12/31/2007 Year Two
Read the year-end letter to see how far the project has come and what's next in 2008: The Year of the Signal.

11/19 Return To Source
Where better to locate the pilot Bumpspark* than the first American escape, the archetype for the artist’s retreat? Where better for poetry and science to meet than in the footsteps of Thoreau and Emerson? The Walden Woods Project will host part of the conversation between Alan Lightman and Robert Pinsky at their Thoreau Institute. This is getting really good.

Just so hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. - Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist.

10/24 PBS Airtime!
Connecticut Public Broadcasting will premiere the pilot episode of Bumpspark* and assist in its development as a national PBS series. Read the press release.

Polite conversation is rarely either. - Fran Lebowitz (b. 1950), U.S. humorist.

10/15 Beyond Mashups
There are gimmicks like The Grey Album and then there are real musical efforts of collaboration between the unlikely. Hear what happens when two Mexico City artists move to Dublin on the self-titled album of Rodrigo Y Gabriela. Then stand in line with me a week from tomorrow when Robert Plant and Alison Krauss release the T-Bone Burnett produced Raising Sand.

10/8 Bumpspark* Business
The Chicago-based innovation company Inventables searches around the globe for new technologies, gathers them in a kind of swatch book, and delivers them to R&D departments at P&G, Nike and Mattel so they can bumpspark them against their products and services. Genius!

When cafe life thrives, talk is a shared limberness of the mind that improves appetite for conversation: an adequate sentence maker is then made good, a good one excellent, an excellent one extraordinary. - Vivian Gornick (b. 1935), U.S. author.

9/24 Fresh Ideas
Working minds are new minds. As we discuss dates and locations and possibilities for the first bumpspark, Robert Pinsky and Alan Lightman are also busy adding their latest thoughts to the world dialogue. Gulf Music, featuring poems that connect disparate things, comes out on 10/16. Ghost, about a reasonable man's metaphysical sighting, arrives the following week on 10/23, just in time for Halloween.

The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man's observation, not overturning it. - Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), British politician, poet.

9/10 Bumpspark.org Revamped
You're looking at it. While raising funds to shoot the pilot in the fall, I thought it was time we go a little more in depth online. Think of this as phase two of three. Read the press release or just have a look around.

8/27 The Foremost Authority
One of my backers recently handed me the book Conversation: A History of a Declining Art. How could I miss this one? I remedied the situation. Yale Press author Stephen Miller is now an advisor to the show. Read the press release and his thoughts on the art of conversation.

8/13 Oops!
Bumpsparks, more often than not, are mistakes. We should make more mistakes! Along these lines, poet and professor Cecilia Woloch recently told me to check out the poetry of Anne Carson, specifically her “Essay on What I Think About Most.” Indeed.

what we are engaged in when we do poetry is error/ the willful creation of error/ the deliberate break and complication of mistakes/ out of which may arise/ unexpectedness - Anne Carson (b. 1950), Canadian-born poet.

7/30 Location, Location, Location
The key to capturing conversation, I believe, will be looking in its natural habitat. Forget television sets or panel discussions and give me two people at an archeological dig or a friend visiting an artist in the studio. Give me clutter and action. Look at this new Smithsonian photo book, Artists in Their Studios, especially the third chapter, The Studio as a Social Space.

In excited conversation we have glimpses of the universe, hints of power native to the soul, far-darting lights and shadows of an Andes landscape, such as we can hardly attain in lone meditation. Here are oracles sometimes profusely given, to which the memory goes back in barren hours. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher.

7/2 To The Flame
The Moth, it seems, has been around for ten years, but I just started seeing the ads in The New Yorker. It is a not-for-profit organization setting up evenings of live storytelling around the country. Another sign the world is heading in creative, fortuitous directions.

6/18 Africa Whispers
Vanity Fair's latest issue features twenty-one celebrities on twenty different covers playing telephone. I'm seeing hints of Bumpspark* everywhere, but not the thing itself.

Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food. - William Hazlitt (1778–1830), British essayist.

6/11 "lightmanpinsky"
It's official! My first pair of counterparts will be poet Robert Pinsky and physicist Alan Lightman in the city of Boston, the home of Yankee ingenuity. Both teach in the City on the Hill and both understand the Bumpspark* concept while coming from completely different disciplines. Read the press release.

Both the man of science and the man of art live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it. - J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967), U.S. physicist.

5/21 The Black Swan
The book I've been waiting for! Nassim Nicholas Taleb's tome uses sound statistics to prove we can't predict much with sound statistics. Just because you've seen white swans all your life, doesn't mean the black one isn't out there. There is no better argument for The Bumpspark* Project. Read it!

Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. - Albert Einstein (1879–1955), German-born theoretical physicist.

5/7 A Poet Laureate Counterpart
The inspirational Robert Pinsky throws his quill into the ring. Read the press release.

In the thirteenth century the great poet of Florence Dante Alighieri created one of history’s literary masterpieces, The Divine Comedy. At the beginning of the poem Dante is welcomed at the gates of Hell by Virgil, the Latin poet. Subsequently he meets Cicero, Plato, Aristotle, and others who played important roles in history. The idea of bringing together great thinkers... is very ancient. And it is an appealing vision. - Steve Allen (1921–2000), U.S. musician, comedian and writer.

4/16 Rodolfo Llinas
NYU's Thomas and Suzanne Murphy Professor in Neuroscience is searching for the physical basis of consciousness. And he is a Bumpspark* counterpart too.
Read the press release.

4/9 The First Counterpart
MIT's Renaissance man Alan Lightman puts his name on The Bumpspark* Project. Read the press release.

Talk shows are proof that conversation is dead. - Mason Cooley (b. 1927), U.S. aphorist.

3/15 Cinematography Team
Fellow NYU alums Michael Schmelling & Matt Salacuse will both focus their lenses on future Bumpspark* episodes. Each counterpart combination will garner photographers specifically suited to their worlds, architecture, rock music, deep sea, etc.

2/12 FVA Fiscal Sponsorship
Film/Video Arts in New York City, a registered 501(c)(3) since 1968, is now fiscal sponsor of The Bumpspark* Project. All donations are tax free to the fullest extent of the law. Read the press release.

My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn’t just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you’ve got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren’t only bombs and bullets—no, they’re little gifts, containing meanings! - Philip Roth (b. 1933), U.S. author.

1/29 Roland Le Breton
The six-time Emmy-winning broadcast designer already drafted our Bumpspark* logo. Now he is the project's official art director. Check out his home page.

1/15/2007: Year Of The Spark
My goal for this year is simple: create the first spark. Read the press release.

The great secret of succeeding in conversation is to admire little, to hear much; always to distrust our own reason, and sometimes that of our friends; never to pretend to wit, but to make that of others appear as much as possibly we can; to hearken to what is said and to answer to the purpose. - Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), U.S. statesman, writer.

Next: What is a bumpspark?

2007 | 2008 & 2009

back to the top

mission | blog | donate | join | contact

©2007 hEADLESS FILM