We (Jeannie & Kyle) will have been together in this life for 15 years, almost to the day of your reading this email. Most likely the exact date was April 3rd 2006, but that date is not 100% for sure, rather, it's a guess Kyle put together months later and it seems to fit. (One of the first times we spent the day together involved going to an egg decorating party on a warm spring day, helpful knowledge only in triangulating our origin date) But for all intents and purposes we can just say that right now is our 15 year anniversary.
We met in art (photography) school in Bozeman, Montana and hatched a plan to hitchhike around the world. We made it as far as Isla Isabella off the western Mexican coastline when our marvelous plans sank to the dramatic realization: sailing, in reality is nothing like we thought it would be like, that is, it's slow, really, really slow and the ocean is really, really big, we are really tall, boats are small and we are both prone to extreme sea sickness.
We jumped ship after this realization and have kept to land for the most part since then. (we will likely return to sailing at a later stage in our life, but 23 year old Jeannie and Kyle were not cut out for sitting on a 45 ft sailboat for a couple of months crossing the pacific). This moment is one that defined a characteristic of our lives together which we have adhered to throughout: flexible adaptability.
Those close to us are driven mad by our last minute plan changes, we literally change direction on a dime. Be it a camping trip or a major life plan, we operate with a freedom from constraint which makes those fond of plans irritable. We see something that will further our pursuits and we change coarse to make it happen. If something is not working out we do whatever we must to make the situation better, even if that means abandoning the plan all together.
It is all, in short, intentionally confusing. Which brings us to this email you are reading right now. We are starting something new and we hope you want to be a part of it.
Many of our decisions and actions seem bananas when viewed from the outside and to be honest they are bananas from our perspective as well. There is a necessary drive to live the way we are in order to experience and become whatever we must in order to inform our art.
It always comes down to art.
The idea of Intentionally Confusing is simply to act fully upon these wildest impulses to see what happens. To put ourselves into the confusion in order to see what will come out of it. And in turn, see what amazing art we can create based on these experiences.
We are going back to our nomadic art making lifestyle for much of this year. (you can read more at length here). The important part is we feel deeply the need to be infused in nature, not to visit, but to live in the wild, celebrate and learn from the wild. Share the creations from the wild back with the world, in a tiny, small way, to help more beings spark love for the remaining wild parts of our earth.
We've struggled naming this new creation for the last ten years. We've used so many names, Homemade Spaceship, Yucca Baccata, Modern Ancient, Desert Archaic, New Tribe Textiles, Seba, Muxy Labs, Yarn-O-Gram & Moon Toad, so many more that slipped by without memory. Lots of names, lots of experiments. Some you might recognize and some never got out of the brainstorming phase.
We landed upon Intentionally Confusing while we were co-creating the MeTeORiC event in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Kyle created a scheduling poster which was complicated and overly informative which confused so many people but that confusion was intentional as it added to the mystery and magic of the weekend. Somehow, guided by the intentionally confusing, everyone found themselves exactly where they were supposed to be.
It's important to be intentionally confusing and sometimes life just comes at us in a way which seems to be intentionally confusing.
COVID, confusing. Still confusing. Will continue to be confusing for some time to come, even as the virus ebbs and we learn again how to exist with one another.
At the very least it's an honest and open assessment of what you can expect from this endeavor. We don't really know where we are headed and what we are trying to create, only that there is a great deal of confusion circulating throughout the world and through all the beings. The creatures of the forest are just as confused by the fires or the ever longer hurricane season as humans are.
For the next chunk of time we will be focused on growing and building a community around the Intentionally Confusing website. This site should be considered as a community supported membership site, akin to Patreon if you know what that is.
We've chosen to run our own website because Kyle is a secret unix computer nerd so we technically can. We are committed to this project and want full control over how it unfolds for decades to come, not to be at the will of a Silicon Valley money hungry investor serving machine. We also want to put a little distance between us and social media, so we might live adjacent to social media but not within. To do this long-term, over decades, we have to run our own website and create our own community.
We have added everyone to the site from our existing mailing list as Free Members as going forward this site/email list will be our main communication platform. It's a migration, if you will, and you'll see us posting on our social medias about this as time passes. This note here is our first announcement of this new project.
If you'd like to support us in this experiment you can do so on the site for $10 a month or $100 per year. Paying members will have a perks but most content will be free to all, always. We hope we will inspire some to help fund the projects we have in mind and want an easy way for those to choose to do so. If you'd rather not pitch in a few hard earned dollars that is totally understood by us - we hope you still stick around and enjoy this experiment. If everyone would share a little bit about this once in a while with your friends we can see together if this small ember might grow into a fire.
The core of the project is an experiment in funding wild art projects over the span of many decades. The more traditional way to do this would be in academia, grants, or some sort of crazy rich benefactors. Our wildly connected world now allows us the ability to crowd fund instead, (and it works!) as proven by everyone's favorite local band to the most recent presidential campaign.
This moment is a great democratization of the art making process, where The People choose to help create art they love instead of just the ultra rich. Imagine what Michelangelo would have created if he had a worldwide community (connected via whatever internet (pigeon?) they conjured up in 1527) instead of creating another tomb for the Medici Family.
Intentionally Confusing is our next step towards realizing some of our grander ideas which seem like amazing art projects to us but have no commercial value so to speak. We will share about these in depth in the coming months, slowly and then like a waterfall.
The website intentionallyconfusing.com will do a few things to start with.
- It will collect both Jeannie and Kyle's social media postings in one place so you can see all of our posts without having to use social media platforms. It will also give these posts a bit of durability and longevity beyond the infinite scroll which is social media.
- We will post twice a month on the Full Moon and New Moon a dispatch such as this one you are just presently reading on a topic of the upmost importance (at that moment).
- Our art experiments will all be collected here. Members (both Free and Paid) will get to see it all unfold. The next experiment is this summer's nomadic trip up and down the Rocky Mountains. We will live solely in the wild for this trip, while creating art and experimental movement in these wild places. To share our journey we will create video, writings, photo essays and present it all on this site.
- This website has a member feature built into it and you can become a sustaining member if you would like. Most content will always be free but members will have some amazing perks many of you will be interested in. More to the point sustaining members will allow us to fully investigate and create the art projects we have in mind.
- Members both Free and Sustaining will be the first to know about any new product drops and will have better chances of purchasing products from us. As we will be investigating new and different realms of our creative practice, fewer works will be able to be produced this year. As Members, especially paying members, you will be supporting and enabling in a huge way this new work and so members will be given better access to the works we do create.
- So many things we've not dreamed up yet.
We have lots of more plans, which we will inform you of as time goes on.
We are thrilled to carve out a strange corner of the web where magic can reside and be inspired by it's existence. This type of site is what makes the World Wide Web so special, magical and endlessly worth all the downsides of our constantly interconnected hyper paced lives.
This idea and this project are but in their infancy, really, just over the brainstorming phase. Here now we are unleashing it to the world just to see how it works and invite you all to join us for this experiment, even though we are not fully sure what we are doing yet. Tonight, on the New Moon of our 15 year anniversary together, is just exactly the night to release this to the world.