Adventure Walk with Sinclair: Birthday 2021

For my 2021 birthday, I wanted to create an experience that acknowledged not just our continued need to deal with the pandemic, but also our having been beyond burned out on Zoom. I had learned a lot in the year since my previous experiment, and indeed our needs had changed quite a bit along the way.

I organized my activities around some key precepts:

Many of us are tired of synchronous video

Engaging in a way that's remote and covid-friendly is still important

Asynchronous participation is becoming increasingly enticing

There is an allure to physical objects and, in particular, letters in the mail

I had been ramping up my efforts to develop ideas around my cartoon friend Sinclair, making challenge coins and stickers for easy distribution.

Given my already stated fascination with pronoia-inducing objects hidden in public spaces, I thought this could be a fun opportunity to deputize my friends to help spread my work around the country.

So I resolved to create a shared activity. This was the plan:

Identify a list of friends

Ask for their mailing addresses

Create a package to send them:

A letter

A zine with instructions

Two Sinclair coins (one to keep, one to give away)

A sticker (just because)

Mail out the packages

Receive their videos and photos

Create a virtual space to collect responses

The coin

After spending the past few months working with Bantam Tools, I was smitten with the idea of manufacturing my own challenge coins using their desktop milling machines. With their machines, I could easily create beautiful looking coins of my own design out of many materials. I was most attracted to aluminum.

Unfortunately, a brutal back injury sidelined my coin-making efforts, so I conjured a fallback plan—custom rubber stamps and wooden coins. The fact that I still had to hand-stamp both sides of each coin ensured the project would still have a nice DIY feel—each coin was infused with a little bit of my energy.

For this project, I had already created the design, so it was just about applying it to the new medium. Two inch diameter wooden coins were easily obtained on Amazon, though I did get one set of "dud" coins that absorbed the stamp's ink poorly. So it looks like I've got some coins I'll have to repurpose for something else—maybe I'll just draw on them and sprinkle them around for fun.

Deciding to add a link

I wanted to be sure this didn't feel like a marketing scheme, even if there ended up being some business benefits to the experience. Everyone I was sending packages to understood that I'm an artist first.

I had a hard time, however, deciding to add an Instagram handle to the back of the coin. In my mind, as soon as I see a link or a social handle, a mental barrier goes up for me. Is this just someone's attempt to sell me something, again? What are this person's true intentions?

In the past I've erred perhaps too far on the side of caution. While I think forgoing any obvious form of contact information helps to generate trust, I think it's important to give people a way to find where this thing is coming from and engage with it.

If I do something sufficiently awesome, and keep the messaging solid throughout, then I think trust can still be cultivated. (See: Where's George, Geocaching)

Instagram

I had previously created an Instagram account—@helloiamsinclair—to post Sinclair art. At this moment, the account quickly fell into neglect, but it provided an easy point of engagement for the coin.

In the future, I might try a different route that doesn't depend on an account that will look stale if I constantly maintain it.

There's certainly plenty of opportunity for me to build this up moving forward!

Physical mail as the sharing medium

At minimum, I had to get coins in the hands of my friends, along with instructions. Since I've already got a fascination with physical mail, I found this to be a perfect excuse to play.

I decided to send them a letter. I got paper about half the size of regular printer paper (A5), envelopes to go with them, and got to work composing a letter "from" Sinclair himself.

I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to identify the perfect Sinclair font: should it look truly handwritten? Does Sinclair write in cursive with a quill? Or should it look like it came from a vintage typewriter that was gifted to him by his great grandfather?

Ultimately, I opted for readability. The handwritten fonts either looked obviously computer-generated, or were just too hard to read. I try to always make things easy for my participants, so I'll err on the side of function over form!

The letter itself had to fit on a page. It had to be a large enough font that it would be readable. I decided to also create a zine (more on that next) which would give people the specific instructions for the activity, so this letter would act more as an introduction and a framing.

I'm not massively happy with the design of the letterhead, but I thought it would suffice for the time being.

The signature

Would the signature be pre-printed or hand-written? Ultimately, I opted for the hand-written approach—even though it added another manual step, it would give the letter a much more personal feel. Again, the letter is infused with more meaning when the reader can plainly tell someone personally put their hand to the paper.

I couldn't believe what a beautiful coincidence this was—it wasn't until I physically started signing the letters when it occurred to me that the two 'i's in Sinclair's name remind me of Sinclair's eyes!

By adding a simple mouth underneath the letters, suddenly I had a killer signature. 🙂

The zine

I felt called to share more of Sinclair visually with the recipients, so he could be more real than just the letter and the coin. I decided to use the six-page zine format, where one sheet can be folded into a tiny booklet without the need for any staples for other binding.

I struggled the most with the title—again, a font choice that reflects on the perception of Sinclair. I love word art, but sometimes I struggle to compose it well. It's a skill I've learned a little about but would like to eventually master.

The rest of the zine was mostly just a bit of work. Drawing on the computer is still a pretty time-consuming activity for me, but practice makes perfect!

My friend's daughter commented: "Sinclair needs to wear glasses more often." I agree!

Assembling and sending

Since I was bedridden from my busted back during this time, I had to adapt my operation accordingly. My amazing lady Christina helped me get set up, including putting my printer on a small table within arm's reach so I could load the different papers.

The physical act of assembling these packages felt SO good—it took my mind off the pain of my injury and gave me such a powerful feeling of tangible purposefulness. It was also a collaborative activity—Christina and I were making this happen together, and that felt really great.

The platform

I wanted to create an immersive environment people could visit to experience everyone's videos. I had recently gotten infatuated with Topia, so I played with using that as a space.

While exploring that, two killer features helped a lot:

Existing template spaces, including one specifically for a birthday!

The ability to embed videos that automatically play when you walk close to them

The interface is still very early and required a fair bit of hacking to get this to work properly. In truth, walking through this environment with so many embedded videos was pushing the limits of the platform and my computer's CPU.

It was still awesome.

I worked furiously to assemble this platform in time for my birthday, inviting people to visit this space at a specific time. Could some of my friends run into one another while exploring this space? Perhaps that would be too ambitious to expect, but I certainly like the idea of designing specifically for that later.

An aside: I love the idea of semi-synchronous activities. I could give people a specific time and place to be, but I can also make it possible to visit anytime. If you can join at the designated time, maybe you'll meet other people while there! But you can also visit whenever you want and still have a quality experience. There's more to explore here.

Out in the world

Some photos of my friends' projects:

The final feedback loop

The last and most ambitious piece is to hear a story from a stranger who stumbled upon the coin.

I haven't gotten any of these yet. That's on me, in part, because I haven't yet created a strong invitation on the linked Instagram account inviting a response—I may yet add that.

Reflections

I loved using my birthday as an excuse to deputize my friends to participate in a project. I loved the reminder that I could so easily spread a new idea to dozens of cities with relative ease, and that I had friends ready and waiting to help.

I loved how I felt while making the art and creating the DIY materials. I loved collaborating with my lady on it. I definitely want to do more of that.

The experiment in using the proximity chat platform merits further investigation.

So, too, do my continued experiments in planting pronoia-inducing things in real life for people to find.