Collective Notions

June

Cubicle Cafe: Northern Spark, 2011

Great writeup of Northern Spark by Peter at Cubicle Cafe. Looks like a wonderful night, wish we could’ve made it to the rest of the events!

My night started out on the Mississippi Megalops, a project of Works Progress. The river ride was one of the highlights of the night. Learning about the river, and seeing sunset over St. Paul.

After the ride we headed over to see Jim Campbell’s Scattered Light. This actually looked really neat coming in on the boat ride, you could actually see the silhouettes of the folks walking across the array.

From this point on till dawn, I don’t have a lot of photos. I feel like we just missed a lot of things (like food at food carts, performances, unannounced bus stops), and a lot more things just weren’t tested well before the night of and didn’t work out. I wish I remembered to take a picture of the Sperm & Egg creations, an interactive game, there could have been more interactive activities. Crazy, glow stick capture the flag in Loring Park, with a burning trash can bonfire was nice, and Dianne Willow’s glowing plankton were pretty as well.

The best came at the end of the night, visiting the Notion Collective’s Station Identification. The sea of noise created by their many radios, the delirious participants, some drunk or just tired, and sun rise over Minneapolis was a great way to end the night.

This post has 4 notes and tag: # northern spark # notion # station identification # radio # foshay # minneapolis .

May

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

(music: “Layered”, a soon-to-be released track from my solo project whirm. photo: Jon Wohl.)

The other night while I was out for drinks, I was introduced to a friend-of-a-friend. He was a loud, obnoxious sort of guy — a classic stereotype of a young lawyer, which he turned out to be — and after several minutes of lewd and sometimes-witty comments, he popped the question.

“So, Jonathan, what do you do?”

It’s a question that falls towards the beginning of almost any conversation with a new acquaintance. What a person “does” is such an integral part of his life; it’s his driving force, the thing that pulls him from one moment to the next, the reason he gets up in the morning.

Or is it? For someone like me — a post-college, no-career-track kind of person, a person with boat-loads of interests, dozens of projects, but no specific direction — answering this question can be uncomfortable. What do you mean, “what do I do?”

We’ve all been promised (in America, anyway) from very early on that if we just follow our dreams we’re bound to live happy and fruitful lives. And in many ways, despite my (perhaps somewhat contrived) distaste for the capitalist culture in which I’ve grown up, I actually still believe it. So why is it that so many of us spend the better portion of our waking hours doing work that we don’t love, or worse, that we truly can’t stand?

I’ve been lucky so far to have largely avoided that trap. Nevertheless, questions like “what do you do?” which usually mean “how do you make money?” corner us into identifying with the means by which we earn a living. For some lucky few, the answers to those two very different questions is the same… for the rest of us it isn’t.

For me, The Notion Collective is an attempt to simplify my answer to that awkward question. And, if things go well, I’ll be able to give an answer that, though perhaps a bit vague, does indeed represent my daily motivations while at the same time hinting at how I pay my rent. What do I do? “I think about things.” And if this answer isn’t satisfactory, I’ll be happy to continue.

“Sometimes I write the things down, and other times the things I think about turn into music! Occasionally they become websites or drawings or industrial machines. Often they demonstrate solutions to problems, but sometimes they just end up generating more questions! It’s very fun.”

But, the other night, when asked “what do you do?” I gave an equally honest response. “I’m a musician,” I said. And, well, I am a musician. I’ve been a musician for as long as I can remember. Do I make money as a musician? No. But that’s not the question I was answering.

—Jon

This post has 0 notes and tag: # life # music # notion # whirm # work # notion .

May

(photo: Milwaukee Art Museum, by Michael Newman/Flickr)

On the last weekend of 2009 I gathered with four friends in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It was a good setting, as we’d all met in Wisconsin. Since leaving Madison a few years, we had dispersed on our own adventures, but with the shared idea that we might reconvene and work together again. This December meeting was our chance to follow through with that idea.

That weekend, a few of us took a trip to the Milwaukee Art Museum and walked down a stretch of Lake Michigan. Along the way, a torrent of projects, ideas, and schemes emerged as if they had been waiting to boil over. We refused to limit our speculations, and spent the rest of the night debating the possibilities.

By the end of the weekend we’d settled on three important points: place, time, and name. The place being New York City, the time being the end of August 2010, and the name being The Notion Collective.

The last of those three was by far the hardest, and was the product of months of deliberation. The root of that name — “notion” — is based on how we’ve operated in the past: beginning with a notion — a kernal of an idea — and slowly and meticulously polishing that idea until it shines.

The plan was (and is) vague, ambitious, and somewhat uncertain. We’ll combine our talents to help pay the bills, and work on our own projects, whatever they may be. We’re still in the beginning stages of figuring out the first part of that mission, but this site is a step into the second. The hope is that this can be a public space to answer the question we’ve been hearing since we committed to this project: “What will you do?”

In many ways, this organization itself is a kind of notion — an idea that we all share, overlapping in many places but still largely undeveloped — and this is where we begin to refine that idea. If you’re wondering what will take shape (as we are), this is a good place to start.

—Andy

This post has 4 notes and tag: # introduction # milwaukee # notion # collective .