Detour Art Project

Through Alicia's blog, I found this project from Moleskine called Detour.

Her post of Paula Scher's notebook of type doodles just got me hooked on a plethora of you tube videos displaying the work. I like the idea of this project: creative professionals show how they made use of a Moleskine notebook. Some very creative takes, my favorites being the more sculptural pieces.

The comments on these videos are unfortunately less than intelligent. I think very few of them knew they were looking at "notebooks" of professionals. Even worse, many were hung up on the fact that these were moleskines, and therefore responded more favorably to intricate doodles than what I see as more creative attempts. More inherently creative to me are Birgit Brenner's embroidering a fold-out moleskine to make a sort-of animation, or Antonio Jorge Gonçalves paper cut-outs of classified nose shapes (each page is a profile of a person, with name on the back), or Scott Henderson's cut and folded in pages that create a sculptural object.....simply because they cross the parameters of the use of a moleskin notebook. How cliche, in a way, to simply SKETCH in one? (I am not suggesting that sketching isn't creative, just that doing something other than sketching in these notebooks does not make that action less artistic and therefore less valuable or enjoyable.) Thinking outside of an objects normal use in order to transform it is showing a completely different way of thinking, which I applaud and sincerely hope future comments on these videos take into account.
I mean, of couse no one has to like everything they see, but at least give it some intelligent thought before dismissing it completely!