Utopia – the erotic mystery set in… well, Utopia, is another example of a principle I call STRETCH – taking unrelated concepts or even words and finding some reason for them to be connected. Back in my psychedelic partying times, we used to play fit the facts (remember that one Gaven?). We’d find reason to fit a few different facts. It is a great exercise for creative story telling. And indeed, this post is directed at creativity which is and important aspect of invention.
In the last post, Gorgolon was mentioned. Gorgolon is the result of the combination of a “spot the artificial intelligence” game (a Turing test) and a poem about an underwater civilization written for the space rock band, Thee Gnostics. This combination stretched the creativity and a story was born as was a number of theoretical inventions – if you read the story. Inventions are still ongoing as people play Gorgolon and make up games and stories to fit the facts of the environment. Players are being STRETCHED and the results of their thoughts are seen by the winners of the game.
Getting back to Utopia, I had written four other mysteries for Moustache Mysteries and was wanting to write another. To do so, I made use of the Tower of Babel – a Dan Zen feature where people whisper unrelated words (nonsense) into the wind and the words are taken to the tower. Here, viewers can vote on how interesting the combinations are by using the radio buttons that construe the walls of the tower and then pressing the god button up top. The more interesting posts rise to the top and the less interesting ones fall to disappear into the ground.
I happened to whisper the phrase, “Sasquatch Seeds” into the tower. I was quite intrigued by this phrase as to what it might mean. And in combination with my conviction that I have seen the Hamilton Hairy wandering the escarpment of Hamilton and stopping to read poetry to some Swedish tourists… I STRETCHED and came up with a connection. (Connection is by the way a very closely related concept to stretch and connections have long been understood as a foreshadowing to invention).
SPOILER TO THE UTOPIA MYSTERY… So what does “Sasquatch Seeds” mean? Well, the Sasquatch, like a Loch Ness Monster, is in part a tourist attraction. A seed is birth. So we have the birth of a tourist attraction. In the Utopia mystery of 1998, over 4,000 people lined up to solve the mystery. They viewed the mystery through scopes. They thought the line up was completely unrelated but it was not. What they were lining up for was a reality show. They were watching six characters, hypnotized into thinking they were in Utopia and placed in a Utopian land of sustenance. Utopia pre-dated Reality Shows by two years. At least in America.
Does the ad for Utopia pictured above take on a little more meaning now? Here are some of the other ads and posters:
Utopia Promo 2 | Promo 3 | Promo 4 | Promo 5 | Promo 6
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