Information Gardens

I have been keeping journals since the late 80s. The morning rituals always included the journals (plural, because I kept a separate lyric journal). 

The main difference between hardcopy and digital journaling is that digital journaling has more capacity for information hoarding, whereas paper journals have length constraints imposed by our tolerance for writing in longhand for pages and pages (which is what people used to do in beautiful cursive at one point). 

The digital realm allows us to create too much information; We want the exformation. For me, exformation comes from what I eventually do with what I've captured. I continually cultivate the journals and transform them into something with more shape, such as blog posts, songs, albums of songs, as well as physical artworks after I've thought about the ideas.

I'm still cultivating it. This of course happened, and still happens with physical objects, as in the above photograph (not my library).

Imagine if each one of those books was an 8' x 6' painting. Digital art is some sense exformation--a conversion of the meaning inherent in the ideas to a compact form which can be more neatly organized--both in a physical sense and cognitively.

1133. All creative people should keep lists (and work in series). If creative work is in the flow of your life, why not begin the serial process and follow it through? A natural branching occurs the longer you do it. But the objective is not only to gather and glean, but to also cultivate and prune the list, and give it power to be generative.