I co-founded Fiftytwo Project with the incredibly talented photographer and fellow flyover artist Chrissy Deiger (check out her amazing and most recent series here). We started it more than a year ago, and finished it in December. It ran for one straight year, with fifty-two artists–photographers, painters, musicians, filmmakers, all kinds. The Project was amazing, thought-provoking and exciting in all kinds of awesome, brain-shaking ways, but this post isn’t really about the project. I can write about that alter if there’s interest.

But watching Gardner Campbell’s talk at Jim Groom’s class last week (this one) made me think again about Fiftytwo Project and this idea of affordances and published interests. Probably a third of the entries on Fiftytwo Project were people who found us once we’d started, artists and institutions who wanted to participate in what we were hoping would become, or would outline, a grammar of inspiration (is “grammar of XXX” already dead? Thanks a lot, Tom Bissell).

What’s powerful here is the idea of the online Gallery. “gallery” (lower case) in internet-ese means, basically, a slideshow or box-o-thumbnails. “Gallery” (upper case) refers to a curated space in which the vision of the curators and artists can be experienced without immediate interruptions. We anchored our Gallery with the concept of mutual inspiration; one artist inspires the next inspires the next. But we could have only done it with the ability to simply, quickly and beautifully (I’m not bragging here, Chrissy did all the designing) publish and organize the pieces.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what different shapes these kinds of empowerment tools can take, and I’ve been so ensorcelled by DS106 that I could only really imagine the shapes it makes: The Daily Create, the Parade of Properly Tagged Posts. But I forgot that I had done Fiftytwo Project, and how differently that looked and felt, what a different experience that was, doing and making and watching that occur. The inspiration isn’t just all around us, it’s behind us, too, I guess.