two conceptual art projects

Firstly, after reading Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel Mary Anne night after night and experimenting with presenting it as an operetta and imagining it as a responsive reading (which would be a big hoot, and could conceivably be slipped into a regular Unitarian service given a touch of creative justification, as I understand things) I have created a Twitter client that posts one line of a file every so often and set it to tweet a line from Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel to http://twitter.com/HankSwap every 36 hours more or less.

This is art because it is fair use of the material. A substitute is not created, it is promotion of the printed work in the same way that a staged reading at a bookstore is. Initial reactions to the concept often include "Isn't that a copyright violation?" which makes the piece about how copyright infringement awareness has become chilling.

Also, the "steamshovel.pl" script will complete the book and restart roughly annually, referring to the annual reading of Torah in synagogues, which is of course where I learned everything I know about responsive readings.

Imagine:

reader: It was mike mulligan and mary anne
congregation: And some others
reader: who dug the great canals
cong.: for the big boats to sail through
reader: It was mike mulligan and mary anne
congregation: And some others
reader: who cut through the high mountains
cong.: so that trains could go through.
reader: It was mike mulligan and mary anne
cong.: And some others
reader: who lowered the hills and straightened the curves
cong.: to make the long highways for the automobiles.

and so on.

So if you were, as a child, a fan of the book, and you use twitter, please help yourself to following HankSwap, and enjoy the treat of another line from it every few days, just like that long-running science experiment that's dripping tar for centuries or that quietly humming church in Germany where John Cages's "music to be played as slow as possible" is being performed at a bar a week (or whatever they're doing exactly.)

Second idea: a chess board on the lawn

A chess board, made by planting two different strains of lawn grass with contrasting color, one darker and one lighter, in an 8x8 grid.

The nelson-atkins museum of art south lawn would be the perfect place for this installation, but I doubt permission could be obtained. I'm not sure exactly who to ask or how to phrase the question though.

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