Wall Jams at the Blank Tank were voted “Best way to brainstorm” by The Georgia Straight Newspaper (Best of Vancouver 2015: Arts)
http://www.straight.com/life/546101/best-vancouver-2015-arts
What is a “Wall Jam”?!
(not this! )
A typical Wall Jam takes place in a spotless, empty art gallery with clean white walls (we call it a ‘Blank Tank’) filled with a diverse and eclectic group of people (often with innovators, students, entrepreneurs, artists, thinkers, writers…) who spend an evening/day/week together discussing the most pressing themes around a given topic and generating new ideas for possible projects/ventures/paradigms. All these ideas are visually communicated on the walls by literally drawing, writing and painting on the walls. Ideally, all of the “idea graffiti” is opened up to the public for viewing for a short period time after each session and is then photographed and posted on social media to start online conversation threads around the ideas generated. The walls are freshly painted after each session so that each session starts with an impeccably clean white surface (whiteboards or erasable materials are never used). The sessions are either video-recorded or time-lapsed from beginning to end including the repainting/restoration of the walls at the end and any construction process involved in creating the Blank Tank space.
The format of each session is uniquely designed for each topic, audience, setting, context and is usually directed by a facilitator.
See this video from a session done in 2015 at the first Blank Tank Gallery in Vancouver, Canada:
Why are we doing this?
We encourage you to try out this method to determine the merits for yourself (and share what happens with us and on social media). This project initially started as a fun temporary experiment, however, overwhelming positive feedback from past sessions gave us the sense that we should carry on developing the concept and sharing it for people to use in their own creative work environments. The majority of the early pilot sessions held in 2014 and 2015 were done with people who had no background in art (other than whatever they might have done as kids in school). Our hypothesis is that when people are able to connect back to a raw, visceral artistic process, certain parts of the brain get activated that open up new creative powers, arguably important when undertaking any process to generate new ideas.
The intention of the project is to enable progressive open conversations for important, often overlooked, societal topics around the world that result in new collaborations, ideas, inventions and ventures that benefit society.