Welcome to Assignment 2: CROWDMAP. Assignment 2 comes from a crowd collaboration enacted at the Super Arrow Launch Happening way back in ’09. The crowd was asked to build a thought map based on the word FIRST. Armed with markers, the revelers marked up several sheets of poster board with bubbles and words and lines, and the result is funny and chaotic and absurd and eerily true. (For instance: Decay, in fact, is a deal breaker. For most.) So we have here this crowd-generated work, which is not really cohesive but which (we think) contains some wisdom and some greatness and some creative truth just as any semi-random collection of connections might.
It’s your job to find/make this meaning, takers-on of Assignment 2. We want you to show us how the connections make sense, to let us know what the lines/arrows mean from one thought to another. We want you to be provoked by the weirdness of it – the frustrating careen-and-veer from total-cliché sense to inscrutable nonsense – and to make a writing or an art piece (any form web-post-able) in response. There are no formal constraints here, but we do want you to take the reference material seriously.
So here’s what you should do:
1) Take a look-see at the original thought map, which can be found here.
2) Direct your peepers to the itemized list of every thought map path which starts with “First --> Kiss --> first --> FIST --> Am I gay? --> ALL THESE FEELINGS! --> ? --> DO THEY KNOW? --> POETRY EVENING”*
3) Download the PDF list HERE of these connections for your convenience.
4) Pick one of the 285 thought paths and GO GO GO.
It’s your job to connect the dots. You can go all microcosmic if you’d like and pick one or two connections in a given path, or you can embrace fierce/foolish ambition and go whole hog. We’d like it if you’d do the latter, but we certainly would not sneeze at the former.
And no, we don’t really know what “popcorn-fux” means, either. If the person who wrote it would be good enough to let us know, we’d be much obliged. Although the mystery is strangely beguiling and pleasurably so.
Make stuff. Send it to us. Include what number path you’ve chosen. E-mail us (as always) at superarrowfliestrue@gmail if you have questions.
Let’s expand this collaboration exponentially.
Our Fingertips Pulse With Type-Tired Excitement!
Super Arrow
* We charted these 285 paths, plus more, before realizing that if we were to chart every single path that it would take us about a month, if we didn’t sleep, and more if we did. Paths were ended once they doubled-back on themselves or hit a terminal point. Pick one of these paths. There’s 285 of them. There’s bound to be one that seems attractive.
