=oceans, vacation (not sailing, but wading into the surf, encountering the infinite data space)
=looking out a window, people watching, friendly surveillance-- creating narratives for strangers; cars passing by on the highway, etc.
=that feeling when something's not quite right all day and you eventually realize you're dehydrated

thinking about narrative in terms of an installation. AIDS-3D did a thing about aliens invading earth only to discover man has vanished into his own technology (http://www.aids-3d.com/speculations.html). seems like sculpture, wall pieces, etc. could be presented as artifacts from a series of events. still thinking about the micronation idea, maybe the story centers around a micronation that is 7 years old. a nation of one, (7yrs because all of the body's cells replace themselves by then) maybe i'm trying to push too many ideas together, or maybe i'm coming at this with too much of an emphasis on "the idea" altogether, but i think that's a way of keeping the whole thing on its rails, if it can always be traced back to a narrative of some sort, even if only very abstractly.

in terms of the screens, is 3 too ambitious a number? i do think 2-channel video is such a well-worn form where the juxtaposition is super apparent.. also, how to decide which screen to put what content on? i don't think there should be an obvious distinction (i.e. screen 1 is close-ups, screen 2 is exterior shots, and screen 3 is animations) but might make sense to have some kind of thematic guideline so that screen 1 is slightly more emotional, screen 2 is more judgmental, screen 3 is kind of bored and easily distracted. i like the idea of giving each screen its own personality. it also reminds me of this contemporary anxiety over news sources. like people who say that they watch fox news and msnbc so they can get the full story or something. thinking about that symbiopsychotaxiplasm film as well, with 3 different camera crews all with slightly different assignments in shooting the same action. what made that interesting was the human element and ideas of collaboration, dissent. there wouldn't be any of that here exactly, so what would be the dramatic tension btwn the screens?

it could be interesting to position them as kind of news networks of the future, with the ability to peer into minds and predict events, and the propensity to display information in kind of a cut-up, spastic pastiche. like how eventually mainstream culture begins to repeat the avant-garde of the previous generation. i don't want to get too orwellian, though. and i also don't know that i want to set it in the future. it should be set right now. or in some imagined now, but not explicitly an alternate reality. actually it could be cool to have it be somewhat documentary. and also to function as a "behind the scenes" of its own making at times. like asking the actor's about their family lives one one screen while another plays a scene they're in? could be interesting to start mining news sites for plot points, especially yahoo! news human interest stories (those 3 or 4 that show up on the front page.) like today those are: car designs that flopped, swift's dress malfunction, 'brain-eating amoeba' kills two, student arrested in bomb plot. they're always kind of sensationalist like that, mixing total fluff pieces with real horrible shit. all about getting someone to click the page. i should start keeping track of those definitely.