Build Me a World

There’s a big difference between observing and doing. Observing places distance between me and my experience. Someone else is in charge of it—an artist who’s out there exploring and sending me status reports in the form of art objects. They’re delicious sometimes, but..

“Here’s an artifact from the journey I’m on, isn’t it cool?”

“Yeah, sometimes—a lot of times when you get better at knowing which artists are good tour guides—but still, it’s your experience, not mine.”

“That’s the problem. I want it to be as much my experience as possible. Give me something to play with, give me a context, an adventure and let me play. Get out of here. It’s like a videogame, really. Build me a world. Let me play in it—let me inhabit it, let me use it to learn about myself and I’ll always appreciate the opportunity you’ve given me.”

Fishbon is experimenting with “world-making.” We want to work with “context”. That’s what interests us.

“I’m an artist, sure—whatever that means—but what I want to do is get out into the woods of experience. I want to put some cabins out there and invite people—friends, because if you’re spending time in one of the cabins I built, you’re automatically a friend—and see how you experience it. What do you do? And from that I learn more about the world, and myself and what’s really important. That’s what Fishbon is about for me. I’m in love with the idea of creating something that, maybe, in its rarified form, is like an elixir. It takes you somewhere you’ve never been, and enfolds you in an adventure that heals, and exhilarates, and makes you wiser about the things you care about.”

-Clay Bodine, October 2005