I'm sincerely regretting doing nearly all the coding for this site by hand. While it's satisfying to create something like this from the proverbial ground up, I now realize I could have made this process go much more smoothly with the aid of some open-source tools (I made good use of jQuery, but no other freely available building blocks). Regardless, the outcome is a solid foundation for what we hope will blossom into a vibrant playground of collaborative creativity--anyone (this includes you) is able to:
Start a written work
Revise existing works
Vote on pending revisions
Make Sean Penn bob his head up and down incessantly
Still in the hopper for future versions, though, are several notable features like:
Tag clouds for browsing
Highlighted differences between current works and proposed revisions
Constraining/finalizing revisions
Comment fields for works and revisions
The success and continuous development of the site relies on active participation in creating, revising, and voting on other's work--it requires several users to output anything worth creating such a system for! We'll be participating, and listening to any and all feedback on how to further refine this environment of mutual interaction.
asymptotic elbow When thinking about as much of everything as we can process late at night, Nick and I came to understand that we cannot think about everything. Our professor's theory--a theory she describes as the theory of everything-- has "limited" in the name. Whether everything is processable or not, I am incapable of processing everything and there is a good chance that everything can't be processed by anything. Still, I must navigate the world. I must believe North Quad (the building I am typing in) is solid or I'd have far too much to think about. Once I read that people are more likely to help each other in small towns not because they know each other but because they are less distracted. But how do we filter content? Who filters content? Can I be content viewing content filtered by someone else just because I cannot wade through all of it? Seeing things as parts lets me type each individual letter of these words that you are reading, but trying to divide the world into parts leads to harmful stereotypes and assumptions that limit everything more than it should ever be. While I cannot live without separating things off, I am compelled to push them back together in a way where I can listen hopefully listen to car horns, street conversations, trucks backing up, my i-pod, and the person yelling for help. I don't believe melting pots that result in one homogenous whole are the answer, but neither are line segments. If everything came from everything why not smudge it back together a little.
she put shoes on feet often backward because she didn't understand that little bend designating each shoes' connection to one particular foot
like putting a sheet back into a printer so things go on the same damn side or not understanding tags on shirts should be closest to you before pulled overhead winding up neatly behind or pressing the gas pedal while in drive backing out of a driveway
but after awhile she learned which parts go where on our filing cabinet bodies belts on waists bindis on foreheads blindfolds on eyes bras on breast crucifix over collarbone hand lotion on hands hijab on head kippah on bald spot leggings on legs mascara on eyes scarf on neck scrapes on knees tallit on shoulders underwear on privates scrapes on knees she learned mirrors could show her hair too big legs too skinny toes too curled bellybutton too deep
then one day while looking at the elbow she couldn't think of any clothes or lotions to organize beside the bend saw how it curved into infinity just like the shoes that once were meant for every feet through the asymptotic elbow she stopped seeing hair as something to be brushed brain as abstraction hair grew into brains grew into soul not really grew everything smudged she could never keep papers without coffee stains pencil notes with solid lines but oh how she tried to pretend enough her zippers would align everyone could know she really tries to pretend like them to believe things are defined are designed are at least following trends have beginnings and ends can be filed between physical and fake can be without mistake but even as she tries her asymptotic elbow laughs line segments are just lies
Nick and I make a good team, except when we don't. We make good talking buddies. So many nights after class we developed the ideas that eventually started going into this blog while talking over tea in this Hoover Streetapartment building. We love abstracts and trying to understand wholes as best we can. Now though, it is time for parts and it's hard not to feel like we are generalizing or generally missing things when looking at the world that way. Like that game of telephone that never got very far, I worry we might always be concept folks and not practitioners.
I've been trying to go back through notes and feelings to remember the parts of our ideas. Nick has been computing like mad to create a prototype. We are trying to facilitate collaboration and have been collaborating to do so. The goal is eventually to create a site that allows for and even pushes collaborative creation in multiple genres and between genres. But just as the surrealists began playing with exquisite corpses in the creation of poetry and prose, only moving on to collages of words and images and creating images once they got a handle on the words, we had to start small too. We had to take our abstracts down to something we are capable of now, but even though we are creating a more limited version of our concept to start and even though all new things are made from old, what will come out of this still cannot be determined. Our limited idea has endless possible outcomes. Will we only attract an audience of our friends and classmates or can we extend the reach of our machine to those beyond our social sphere? Will we have encouraged the creation of inside jokes, a group of people dedicated to making art relevant to and capable of reaching as many folks as possible, some loosely affiliated people, some bad poetry, genius? We'll soon see and then soon have a better idea of where to wander next or how to wander better.
For our website, Nick and I don't want names of people or of art. Instead of titles, the art will be categorized by subject matter, and instead of names, people will go by IP addresses so that if we don't get the categories right at least we have changed them from the norm so people will have to adapt.
On a summer night in northern Michigan I was doing somersaults in the water while trying to fend off the sleep that sun--still on my face even under the stars-- demanded with the help of water's chill. When I surfaced for air--instead of the comforting voices of people who talked so much that day humming over the surface--I made out a bit of a yelling conversation. One friend was rather angry about an MIA song sampling "Straight to Hell" a song by the Clash she'd grown up listening to while the other believed that you are always using something old when making something new. I surfaced and listened to the voices softened by the water ripples but carried over enough I could float on my back and hear.
Where collaboration went.
Something Older. Something better?
Every time I write my opinion about copyright law, I should have to cite that night. Who do I cite though? My friend's voices or the water rehashing sounds I'd heard before without paying for any of them or the muscle memory of my body so self-assured from years of floating on a lake that the motion had been perfected. In that moment, I knew that even though my friend could pinpoint the bit of the Clash within MIA's music enough that she was annoyed so much else went into that song that wasn't new. Everything has roots. No song begins in midair. No person starts as a tabula rasa.
Some genres even expect people to reuse notes or continue on a structure and even knowing where those came from we can't ever understand the entire genesis of an idea because so many other ideas were part of creating a new one and so much was there before that. While we can try to piece back the origins of everything our role as piecer changes everything and time does and sometimes just walking past a television saying something or other may imprint on us and show up later and we may not even know. I think there is value in knowing where things came from, but I don't know how anyone claims an original idea. They are not new. The things they saw, heard, did. The language they have to work in. The people they talked to. Their genes. Do we have to cite all of those things?
Of course I do my best to adhere to copyright laws, but in all the voices how do I know for sure which ones are in mine or when someone else has taken mine. Is it really taking? Should I cite the makers of my computer knowing my ideas come out differently on here than in a journal? I hope that my words appear in someone else. I love when a phrase starts being uttered regularly by a group of friends and no one knows who said it first or who said it to them. Should they trademark the words? What happens when a year later they meet someone else who has been saying the same phrase longer than any of them? Experience mostly overlaps. When we say mine mine mine, we forget how much is ours.
asymptotic elbow 
Is there anything to talk about without sandwiches on the table?
In all of these conversations in all of these locations there is good and not so good an maybe even evil. I had an image of their interaction in my head, but another interaction with my friend Evan Clark resulted in his creation of an image other people can interact with and that interacts with this poem.
apartment building. We love abstracts and trying to understand wholes as best we can. Now though, it is time for parts and it's hard not to feel like we are generalizing or generally missing things when looking at the world that way. Like that game of telephone that never got very far, I worry we might always be concept folks and not practitioners. 
