asshole!

A golfer is hitting nothing but holes-in-one and finds himself getting bored. He begins to take his time in between holes, drinking heavily. Soon he is a drunkard and is happy with his newfound freedom from perfection.

A day at the pool, culminating in a beautiful game of marco polo.

A man fancies himself a gourmand and goes to the market one day. He is single, and no longer young. While there he sees a young woman in line waiting for a duck. The man goes up and gets in line behind her, and begins to flirt. She hesitates, but he continues. He’s telling her his favorite duck recipe. As he does so, he begins to gather small ingredients off the racks around him, and starts a demonstration of the recipe.
Soon people gather to watch him prepare the recipe. The meal sounds mouth-watering. The woman, we can only assume, is as charmed as we are.

Patent #1: City Lights (slideshow)
A slideshow lecture, wherein I propose a solution to the problem of the dark-day metropolis.

[Images of midtown New York — tight streets, tall buildings. The sky is a vivid cerulean blue, but the street lies in shadow.]

0: Tone
The tone of this needs to be half sincere and half ironic – this should be an uncomfortably elegant solution to a fundamental fact of city life. It should be both repulsive and useable.

1: Streetside
Even during the brightest day, half of Manhattan finds itself swimming in shadows — the only daylight to be found is straight up, crane-your-neck-back overhead. Yes, there’s always high noon, but what kind of a life has sunlight for half an hour a day? Not all of Manhattan. Mid-town. Wall Street. The financial districts. These men in ties, women in wool, pulling at their collars — it’s goddamn hot, here in the shade.

2: Irrigation
Brief history of irrigation. Bringing water from A to B. Allowing fertile plant-life. Irrigation of sunlight — allowing healthy mental state.

3: Implementation
Similar to roof gardens. Light irrigation would use individual buildings as conduits to channel light that passes overhead down the structure, like a rain water gutter, out to the base of the building. In this way, the base of each building will transmit the light that passes overhead at that time of the day.

4: Consequences
Utilizing sun. Sensors on tops of buildings track movement of sun, pass light down through light system, through the building and out onto the street. No need to have any adjunct power source — the coming-and-going of sunlight, due to clouds or rain, is a beautiful fact of the natural phenomenon translated to street level.

How does the sun hit the street? How to regulate how the sun encounters the street? Are light systems integrated into building facades – where there are regulations for how the light emerges from “pipes” extending out the front of the building?

Perhaps streetlights become daylights — Hijack the infastructure in place. Yes.

5: Design proposals
On the roof: Entire swaths of fiber optic fields, like the grids of a farmer’s crops. Built up one foot off the ground, letting the fibers gather in that space before being pulled together into bundles to shoot down the building’s structure.

6: On second thought
This on some level should taste of aggression. Not too polite, these light pipes. An intervention through buildings. A natural extention of using “solutions” to provide society with fundamental phenomena, the access to which should be default & a priori. An aggressive cut through building space. Foreceful.

[Again, this needs to be accompanied by a slideshow - or maybe some projection system. The imagines must absolutely positively not be read from a monitor or any other RGB system.]

…

Patented! See you next time.