I’m not sure where I ran across the 100DayProject, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. The premise is simple: pick a project, do it once a day for 100 days, and post something on Instagram each day. No problem. It turns out, though, if you do the same thing enough times you end up learning quite a bit about yourself.
The Big Idea
Starting out, I knew I wanted to do something related to my pandemic hobby: revisiting music, specifically guitar and modular synthesis. I also wanted to use this as an opportunity to dive back into magical and speculative realisms, which I hadn’t done much with since grad school. Exactly what that entailed, I wasn’t sure. After a little bit of thinking and a last minute decision the night the project started, I went with “Thin Spaces” as the guiding theme:
The concept came from a general interest in liminal and marginal spaces and the idea was each day I would find a thin place, take a photo, write a quick story about what worlds it was bringing together, and make a few seconds of accompanying music. I hoped that throughout the project, this would help me be more engaged with the surrounding environment (which was extremely restricted due to the pandemic) and encourage me to really lean into exploring off-the-cuff ideas. From a very operational point of view, I also hoped this would bring creative production into my daily routine, be a fun way to push me to learn new music techniques, and provide an opportunity to get some expertise into some complicated equipment I had picked up during the pandemic.
So, basically, a project that was super easy and scalable to a 100 day project. No prob.
The Big Payback
Without a doubt, the project was a success. Definitely not because it hit all the goals I set out to hit, but because I realized those aren’t goals that would be helpful for future projects. I did learn about techniques, community, my own artistic practice, and how I engage with space, but not in the ways I was expecting to. The project oscillated between razor-thin lines of playful and dark, lofi and hifi, visual and aural, generated and natural, human and machine, concrete and fuzzy, well executed and just plain awful. Throughout the project, I was always amazed at how the feel of the resulting post had less to do with my own immediate mental state and more with whatever direction the elements wanted to go when they were placed together. A lot of the monochrome posts in the last phase of the project are creepy, eerie, unsettling, and foreboding, but I didn’t set out to head in that direction – the combination of available photos and music just seemed to point there.
And it seemed to work with where the project was heading overall. The last few posts were about really going into the thin space of the project between the “end” and a new beginning, the introductory 101 course that is the start of new projects inspired by this one. It made sense to give those posts a dark feel to them, like entering into a sort of anxiety-inducing territory where you have to progress slowly and methodically. That’s not something you can do with happy music bouncing around.
One Project, Five Paths
Initially I intended this project to be a single, coherent set of posts – or at least a fluid transition between ideas. While the first and the last post don’t look radically different, I could break up the project into five stages where my thinking changed direction and I started doing something completely different with the project.
Stage 1: Roadblocks (1 day)
I didn’t do a lot of planning or set up since I was fairly busy outside of this project, so I didn’t have much of a clear path at the outset. The second day I ran into an issue where I didn’t have enough constraints on the posts. They could be anything, so there were too many directions to go and too many possibilities to explore. I quickly realized that just identifying a thin space, photographing it, and writing a story was still too wide to be a viable project and I’d have to narrow down.
Stage 2: Iterating (71 days)
The third day I arbitrarily picked a direction that I would keep for the next 70 days of the project: anchoring the post by turning some element of the photo into a present participle. This practice started with “building,” “kitchening,” and “rooming” before moving into objects: “transpondering,” “americanaing,” “dumpstering,” etc. I also used actions associated with the objects sometimes: “seeing” for glasses, “picturing” for a camera, and “moving” for moving boxes.
In the first few posts, the pictures were paired with a more serious, meditative video and a response to the question “what is [the object/space]?” These served as an introspective look at what I wanted the project to be and a straightforward commentary on what I was trying to do with each post. Looking back, these were a little awkward and were writings that I would typically stash in a notebook somewhere and avoid looking at. However, they did help move the project along.
Day 12 was another slight redirection. Instead of starting with the image of a space, I stumbled upon a modular patch that sounded like a game of tennis. The only video I could find to pair with the sound was a strange clip of a mustachioed hipster waiting on the sidelines with his racket. It was impossible to do anything too serious for that post, so I started leaning in to the ridiculous side of the project. Some of the subsequent posts just ended up being bad puns: “watering” was a bottle of Topo Chico and someone watering their lawn; “schooling” was fish and a book; “ruling” was a ruler and a person dancing with an oversized chess piece; “matching” was a matchbook and soccer match.
This was also the time when I began bringing Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), specifically Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing into the project in a more obvious capacity. The text for the rest of this section moved away from thoughts around the project or what the space meant for me, and instead tried to get at what it was like to be the thing. Bogost has three ways to try and get at the existence and relation of objects: ontography (aka Latour Litanies), metaphorism, and carpentry. I didn’t quite make it to carpentry during the project, but I did work with ontography and metaphorism. Graham Harman describes the purpose of the ontographic lists as “to establish the autonomous force and personality of individual actors, rather than allowing them to be reduced to or swallowed up by some supposedly deeper principle.” My goal with the lists was to start with the initial object in the post and then pull together a list of the things that the original object would engage with. Hopefully, this would draw a picture of the point of view of the world from that original object, without some sort of human filter.
