EDITOR'S STATEMENT

There are two main levels on which to engage conceptually with the Ideas Catalogue. Initially, the reader considers each individual Idea within the publication for its content, artistic quality and for the questions it raises. Alongside this, the structure, the very idea of the Ideas Catalogue provokes thought about issues of authenticity, intellectual property, and social, artistic and commercial interactions and transactions.

Initially the Ideas Catalogue may seem to confirm the prevalent view that the artist is a solitary genius whose authentic creations arise from introspective creativity and imagination. However, by imposing the vernacular of commerce and public bureaucracy onto the Idea, it becomes considered as a product subject to the flow of mercantile exchange, and its organic and amorphous qualities become more evident. Through its interrogation of notions of intellectual property and originality, the Ideas Catalogue reveals the artist more as an administrator or facilitator of aesthetics, consciously manipulating existing systems and creating new systems to provoke discussion, induce behaviours, and conduct exchanges.

The artist perpetrates actions under the influence of an almost deterministic past-present relationship, creating symptomatic and paradigmatic ideas that are agglomerations of time, culture, society, upbringing, etc.

The Ideas Catalogue acknowledges and encourages the possibility of many mutations of an idea that exists unstably and momentarily through any number of individuals simultaneously. When the Idea becomes a product, it enters systems of investment, ownership, functionality, and "value-adding", and the artist (the editor or contributor), relinquishes control over the evolution or outcome of the idea. With this transitivity and shared responsibility, the consumer/viewer emerges from a passive role to become a co-producer, undermining the concept of originality. In his essay "Seven note on the Immaterial", Nicolas Bourriaud states that at this point "the work ceases to be the recording of a state of things and becomes a matrix, a score, an object generating other objects or attitudes. Art no longer presents a past event; it no longer constitutes a fact that the public is called upon to observe; it produces future forms, it provokes other events, it induces behaviours among the viewers." It is an obvious paradox that is embodied in the Ideas Catalogue: its attempt to harness a flow that is not containable or controllable, and sell something that cannot be owned. By nature the act of defining an idea is tantamount to transmitting and distributing it. However, As well as claiming ownership of the written idea through copyright laws, and authorship of the concept through the creation of the Ideas Catalogue system, it is largely the respect that this society holds for commercial systems that protects these products from being "stolen". (Most shoppers would not steal shoes displayed on the stalls out the front of the shoe shop out of respect of the commercial systems of ownership, even though it is relatively easy.) All industry has been built around resources that essentially belong to nobody and everybody: The claim over land through colonisation, its division and distribution by nobility, and its management by real estate agents and property developers have led to land being an unquestioned product to own and trade. The primary materials of clothing and food (basic human rights) have been channelled into the commercial system by the structures and methods created by farmers, craftsmen, factories and retail outlets throughout the development of civilization. Today, our bodies and body parts, our time and labour, behaviours, emotions, thoughts and relationships are all quantifiable and saleable. In industries such as design, advertising and marketing, a creative and astute intellect is highly valued and paid to cut through the abundance and excess in new and imaginative ways. Like all other industries, the Ideas Catalogue establishes a system that acknowledges that ideas can be qualified by the same criteria as any other service or product.