The public domain - an uncharted estate at once as familiar as the ground beneath ones feet and as foreign as wooden lip gaskets or the joyful innocence of Parisian body odor. A realm where blue haired seniors share rose gardening tips while red banded malcontents share techniques for plastique. It is as hallowed as the first amendment of the bill of rights and as feared as the use of the first amendment of the bill of rights. The healthy mind uses more energy acting as a filter to remove unnecessary or unintelligible stimuli than it does feeding you the processed data. Sanity is selectivity. We live in a world sanitized behind our eyes, muted between our ears, dulling the roar and avalanche of information so that we can stay "tuned in" into the world and our place in it. Funes, afflicted with terrible memory, the aching inability to fail to see and store even the smallest detail of his sensorium, could not comprehend the concept of "dog", for each movement of the simple beast produced a new constellation of muscle and hair and breathing and odor that could not be linked by a single irreducible syllable. Your world teems with such a mass of endless possibilities that you cannot but become deaf and blind, senseless but for the small window etched by familiarity. The rest becomes the public domain. It is a domain of appropriation and neglect, of found objects and intellectual grand larceny. It is of voices that assert a world to their stories. It is a lacy network of special interests and forgotten public works. It is garbage and dross and nuggets of fine metal buried in tons of sand. It is the arcanery and the esoterium, a museum populated from the dumpsters set behind merchant malls and books filled from the contents of glove compartments in rusting heaps awaiting reprocessing to pig metal or tricycles. It is as nasty as your tongue in the morning and as fresh and unexpected as a desert bloom. Welcome to the public domain. Kevin Sullivan, 1990