DADA Questionaire
June 19, 2003
1. What is your company¹s mission, in a sentence?
To incorporate visual art, art history, and literature with modern DVD
technology to entertain
and inform.
2. What is your product or service (short answer)?
DVDs mixing art history, text, and visual art, including a booklet that
includes the text of the
DVD narrative.
3. Who are your customers? (age, gender, interests, income, hobbies,
businesses, affiliations, what do they read, etc)
At this point, oddly enough, it'd be publishers. I'm trying to interest
a publisher in the
process. Beyond them, I imagine the audience would be mostly libraries
and students, from junior
high through post-graduate. There may be some interest in the art community.
4. What are your business goals - short, medium, and long-term?
I would like to make enough money to break even for income tax purposes
(short-term). Grand
success would be to interest a major publisher in the project (medium-term).
Long-term would be
to create a series of these, whether for Laocoon Press or a larger publisher.
5. Describe your business to me as if you were describing a friend or
a
building. What does he/she wear, what color is it, how big/small, furry
or
smooth? Conservative or radical? Musician or politician? Give me as many
adjectives as you can think of. Make the list exhaustive. (We can do this
together as a brainstorm if you like).
It's mostly a way of trying to involve my talented friends in a common
project, looking to
expand their resume and increase their portfolios and create "art
moments." I also like to
create products that I'm proud of. My tagline for FRICTION magazine was
"We matter." My tagline
for Laocoon Books is "Artworks disguised as books." These would
be of a similar
nature--"Artworks that matter disguised as DVDs." In other words,
there's a use of the medium
(whether a book or a DVD) to create a talisman that actually functions
as a bridge or a window
into some larger or deeper change via art. My interest in art is predominantly
in SOME of the
"outriders" and "outsider" art, especially art interested
in art outside of museums, focusing on
art that relies heavily on the present moment, especially performance
of "life-based" art,
including dada, surrealism, mystics, etc.
6. Who are your competitors (if any)?
Not aware of any at present, but I haven't really investigated the situation.
7. List some some other products/services/magazines that relate to your
business. Who else is in your world?
Laocoon, a book press for small press poetry books. dada productions,
an art performance
organization that is more or less on hiatus. Jeff Grove and Stevin McNamera's
music will be part
of this project, as well as Jeff's design of the DVD imaging. Your logo.
Kai's slides. Darrin's
designing the booklets. The art historians whose work I plunder for my
pieces. Naropa, Penny
Lane, BMoCA for the art performances. The artists I've written about or
will write about. Those
who created the original art that I use to illustrate the works. The kind
of artists that I've
used thusfar include Jean Cocteau, William Blake, Federico Garcia Lorca,
Ginsberg, Philip
Whalen, Zukofsky, dada, surrealism, pre-Revolutionary Russian poets, etc.
8. Anything else that you want me to know about you and your business?
That I'm glad you're involved.