Monday, August 10
Today, your exercise is to notice blue. From your toothpaste to the bus advertisements to the varying shades of sky, make note of the way blue is a part of your environment. What shapes does it take? What various colors and hues do you notice? How do you feel when it's around you? How much blue is there in your world in comparison to other colors?
Figure out how you want to jog your memory through all the blues of your day - you might carry paper and a pen, or take photos with your phone, or just make a running mental list.
At the end of the day, take a look at your list -- what does your agglomerated list of blue look like when it's all heaped together? What was your experience of attuning your senses to a color?
Tuesday, August 11
Today's warmup is all about shapes. Wherever you go, whatever you're doing, try to see the basic shapes hiding under everything. Pretend you have to write one of those "How To Draw A _____" comic strips, and deconstruct it all.
That building -- what are its shapes? That alley? Your coworkers? Your car? That hill? That garden? Your toothbrush?
Wednesday, August 12
At some point today, make yourself available. Offer your services - to an individual, an organization, or anonymously. Take nothing in return. Notice how this affects your perspective.
Thursday, August 13
Today when you're eating, begin all your meals, snacks, etc. as you always do, and pay attention to how you feed yourself -- the way you utilize your fingers and utensils. Then, after the first few bites, switch hands: have them trade jobs.
Whenever we use opposing hands, the tactile sensation of those hands sends signals to the corresponding sides of the brain, stimulating new regions. The left hand signals to the right hemisphere -- the Creative. The right hand signals to the left hemisphere -- the Rational.
How does this affect your mind/body connection? Your presence with the moment? Does eating with intention in this manner alter your way of experiencing the meal? Your sensation of nourishment?
Friday, August 14
Begin with a piece of blank paper and a drawing utensil. Think of something to draw, anything that comes to your mind, and draw one line of that thing. Now, drop that thought of the thing you were going to draw and look at the line on the page as if you didn't draw it. What might that line be part of? Once a new image comes into your mind, draw the next line on the page in pursuit of drawing that new thing. Then again, drop that image and consider the lines. As soon as a new image pops up, draw the next line and so on. At a certain point, the lines on the page will reach a tipping point where the picture is clearly coming in to focus, but even into the details of the drawing, hold no preconception of how it should ultimately look. For every line, consider what the image is and draw the next line.
You can do this by yourself or with other people, passing around the drawing, each taking a turn at drawing a line.
Dérive... What Is It?
From the French dériver, meaning to drift, the dérive (pronounced "day-REEV") was conceived by a Frenchman named Guy Debord in the late 1950s. According to Debord, during a dérive "one or more persons during a certain period of time drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there." Put more simply by writer Joseph Hart, dérives and the theories and practices surrounding them are "a whole toy box of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities... just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape."
Background and More Information:
Guy Debord was a member of a group of international revolutionaries called the Situationists. He wrote an essay entitled "The Theory of the Dérive," in which he explained that cities have "constant currents, fixed points, and vortexes which strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones." Most people are not conditioned to view their surroundings in this manner. Instead, if a person were to leave her house and go on a stroll, she would follow the path of least resistance, and her stroll would have no relation to the physical contour of the terrain, nor the appealing or repelling character of certain places.
The randomness of a dérive, however, is fundamentally different from that of the stroll. In a dérive, we "drift" from place to place, but we allow ourselves to be aware of the varied ambiances of space. We look to shapes to inform our decisions about whether we turn left or right; we feel the psychic atmosphere of an area and determine whether or not it begs our entry. If a place or direction pulls us, we go. If it repels us, we turn away. We are at once playful, and constructive. Our dérive may lead us into unchartered sections of a city, or it may cause us to view a familiar area in an entirely fresh way. If we are traveling and exploring a place foreign to us, our dérive may illuminate the vivid and thriving pulse of a new space.
Color, shape, energy, and willingness to interpret familiar information in a fresh way are all components that will guide us on our dérive. All week we have been preparing ourselves to take another look at our everyday reality; we have pulled back the veil, and our eyes are open. We are prepared to let our surroundings speak to us, and we are willing to resist the temptation to project ourselves on the world around us. Instead of blazing our own trail and talking to the world, we are ready to be pulled along. We are ready to listen, and to learn.
A dérive often takes place within a deliberately limited period of a few hours, or it may last for several days without interruption. The average duration of a dérive is one day, considered as the time between two periods of sleep.
Your Assignment:
Open your front door, and go on a dérive. Pay attention to the geometry and energy of the landscape, and let your surroundings dictate your path. Try to be open to being pulled forward, as opposed to following the path of least resistance. See if you can allow geography to move you, instead of simply satisfying your curiosity about what lies down a particular avenue. The world is trying to show you something: go along with it. Turn off your phone. Let time go. Drift.
At some point, your dérive will come to a natural end, and you will return home. When you return, we ask you to create an expression of your experience. You may use any medium you wish; simply document, record, react to, or otherwise comment on your dérive. A web-ready version of this expression (a video, photos, description, you-name-it) needs to be turned in to N.O.W. by 11:59pm Eastern Time on Monday, August 24th. We will create an online, interactive gallery from your submissions to share with other participants and the world.
Short on Time? Take a smaller bite of the assignment. You get to interpret this assignment however you wish; if you are short on time, simply set aside however much time you have and make it work. Allow a portion of your time for the dérive and another portion to create your art. Part of this assignment is the challenge to fit art into your daily life - wherever you are, whatever the circumstances. You can do it!
Sources (we took inspiration and quotes from the following documents):