Happy birthday to John! I-M.net / YFIGTASOF.net project is no longer secret…
First and obvious, John is 39 years old today – HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
Now, the time has come to reveal the Super-Secret Project 2009. As some people might’ve guessed, it was meant to be released today.
On 23rd January, while sitting and reading a piece of text that couldn’t have been any simpler, yet more goosebumps-worthy; I came up with a very strange idea for a comic, featuring a stickman and a sun balloon. I drew it and showed it to a couple of people. And they liked it. A couple of days later, by a total coincidence, the sun appeared in a context very similar to the one in the comic; which was a rather scary coincidence, but it also gave me an idea.
And, a couple of weeks later, on 17th February 2009, the time came to announce this idea to the public. How? By inviting people over to participate in something they didn’t know what it was, named “Super-Secret Project 2009”. I asked Nella, a long-term site visitor and a dear friend, to help me coordinate this project; by giving her opinion on file formats, quality of pieces sent in and dropping additional ideas on the concept itself.
256 people expressed their interest in the unknown and silently advertised only with doodle banners during the last couple of weeks. The occasion behind the Super-Secret Project was, obvious to many but thankfully not too many: John’s 39th birthday. The idea was to give everyone a stencil and let them do whatever they wanted to do with it. Frankly, many things were possible. One could’ve done digital art in programs such as Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator, Gimp, Corel Draw/Painter or even the plain Paint. One could’ve printed out the stencil and decorated it any way they wanted it to: by drawing, making a collage or simply by writing into it. After that, everyone sent their finished pieces of work back to my email address.
119 of them have completed their 118 pieces of work (the numbers aren’t matching because there is a piece two people worked on). And, needless to say, every single piece created was unique. There’s one done with popcorn and cornflakes, there’s a photo in perspective, there’s a painting done on fabric, there’s a knitted sun, there are a couple of doodles. Many pieces
The catch behind the whole project was NOT to do fanart of any kind, not to write any personal messages and, of course, not to steal anyone else’s work. I wanted us all who participate in creation of Invisible Movement and YFIGTASOF – by visiting, interacting with others and supporting – to be true to themselves, to be who they are…not just people defined by the loose term “fans”. However, given that some people did not read the rules properly, yet they took a lot of time to create some stunning pieces – I allowed SOME fanart in; with hopes that people who submitted them would make it up with a totally unrelated work of art some other time.
The only thing that was remotely associated to John in all this was the stencil itself – a doodle of the sun drawn in Adobe Illustrator, originally taken from the above mentioned comic with a stickman. For those of you who aren’t keeping up with John’s blog, he used sun as the symbol that represents things in life going up and down in a couple of his January 2009 posts. And therefore, we (Nella & I) thought that this was a good idea. On the other side, the sun is a synonym for warmth, life and joy. This was just our way of offering a warm hug to someone who’s deserved it for the more or less significant impact he’s made on our lives – and in some cases, the process of growing up and getting to know the world, getting to express own creativity in a better and more efficient way. So, this is, at once, reflecting our own creativity and is our way of saying a big “thank you and happy birthday”.
Our e-book, the warmest e-book on the internet titled A Book Of Suns, can be downloaded by right-clicking here and picking save as or save link as. It’s 89 Mb in size and it was already downloaded times. Moreover, individual pieces can also be accessed through the gallery, in full-size and in many cases full quality. Obviously, it’s a birthday gift. Will it be seen? No idea. The internet is like an ocean sometimes, you have to put a message in the bottle and perhaps someday, it’ll end up where it was ment to end up at. Perhaps not. We don’t feel that it’s essential to have it picked up by him, but yup, we’d love to see that happen. With these words, the suns are being released to aether! ^_^
Feel free to comment on the suns (just be nice), feel free to leave messages of any kind (though no one on the planet can’t guarantee if you’re setting them free the same way we’re setting these suns free)…
This is how the original stencil looked like:
The stencil was available in .ai, .psd, .jpg and .pdf.
The oldest person in the project was 56, the youngest is 13. Our average age is 22,30.
70 of us are female, 49 are male. People from 35 countries took part in this project.
