Insights

A grad school professor of mine once related some wisdom to our class: “every artist has a certain percent ‘done’ at which they will stop working on a piece. For some people, they’re “done” when the project is 50% complete, others are “done” when a project is 137% complete.” Personally, I have yet to come …

Doneness Read More »

I listened to a podcast recently in which the guest, a visual artist, was saying that it is the job of all artists to be vulnerable and to make that vulnerability public. I’m still thinking about it. I have certainly bared my heart and soul and fear and courage and pain and love and tears …

Vulnerability in Practice Read More »

Today’s post is for everyone with a backlog of creative projects a solar system wide and a galaxy deep.  Ideas exist in the way ghosts exist; they can’t take corporeal form without possessing people. Fortunately for ideas, many of us are willing, if not eager, to be possessed by an idea. Ideas also resemble ghosts …

Ghost Brain Read More »

L’appel du vide is a French phrase for ‘the call of the void.’ It refers, literally, to the feeling we get when we’re high up, looking way, way down, and feel an urge to jump into the abyss. Maybe you know this feeling. It’s not a desire for the consequences of that jump, simply the …

L’appel du vide Read More »

Perfection is alluring. It’s shiny, calming, and I imagine it would feel really good to achieve. You know what else would feel really good? Wearing pants made of clouds and riding around town on a 20-foot-high panda named Jedediah. Too bad those things aren’t real. Too bad perfection isn’t real.

Doing things is important. I am a big fan of doing. But on the flip side of the same coin is not doing and not doing is also important. As it turns out, it takes just as much energy, dedication, and grit to not do something as it takes to do something.

New Year’s Resolutions are interactive experiences. They just happen to suck most of the time. As a designer of interactive experiences that gamify philosophy, chaos theory, self-growth, and paradigm shifts, I’ve been experimenting with New Year’s Resolutions and gamification for years.

I completed my first National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) novel in 2010. Since then, I’ve written 50k words every November. This is the premise of NaNoWriMo: Writers all over the world commit to writing a 50,000+ word novel in 30 days, from November 1-November 30. This year, 2020, marks ten years that I’ve been committing to NaNoWriMo.

I’m often asked about the name IKantKoan. What does it mean? Where does it come from? Why, for heaven's sake, would someone choose a company name that is so hard to pronounce?