Principles
These principles will help you make more art, document your work, and learn from what you are doing.
Method As Medium
How you make something is as creative as what you make. Treating method as a medium allows you to test and develop techniques, tweak processes for unexpected results, and take the pressure off of yourself for adhering to arbitrary rules.
Accelerate Mutation
To survive you need to evolve and to evolve you need to mutate and the quickest way to mutate is iteration. You need a way to make lots of mistakes so you can adapt from what they teach you. Small projects that can be completed within a set timeframe and have low emotional stakes are the best way to this. Lots of small projects will help develop skills, build confidence and succeed at larger projects.
Disposable Manifestos
Movements have manifestos, enterprises have mission statements, we suggest your projects have Disposable Manifestos. A disposable manifesto can be as grandiose as a regular manifesto, just smaller in scale. Before you start capture your intention, begin with the end in mind and create a small record of why you are doing what you are doing so future generations can marvel at your audacity.
Automatic Biography
It’s important to document your work. The reason most creative work never gets documented is because people don’t know how or when to do it. For this reason we build documentation into the creative process. We create “traps” for ourselves that take snapshots of our work in progress. Photos, video, audio can all be captured at random moments to generate objective records we can later reflect on.
Self Collaboration
Even when working solo you are still collaborating with yourself. You need to play various roles at different stages of any project. Knowing who you need to be to complete a specific task helps identify what skills are needed to do the work. The process of identifying, negotiating, and enacting roles will help you organize your projects, develop skills, and give credit where it is due. Thinking about collaboration while working solo will help you more effectively collaborate with others.