About the Project

I first heard the term 'Boil the Ocean' when my friend and business partner JT Myers used it to describe something we would not want to do. It was the kind of perfectly deployed business metaphor he specializes in, and whether he made it up or picked it out of a Harvard Business Review article, it stuck with me, and I tried to use it as often as possible. To boil the ocean is, in a pejorative sense, to do too much, to take on an impossible task, to lose focus. As a small company, it articulated a boundary of risk.

A few years later, my friend Eoin O'Leary and I revisited it as the name of a catch all art project in which we would deliberately do too much, with very little focus, and maximal energy in every possible direction. Imagine the heat it would take to boil an entire ocean! And the fire it would take to generate that heat! Not in the climate sense, obviously. As an example we had an idea of creating a bot that would sign every single artist on Soundcloud to a record deal with no royalties, no requirements, no ownership. Not a deal at all really. But the ocean: boiled.

About 4 weeks before my 50th birthday I decided to make 100 things and give them away. Mostly clothing and textiles, hats, hoodies, shirts, the occasional towel. It was an outrageous goal, but only from a time, space and money perspective. But I could feel the flames under the water, I could see the wave massing in the pot. So I went for it. And now my hands hurt and my feet hurt and I have cursed out my Ricoma MT-20 more times than I can count. It required an archive of some sort. This is that archive. Maybe one day it will become something else.

If you have made it this far and are interested in a design send a request and I'll see what I can do.