Bricolage

The moment I heard the distinction made between a bricoleur and an engineer back in grad school, I knew that I was the former. What has given me the greatest pleasure over the years has been completing projects in which I pull together text and images scavenged from all types of cultural artifacts. In high school, I composed a Shakespearean comedy using pieces from Shakespeare's comedies. As an undergrad, I took a actress playing a bag lady, a little Miles Davis and a dance solo to choreograph a final project. In grad school, I worked with wonderfully creative colleagues to craft a video essay that was a commentary on star quality in place of a conference paper.

Given how much material is available on to work with and how easy it is to compose and present work using readily available tools, I ought to be able to weave stories together in a way that makes them matter to people. I ought to be able to design some kind of story engine (Thank you Guillermo del Toro for that concept) or at least gather some people together who'd like to try to make it. For some reason, I think that applying the rules of digital alchemy will help me do this, but I haven't yet worked out exactly what those rules are. I know they have something to do with distilling ideas from a variety of scavenged materials and transforming them into something valuable, but I just haven't figured out how to make it work. What I think I need to do is just start weaving together my current favorite narrative threads into some kind of text and stick it on my web site.