Of course, this proved almost impossible. Being a human, not only was it difficult to put aside a filter of human consciousness, but the related things tended to be reduced to ecological materials like dirt, mud, water, etc. There wasn’t too much to explore with these ontographic lists beyond realizing that objects are made of material that interacts with other material.
So, I moved on to Bogost’s second method of getting at the being of objects: metaphorisms. We can’t really replicate the perspective of objects, so we have to use the tools available to us. In this case, metaphors get at the perception of objects by trying to understand their internal logic and structures – all of which are foreign to us. In the metaphorism posts, I was working to bring together objects that seem to have similar logic and structure from my perspective, even if I didn’t totally understand that structure or could put myself in exactly the vantage point of the object.
This diversion got a little closer to dealing with the weird spaces we see in the world and different modes of perception that exist beyond the human, but I still wasn’t quite happy with it. The metaphorisms read too much like random, stream-of-consciousness poetry to be able to highlight the OOO-inspired motivation. On top of the theoretical issues, the posts themselves were taking way too long to make. Not only was there an object that needed to be found, but a picture that had to be taken and edited, a video that had to be sourced, and then a post that had to be rendered. Doing all of that on a daily basis while trying to balance the rest of my day proved a bit too much. The fun had gone out of creating the posts and I didn’t feel I was getting as much out of the project as I had hoped. Days 60-73 started to feel more like I was checking boxes to get something on the internet rather than really engaging with the project.
Part 3: Cracking (27 days)
After a few weeks and some conversations with friends, I decided it would make sense to reboot the project. At this point, I realized I also had strayed too far into looking at objects rather than spaces. While I’m all for a good tangent, I still wanted to some exploration of space while I had the project keeping me focused. The first place I went was the floor in my apartment: a crack-filled concrete slab My first idea was to look at the cracks as a map and spend the next month performing a sort of cartography exploration that would create the outline of a world on my floor.
That is a project I still want to explore, but for the 100days project I ended up meditating on what was beneath the cracks, where they lead. A few posts ended up with stories about the actual hidden spaces behind the places in the photographs. Quickly, these stories seemed like too much information. The stories seemed to constrain the space too much and not allow whoever was reading the post to add in their own story and experience. The pictures of cracks also seemed too specific to really be an exploration of a space.
Around this time, I had also started doing some film photography with a Holga camera. The images had an ethereal feel to them, caused by light leaks in the camera and felt like a good aesthetic to bring in to the project. As part of this last pivot, for each post I combined two images from recent trips to the southwest, Portland, and Tulsa. Then, I brought back the lists from the earlier stage of the project, but now used them to describe conflicting elements in the two images.
These posts were a good movement toward what I had initially set out to do. It played two spaces off of each other in order to show the unique characteristics of being in those spaces as well as the connections that exist in the gaps. I don’t think it fully captured the initial idea, but it was at least in the right direction.
Part 4: The Margins (9 days)
Adding on another ten days is probably the worst thing to do with a project that was a struggle to finish in the first place, but it seemed to make thematic sense. Diving in to the margins between 100 and 101 in the way that I dove into thin spaces between 1 and 100 seemed like the perfect way to spend some time sitting with the project. These posts didn’t have much of an aim other than to give me time to work out this reflection while not stopping creating.
I generally kept the same aesthetic during these posts, but kept the colors monochrome and moved toward clearer imagery. I also removed the text to keep the attention on the sound and images.
Post 101: An Introduction to Creative Practice
Ending on post 101 seemed appropriate because in a lot of ways this project was a sort of Creative Practice 101 where I was able to take a detailed look at how I make things, learn new tools, and make new connections. If I had one major takeaway from the project it would be that creating regular, focused pieces is a good way for me to learn and explore. Just as important, however, is to remember when to reframe and to let an idea go.
With all of the redirection, gaps in posting, and struggling to land on an idea that I felt like I had fully explored, it was easy to downplay how much I had learned during the whole project. When I mapped it all out, though, I had come quite a ways in the last few months. I had taught myself modular synthesis, learned how to set up a mini recording studio, improved my guitar skills quite a bit, taught myself Adobe Premier Rush, figured out a couple Photoshop tricks I didn’t know, explored using color, learned film photography, and re-explored Object Oriented Ontology.
I also was able to get a couple mini collaborations going, including some jamming with @new_romancer:
And answering the question “what does a soundscape for spinaching sound like?”:
As with any good project, I’m left with more I’d like to do with the concept of thin spaces, but also a number of spin off projects, including radiator soundscapes, more generative modular songs, architectural photography, creating twang-gaze and doom-twang musical genres, recreating the feel of a city through images and soundscapes, and continuing to learn through sketches.