Micro-adventures: Spice 2 Life!

Having spent 75 days taking a self portrait of myself every day to fit the group-of-the-day on Flikr Group Roulette (see my Fugger blog for all 75 pictures), I felt it was a pity to give up the fun part. Taking a picture involved dreaming up a suitable image, preparing for it, taking it, processing the resulting image, posting it and then encouraging people to come and see it. It all took rather a long time.

I did it to see if I could prove that art could be separated from craft, part of a long term project to show that art exists in all fields of human effort. That means that you first need to learn to recognise it in a particular field, and that in turn meant trying to define what we mean by art. High art was the first casualty.

Anyway, I quit taking part as a Fugger to give me time to write, including in this blog. However, no matter how much fun this is, most of it is merely writing down concepts I have already worked out in my head. What happens, then, when I eventually finishing writing down all those concepts? Comment on current affairs, write about my home improvements or my cats? I don't think so, there are already enough people doing that kind of thing. No, I want to talk about the harder concepts, the ones where you have to create the concept before commenting on it, more like the carpenter who designs a table, makes it and then comments on it, or the artist, rather than as a mere critic passing judgement on others concepts.

What I am trying to say is that I need a way of generating new ideas. Generating new ideas is the most effective when you do something new, when you get to know something more of your effort goes into maintaining your earlier ideas and pushing them to a conclusion. Fresh ideas means getting off one's metaphorical butt and doing soemthing different. Welcome, then, to the micro-adventure.

Everyday you need to set aside five minutes for an adventure, something that benefits only your personal development and not your work or home duties. It could take longer than five minutes, but that is my best first-guess. I have tested over the past few days, on Friday I went to a gym and signed up. Yesterday we explored the lifts and the underground garage in the city's largest and best mall. Today we explored the foot crossings at the northerly end of the train station platforms, near where they load and unload the mail, which we had not noticed before today when we went to get some photos of the station for a work project.

Fitting the micro-adventure into the working day, as part of a shopping trip or whatever is fine, it is the deliberate removing of five minutes from other tasks which is important. What is scary is not knowing whether I can continue to generate ideas for adventures every day; however, having generated adequate images for 75 days I do have some faith in being able to generate ideas in the future for things to do.