First article effort set for June

Wow. Sometimes people inspire you and sometimes they leave you speechless. I went to a weekly meeting at Meow Wolf artist collective last night to see about getting permission/support for my idea of placing a desk in their way for a week to do my first time-based article. I knew one person there, out of about 15, and generally in circumstances like this, having to stand up and describe CTD coherently to people who had no idea what it was, I'd be pretty intimidated. But the whole vibe there was so welcoming, warm, and fun, that I almost immediately felt comfortable.

After an hour or so of sitting around a circle going over "business stuff," they shifted focus to their upcoming June show—a massive installation project called Habitat, for which they're going to fill the entire MW space with all manner of sculptural/performance/whatever artwork that relates to the idea of home. The project has barely begun to be developed so far. Nick Chiarella unveiled (with an eloquent dedicatory speech, I should add) a half-scale model of the MW building, which everyone then more or less jumped on and began playing around with ideas for structures they could build as the framework for the show. Somewhere in there I had a few words with Emily Montoya, who suggested that maybe I'd like to do CTD in conjunction with Habitat in some way. It opens in mid-June, she said. I thought that would work well, so halfway through the discussion, she announced that Habitat had its first real "idea." Then everyone was staring at me and I began explaining my concept and what I wanted to do in the MW space. Amazingly, I started seeing eyes widen and heads nod, and when I finished several people said, "That's a really cool idea!" So there it was.

But that, it turned out, was just the beginning. A couple of guys started peppering me with questions. "Could we incorporate that into Habitat?" "Like, could other people use your desk to write in when you're not here?" "Could we leave a typewriter on it for anyone to use?" "What if the desk moved across the floor?" "And then ended up in like an empty office? Like it comes home." "What if we projected your words onto the wall behind you?" I said I had thought of that and wasn't sure I was ready to be that exposed yet. "We could project the words backward then, or sideways, or any way you want." I mean, this all happened in the first five minutes.

I conceived of CTD, in part, as a way to have a collective experience even while engaged in the solitary pursuit of writing. I think my experience here is going to be much bigger, and much more participatory, than I expected. And I think its going to involve way more of what someone last night referred to as "manic creativity" than I had envisioned. The surprises have already begun! It makes me think of a list of performance-art tenets I scribbled down and stuck up on the fridge on the morning I came up with the CTD idea. I was inspired by a New Yorker profile about performance artist Marina Abromovich, and a group of artists in the 1970s who decided it should be done this way:
No rehearsal
No predicted end
No repetition
Extended vulnerability
Exposure to chance
That's what I wanted to do with CTD. Amazingly, I'm already doing it.