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About The 365 Project
• Year-Round Open Call for Poets & Artists •
• Entertainment: The Point of Differentiation •
• Publication, Exhibition, & Performance • Submissions to The 365 Project •
Trailer
| The 365 Project Trailer | |
What is the 365 Project? How can you participate? Watch this trailer and find out. But it's a big file, so only download it if you are on a high-speed Internet connection.
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Press Releases
You can download these press releases for your personal use or share them with your friends.
Better yet, become a 365 Project Ambassador, and print these out and mail them to a hundred friends, strangers, people whose artwork you admire, people who would benefit from seeing the site and its artwork. Or post them at your local java house ... you get the idea.
To view them, you will need the free Acrobat Reader software (which may be built into your browser).
| Document | Size | Format |
| The
365 Project Summary A summary of The 365 Project and its goals, including information on how you can participate, donate, submit material and in other ways support the project. |
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| Dactyl
Foundation Reading (NY City) An announcement of a reading at the Dactyl Foundation (64 Grand Street, SoHo, Manhattan) on March 29, 2003, 7-9 p.m. (Posted by permission of Obscure Publications.) |
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Why The 365 Project?
The 365 Project is a standing call for artists to restore the currency of imagination in America.
OK, well, what exactly does that mean?
At present, imagination is not a valued currency in America. The reasons are simple. Imagination involves risk. It doesn’t guarantee a rate of return and it runs against the grain of what is already established and proven.
While celebrating and promoting mass-marketed sports millionaires and pop culture celebrities devoid of originality or relevance, the “entertainment industry” helps marginalize artists and original thinkers, thereby depriving our populace both of its conscience and of a meaningful, engaging and mature culture.
The 365 Project aims to restore the currency of imagination by encouraging artists to come out of their studios and down from their towers, to come into the streets and address the public directly on the subject that matters most: real life and important events in the world. Through collaboration and mass media artists can demonstrate that art is more entertaining, more relevant, and infinitely more powerful than the kinds of mass hypnosis that come out of the zombie factory.
Television: The Point of Departure
The premise behind The 365 Project is simple.
Each day for the year 2003, a line taped and selected from non-fiction television will serve as the collective point of departure for artists to comment on the dilution of truth and the disintegration of our culture.
The Project’s staff will choose a featured line from recorded television each day. Individually, the lines themselves will encompass the humorous, the poignant, the crass, and the absurd. Collectively, by year’s end, the 365 lines will form a cogent overview of America that may well point to the decline of sanity, beauty, and truth in Western civilization.
Because television is both the universal means of disseminating information, as well as the chief instrument of establishing patterns of mass thought that result in an ongoing cultural and social decline, artists need to confront this source directly. It is our belief that television is not the enemy, only a misused tool, and that the artist’s job is to incorporate and appropriate new technology to create new art.
Beginning January 13, 2003, a line for each day of the previous week will be posted on The Project’s web site on a weekly basis. Each day of the year will feature a different line, representing a renewed opportunity for any artist to contribute a new piece of work.
Ultimately, The Project will feature 365 reasons to create and contribute art.
Year-Round Open Call for Poets & Artists
Each recorded line posted to The Project’s web site is an open call for submissions of any type of artwork. Initially, however, The Project’s emphasis will be on poets and poetry, for two reasons:
- As the advocates and guardians of language, poets are in many ways the soul and the conscience of a society. When poets are silenced, marginalized, disconnected from the mainstream, institutionalized in universities, and their discourse trivialized and diluted, who then will fill their role and speak the truth? Politicians? Businessmen? Journalists? Celebrities?
- Since poems can be published on the web site in a timely manner, it is our hope and expectation that other artists will use some of the poetry as inspiration in addition to the taped line from television, thereby extending the Project’s possibilities and broadening the web of collaboration.
The posted lines and the poetry that is created from those lines will provide multiple dimensions of inspiration for musicians, painters, collage artists, filmmakers, installation artists and any other type of artist who wants to create and contribute.
Entertainment: The Point of Differentiation
“Arts & entertainment” is widely used term that implies a cozy relationship when in fact their connection is closer to the phrase “heaven & hell.”
By and large, most “entertainment” is mind-numbing, mass-marketed product that is passive, controlled and costs a lot of money. It’s a diet of pure sugar and salt with no residual nutrients for the body, mind or soul.
And then there’s “art”, the vegetable nobody wants to eat. To the majority of Americans, art means sulking around a boring and static museum or gallery, while literary fiction consists of strange, unreadable books. Independent films are shot in grainy black and white and have subtitles, while poetry is imprisoned in an irrelevant caste of professional poets sharing their poems with each other and/or trapped in the dead image of snapping fingers, black berets, and surrealistic alienation and banter. We intend to address these misconceptions.
Ultimately, creative artists participating in The 365 Project should be thinking of new ways to approach traditional art forms. For example, poets might send a video or an audio recording of themselves reading their poems, in addition to sending a paper version. Where possible, artists should consider collaborating and cross-pollinating between disciplines. We’re looking for a new art that breaks boundaries. We’re looking for expression with energy and excitement. We’re looking for amusement of the mind and senses that brings insight and dialogue. You might even call it entertainment.
Publication, Exhibition, & Performance
Initially, all accepted works relating to The 365 Project will be published on the Project’s web site (www.the365project.org).
At year-end, there will be a number of collective efforts underway to maximize the exposure of contributors to The 365 Project, including, but not limited to, published anthologies in both print and digital formats, a national touring performance, gallery exhibition, film, and, possibly, television.
More details on The 365 Project’s plans for exhibition in 2004 will be available on this site in October 2003.
Submissions to The 365 Project
All submissions are either completed works or project commissions.
- Completed Works. Any work that is complete and ready to be published on The 365 Project web site should be submitted as a Completed Work. The Project will accept a submission of art in virtually any form or medium — paintings, poetry, music, fiction, non-fiction, dance, video, sculpture, collage, whatever your heart desires.
- Project
Commissions. Commissions are reserved for a limited number
of projects of exceptional merit and complexity that take additional
time to complete.
- 365 Model Projects. Artists of all kinds may wish to undertake larger artistic projects of their own devising, based on the 365 concept and/or lines. For example, a composer might write 365 measures of music for piano based on the emotions the lines inspire each day, or a photographer may undertake 365 self-portraits, one for each day of the year, each a subtle and personal reflection of the effects of world events. Artists who complete officially recognized specific individual projects based on the 365 model will have their projects described and documented in words and pictures on The 365 Project website.
- Collaborative/Large-Scale Projects. Any collaborations to complete a piece for The 365 Project should submit a commission to insure that no one else is working on a similar idea and to get the project is officially recognized. Such projects might include murals, films, or installations.