A Final IP Proposal?

I've realized that IP has already consumed my life, and what's scarier is that I'm okay with that. I leave the studio after midnight and can't wait to wake up and return to my projects. It never really leaves my mind and sometimes I get anxious when I can't be there. Passion is a good thing, but at it forces you to give up other things too. So apologies in advance if I take forever to return a phone call or e-mail during these next 8 months.

So our assignment for tomorrow is to synthesize our three proposals into one, and then come up with three variations: what would the project be like if you had unlimited time, money and energy... what would it be if it was due tomorrow...and some sort of compromise in the middle. It's a good exercise and it's helped me narrow down my ideas.

First, I had two revelations about my original project proposals. The ones about tourism and climate changed interested me because of a general theme of "displacement." What does X look like when placed in new environment Y? That's just how my imagination works, a sort of "what if this happened" mentality. For example, rising oceans and changing climates would displace millions of people and force animals to migrate to new places. What would those images look like and what sort of interactions would occur? As for tourism, I wanted to explore "what not to do" when you travel. A tourist is of course, displaced from his or her home environment. And as you all know from your travels, you learn so much about yourself when examined through the mirror of a foreign culture and place. Maybe that's the value of exploring "displacement," that it's an opportunity to explore the true nature of something.

For the third proposal, swarm theory and animal behavior, it was purely an aesthetic attraction to the forms of animals in large numbers together.

So what does proposal A + proposal B + proposal C equal?

"Field Sketches from the Animal Integration Project"
The premise: At some point in the future, we've destroyed all natural environments. In order to preserve biodiversity, we've tried to integrated animals into our urban society. What are their new roles? How have we adapted to having random animals part of our everyday life? It's completely outrageous and exaggerated and I have so many ideas I can't wait to translate to paper.

During my research, I've compiled a list of the collective nouns for animals groups (these are all from the San Diego Zoo website):
-a knot of toads
-a congregation of alligators
-a flamboyance of flamingos
-a wisdom of wombats
-a smack of jellyfish
-a flutter of butterflies
-a wake of buzzards
-a glaring of cats
-a hurtle of sheep
-an army of caterpillars
-a peep of chickens

Now, I don't know about you, but when I see those phrases, I immediately see images in my mind. A congregation of alligators? a bunch of alligators in church, maybe in the south, wearing big hats and white gloves and fanning themselves, are they Baptist? A wisdom of wombats? Library aides somewhere on a college campus, or maybe they're religious figures, or maybe they're answering psychic hotlines like Ms. Cleo, or maybe they're sweatshop workers in a fortune cookie factory.

I think you see where I'm going with this. I guess I'm also trying to have visual puns and wit, where perhaps the phrases are illustrated maybe a bit too literally. Or I'm taking creative license with the English language (a hurtle of sheep? wouldn't it be funnier to draw a "hurdle" of sheep at a track meet?). Dad, I hope you're proud at how cheesy some of these ideas are.

Anyway, this seems like it should sustain me for the next year. I'm not sure how the final work will look, but that's okay right now. I'll keep you posted.