Bamboo Morning (Haiga), BlackBerry 52, Jump-Off – Week 2, January 10th 2011, photo © 2011 by alotus_poetry. All rights reserved. Medium: Digital collage created using MS PowerPoint 2007 & Adobe Photoshop CS2. Photo taken on BlackBerry. Poem first created on magnetic poetry board with word kits.
I was in Ely, Minnesota on a hot July afternoon when a new haiku 2 (one-a-day) notification popped up on my BlackBerry. It was A~Lotus, a friend I met through red Ravine. Liz and I were taking a break in our room at the Adventure Inn before heading back to the North American Bear Center. I took a minute to read the comment:
Hey, here’s an idea: Why don’t we do a BB 365 Collaboration? We each do our own 365 photos and manipulate them however we want to, be it adding text/poetry, collages or any other mixed media. However, we will be responding to each other’s photos. It’s a triple challenge:
A) The first individual will take the first photo of the New Year.
B) The second individual will take a photo in response to the first individual.
C) Both individuals can be as creative as they want in their own separate photos.
D) By the end of the year, each individual will have their own 365 batch.
Already in the middle of a BlackBerry 365 Project for 2010 (view the entire year’s slideshow here), I had to do some soul-searching about whether I could commit to another year of taking a photo every day. Honey, Lucky, and Ted were waiting. I tucked the idea into the brim of my Minnesota Twins cap, sent off a quick response to Lotus, and headed back to the NABC:
A~Lotus, I’m on vacation up in Ely, Minnesota right now. But, at first glance, I like the idea of collaborating on a BlackBerry 365 year. I definitely want to do another kind of photo practice next year. It stretches me. So let me think about it a little more and read over your proposal again when I get back into town. I like your enthusiasm! Will check out your Flickr account.
Sun Bleached, BlackBerry 52, Jump-Off – Week 1, Golden Valley, Minnesota, January 3rd, 2011, photo © 2011 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.
A few months flew by. I needed to respond. I agreed to post one photo each week for the 52 weeks of 2011. And that we’d call it BlackBerry 52. Lotus is a poet, so it seemed like a fun idea to also collaborate on one renga for the 52 weeks of 2011. We’d call that Renga 52 and keep it going for a whole year on haiku 4 (one-a-day) Meets renga 52.
We finally landed on collaborative practices I felt I could stick to — one photo a week, one poetry addition a week. It’s tough to do any practice for an entire year. I’ll write about the challenges of BlackBerry 365 in another post. For tonight, here are the simple guidelines that A~Lotus and I are following for BlackBerry 52. It’s a call and response:
BlackBerry 52 Guidelines
- One person posts a BlackBerry photo on her Flickr account each Monday. This is the Jump-Off.
- The other responds with a BlackBerry photo, a haiga, a piece of art, any form of visual response.
- The response to the Jump-Off must be posted on Flickr by the end of the next Sunday.
If you’d like to join us for BlackBerry 52 each week, post your responses to the Jump-Offs on Flickr and drop the link into the comments. The Jump-Offs for January 3rd and 10th are the images above. (I’ll also add a BlackBerry 52 link to the sidebar.) You can follow A~Lotus on Twitter (where she writes poetry every day in community with other Twitter poets), at Poetry By Lotus, and on her Flickr account. Can’t wait to see what develops by next New Year’s Eve!
-posted on red Ravine, Tuesday, January 11th, 2011
-related to posts: BlackBerry 365 Project — White Winter Squirrel, BlackBerry 365: Things Loved, Things Learned
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