I was thinking that maybe i could hold a pen on one page and add a page to the bottom for everyday. i could present it in a book type thing. but i don't know the more i think about this idea the more i feel bored and unattached from it. i might focus more on the drawings idea.

So i think i'm going to set up those pens and try that stuff out and maybe finish it by the end of the week. no new revalations.

I am going to focus on the pen seeping thing because i think that is a perfect measure of "pen time". i'm still going to do the other idea but i'm going to focus on the other one. i'm going to set up a bunch of pens around my room and my roommate is going to think i'm crazy.

i did a drawing a couple days ago about some ideas i could do and i'm going to try and upload it. no promises though.

So once again i rethought the project and decided, a long time ago actually, to do one big piece of paper. but then after thinking about that for a while i thought maybe i should do it in a notebook with a new page for each drawing. Maybe that would make it more linear.

Then at class today you talked about letting the pen seep out into the paper and i thought that this perfectly shows pen time, in a less entertaining but more accurate way. Some possible variations are: using wet/dry paper, the angle of the pen, the color of the pen, the amount of time (but i would probably hold the pen until the ink ran out), or the amount of pages underneath the pen. i like the amount of pages underneath the pen idea...

Also i just want to do the drawings of myself in "pen time" because i think it would be cool even if it doesn't really relate to the project as much. I guess with that project i didn't feel like i was discovering anything about the pen i was just giving an example of what the pen can do. that's why i'm excited about the pen leaking thing; because i really feel like i could learn something from it rather than just express an idea i already have. So i guess i'm doing both projects.

so this is the rough drawing i did of my first idea of attaching papers. just click on it and you can see it better.

Either way i'm sure i'm going to make changes to my proposal. oh well

I emailed carl bogner about it and got his thoughts on it. I am thinking about whether or not to actually draw a picture in the middle or to just draw circles or lines. a picture might take away from the sense of time. Wait! How bout if i used one piece of paper and documented what i did/what i was doing? if i went to class and took notes then i would draw a little person sitting and taking notes, i would spend as much time on the drawing as i did doing the thing. if i thought about eating a hamburger i would draw a quick picture of that! i would make a diary of sorts until the pen ran out. maybe that would help illustrate time more.

I thought more about it and thought about another thing i could incorporate into this project. i was thinking about drawing a big picture on a big piece of paper and when i had to go to class i could connect a piece of notebook paper and take notes in all cursive so it would all be connected and then attach it to the big piece of paper. if i went to the movies with my friends then i could attach another piece of paper and draw that. so ya i thought that would be cool.

So i went home this weekend and i had two five and a half hour bus rides to think about this project. I decided to do something with the pen because i don't really know how i would work with sound. i started thinking about doing a drawing that only a pen could do. i tried to think about the physical elements of a ball point pen that make it different than a pencil. At first i thought about the width of the line a pen draws and how it's more or less the same every time. i thought about drawing pictures with a pen and showing the width but then i thought a drawing would distract you from seeing the important part which is the uniform line thickness so i thought about drawing a bunch of lines. I decided that was a bad idea because you can make different thickness of lines and i just wasn't satisfied with the idea. then i thought about how the intensity of the line is mostly the same. i thought of some situations i could draw to show that but once again i wasn't satisfied.
then i came to a conclusion: not only does a pen have a certain amount of ink which limits what you can draw but also, unlike a pencil, you never have to sharpen it so in theory you could use up the whole pen without ever lifting it off the paper. i decided to draw a drawing using the whole pen without ever lifting it off the paper. sort of in the spirit of the andy warhol videos.