Discarded Art

[sparr]

Prior to a few years ago, it never occurred to me that every artistic medium has as many unfinished / unpublished / unfamous works as are commonly associated with writing and painting.

A partner was involved in amateur screenswriting. Until she mentioned it, I had no idea how many people are out there writing the scripts for movies that never get performed, let alone filmed and published and distributed. She was part of a club where people met to discuss each others' work, almost none of which was ever published.

As I get deeper into board game design, I'm getting a sense of just how many designs never make it past an idea, or a few playtests of a paper sleeved copy. I'm in a community now where people are putting hundreds of hours into game designs, including high quality artwork, that only ever exist as a PDF somewhere.

My exposure to makerspaces and burner culture has enlightened me about how many LED installations and steel sculptures and such get made, maybe shown zero or one times, then put on a shelf or scrapped or thrown away. This one hit me hardest, and is why I so rarely engage in the pursuit.

I'd love to hear about others' encounters with this phenomenon.

Comments

[kdsorceress.livejournal.com]

Man, there are so many webcomics out there that have died a dozen strips in. I think at one point I was making a point of poking around randomly on Keenspace/spot, looking for things with a minimum of updates.

(*pours one out for Cat and Mouse*)

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Folk dancing, specifically Scottish Country, definitely has some of this. I mean, I've certainly made up random dances before (especially when trying to fit in a small space), and I've danced things from other people that may never get published or danced by anyone else, ever. Hell, just about every year at Pinewoods there's at least one ceilidh act that's a dance written or modified to be done then and there and never else.

(I do have a copy of "The Piper's Wife Has No Partner". I'm not sure I've ever danced it.)

Heck, even among "published" dances, because so much of it is basically chapbooks, there must be thousands of dances that are seen by no more than a few dozen people. I own not-so-many dance books, but I've not come close to dancing everything in them.

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Dude, the amount of fanfic I have written in my head is...well, okay, I mostly write original stuff, or more accurately, OC RPF nonsense. But yeah, sometimes actual fanfic, and no, you'll never see it published because I never bother to write it down. You can find on the internet if you look the first chapter of an absolutely amazing* Artemis Fowl/Harry Potter crossover I was gonna totally complete.

*This is not true in any way shape or form. Anyways, it's called Centaurs, I'll give you a cookie if you can actually locate it.

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Oh gosh, COSTUMING!! I mean, there's the whole sci-fi con masquerade thing, where people put _hundreds of hours_ of work into things that they wear for maybe six hours, and are onstage for maybe thirty seconds. The drive to have new cosplays inspires us all!

I guess this is veering more into "obscure" rather than "unpublished", but yeah.

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Chalk art!