James Curico dicusses the battle to create new stories and the background of the Citizen Y project...
Citizen Y and Independent Media Production From The Trenches
There’s always a side of the creative process that remains in shadow. We used to call it “behind the scenes,” but the angle shot from behind the scenes has become the new normal. The actor playing the character is, if anything, more at the forefront of the viewers consciousness.
As an example of this, here is me playing the actor JC, who played the character JC in Clark:
(More on that project in a second.)
Maybe we can see “behind the scenes” if the project has not yet been produced. I want to share a bit of a project with all of you that, so far, has not seen the light of day.
If it hasn’t seen the light of day, why should you care about it, you might ask?
Because it is a story more common than you might think. Because it is the norm rather than the exception. The number of things you haven’t seen far outweighs what you have. For every Picasso there are millions of other painters, some excellent and some awful, that you never happened upon. And of the artists you have heard of, except for when they are put under the microscopic scrutiny of historians, there are probably works in progress that never made it.
Some of these projects are abortions, some are miscarriages, and some, fighting all biological possibility, simply remain in a kind of limbo space, maybe to manifest at some point in the future, and maybe not.
The project I’m talking about is Citizen Y, and it is an example of the latter case, neither an abortion nor a miscarriage, but instead, as the blueprints of the experience we developed are soon to be released, it is something that exists as many ideas and myths exist, an unmanifest possibility. Time will tell, as it always does.
This is how conception went. In 2007, I went to the first Esozone in Portland. At the time I was senior editor of Alterati. I had the chance to meet a number of people I had been talking with online, even working with, but who I had never met in “meat space.” You can write a book, produce an album, or talk for hours with people halfway across the globe. But there is something unique about being in person with them. Something very different about the experience.
After seeing FoolishPeople perform, Joseph, John and I talked and we decided we wanted to work on a project together. Probably a live event slash film. We didn’t know what yet. We just knew we wanted to do it.
A year of writing and bouncing ideas around later, John and I had a workable script. The script itself was futuristic in content but written with a tone that is almost reminiscent of Greek tragedy, if it was parsed through the brain of someone like Philip K Dick. It is not a tone that I usually use. To an extent I was taking John’s lead with that, and to an extent it was just what came out of the chemistry of that moment and that interaction.
We had a few concept artists onboard, and we were in the process of planning the event. First we had our sights on LA. At the last minute - though thankfully before we announced, if memory serves - that angle fell through. We then spent some more time refining our creative materials, regrouping, and we conceived of doing it in London, after FoolishPeople pulled off yet another successful event there in the Abattoir.....
You can read the rest of this essay at Weaponized.
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