This website is a huge part of the documentation process of this project, but just as important - if not more - is the documentation on film. This project is being documented on camera and will be compiled into a feature-length documentary in 2006. The working title is "My Million Dollar Year: The Art Of Making A Fortune."
At the beginning of 2003 I was going to start a project not entirely unlike this one called My Life In Debt where I filmed what it was like to live in serious amounts of debt. However, I thought it was really depressing, and the only reaction any sane audience member could have was "Well, sucks to be you." Wallowing in life in debt for a year was more negativity than I could handle, so I shelved it. It took new form a year later as this project.
As a performance artist I'm in love with documentation. Performances only endure through documentation, but if you spin it right the documentation can be just as compelling and meaningful as witnessing the event. Documentation takes on so many forms - oral history, physical artifacts of the event, film, audio, this online history. I feel that the video documentary is important as it captures my reactions and feelings at the time these events are occuring - as candidly as I am able to make them.
I don't have any interest in making a video diary that makes this seem easier than it actually is. I think what's important about this project is that it's challenging, is a common struggle that a lot of people are going through, and is usually gone through alone. For the past few years I have been wanting to hear from someone who I didn't think was blowing smoke up my butt to tell me that they've been there and that it's hard but it gets better. I haven't met anyone who's said that that I felt I could believe.
I heard somewhere once that human beings have no real memory for physical pain, that after the pain is over you can't ever really remember what the sensation was like, only that you felt pain and some descriptors for it. I think the same is true emotionally; after the event happens you can't really feel what it was like to struggle and have absolutely no idea what to do next and to be scared out of your mind that you're making the wrong decision.
In the documentaries for The Lord Of The Rings one of the writers describes Tolkien's genius as, basically, "understanding that reality is not knowing what to do next." That rung true with me; I have to make difficult financial decisions every day, not knowing how they're going to contribute to my success or my failure, not having all the information and having to rely on gut. After the fact I will understand what decisions were good and which were not so good, but what's compelling is the real struggle and the real unknown as it happens.
For these reasons I'm keeping as true a video record of this process as I am able. I kind of understand the way new parents obsessively photograph their children; I constantly worry that the camera's on too much, not enough, pointed the wrong way, that the audio's going to be crap, that the framing is going to be wrong, the shots are going to be inconsistent, that the lighting sucks, and so on. I am trying to capture an honest account of this process.
The video documentation alone is going to require an estimated 400 hours of mini DV tape, which at this point is making me dread and relish the editing stage.