~JigsawPuzzleProject



I opened the metaphorical doors of the Jigsaw Puzzle project on the 15th
of September 2005 and quickly got to work on the very first piece. The
concept was simple, it was partly inspired by my collaborations with
the notorious *TheExquisiteCorpse club and partly inspired by an
interest in the art internet culture that exists on Deviant Art.

I wanted to create a little world for everyone, a collaboration that
was not bound and constrained to anything, growing organically and
beautifully like the faces in a crowd. The giant quilt-work of
diversity took the form of a Jigsaw Puzzle, with each artwork in the
shape of a puzzle piece. The only rule that I instituted was that
every artist had to blend their own piece into a piece that was adjacent
to it.

I laid the first piece down on the 25th of September, and advertised
the newly available four adjacent pieces to be booked by artists on a
first-come first-served basis, whereby the artist got a template emailed
to them. The next piece was completed by the collaborator
extraordinaire *Bernardumaine just four days later and the project
soon started to tick over. As soon as a piece was completed, it opened
more opportunity for more expansion.

The original pieces were all in a row and all in greyscale, but then
suddenly splashes of colour started emerging, causing some mixed
reactions. Traditional stood alongside digital and greyscale stood
alongside colour. The puzzle had a mind of its own.

It grew with increasing ferocity throughout the end of 2005 with fourteen
pieces added in only three and a half months. Things did not slow down
in early 2006, with four pieces in January and then five in March. Many
of the great pieces were added at this infant stage.

Some noteworthy pieces are:


During the middle of 2006, definite zones emerged of different types of
styles. The bottom left side contained pencil, crayons and flowing
lines, while the centre right side remained strictly black and white,
with more graphic styles catching on higher up. Pieces started to
emerge with multiple shared edges and some pieces embraced the
blending masterfully:



The project would be nowhere without the help of *LilaMoss, who
was the backbone of the project. She answered notes and responded to
comments, and boy did we get a lot of correspondence, some pretty
funny stuff and some people that drove us crazy.

Thanks to ~UNformation who put together a little flash application
called the Zigzoomer, this enabled a perfect view of the project.

In late 2006 things started to go pear-shaped. The interest in the
project started waning, many people booked pieces and disappeared
wasting our time. Pride in the project seemed depleted and less
effort seemed to be put in by some of the participants.

My first idea was to make the project infinite but, it soon became
apparent that the project would be bound to a lifespan.
There were always some exceptions and when a good piece came along it
did seem to lift the interest in the project.



In 2007 the project ground down to a snails pace. Not one piece got
completed in the whole of February or July. The structure of making it
a Deviant Art group with members got dissolved and I made booking
available for anybody. The project slowly ground to a close with some
remarkable pieces coming towards the end.



I finished the project as I started it, to provide a fitting close to
our new Deviant Art representation of arty-internet population.

• 72 Pieces were completed by 55 Artist
• the average age of the participants is 27. The oldest was 52
while the youngest was 15
• 24 where from the USA.
• The rest were from Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Estonia,
Finland, France, Israel, Macedonia, Netherlands, Philippines, Romania,
Serbia, Slovakia, South Africa, Switzerland and the UK.
• 42 pieces were in colour and 30, in greyscale.
• 31 pieces were digital, 41 traditional.


Thank you to all the participants who put so much effort and time into
this project:

*AmyKollarAnderson
=a-neon-devil-breath
~Aplmf
=artistm0nk
~avsky
~bentolman
*Bernardumaine
~Black-Narcissus
~Bungakerty
~catzeyes
*chris10belgium
~dandellion
*divee
~dragontech22
=dreamweb55
*ehall
~Engel08
~epstein
~Eyeball32000
*EyeOfMaharet777
*fagashlil
*FeralFungus
~FranciFranci
!georgia-orwella
*gromyko
=harleysq
~heokawolf
~IamWhoIWasNot
*Itsuo
~kiisseli
=lila-may-qt
*LilaMoss
~Metahedron
~MistressFreeze
~mulletrat
~Nines
*Nyarlotep
*pawwwprint
~polarpaul
*pril
~PromefeuZ
~Rbc4t
=rockpiti
*shunter
~---soulfly---
*starzel
~TheNikmeister
~TheNot-FallingMan
~ThePat
~TheTrashCaretaker
~UglyFuck
~UNformation
~yakiroba
~zyphryus

This projected is dedicated to our good friend ~IamWhoIWasNot Who
is truly an inspiration to humankind.