A bucket is a middleman. It was originally used to transport water from fountains or wells, but is also traditionally used to carry paint, dirt, sand, foods, and many innumerable substances. It is a temporary space for the transition of a material from one state to another, usually from its source to its permanent residence. In a way, everything that exists can be seen as a bucket for the transformation of a substance along its journey; atoms carry particles from one energy state to another, bodies carry organs from birth to death, minds carry ideas in constant transformation, and the earth carries life from its start to its end. Even the solar system carries stars and planets across the universe. If you take this line of thought to its natural conclusion you reach that which is a container for everything, as everything is in transition. We like to call that idea the Omnibucket, and have used that idea as inspiration for what you have stumbled upon here.
In the grand tradition of buckets, Omnibucket.com is also a middleman. It is an incubator for creativity, carrying both projects from isolated idea through the transformation of collaboration to fully realized productions, as well as carrying the creators as they grow in their career. Since a bucket is the most basic form of vessel whose purpose is transformation, to be in accordance then, it is not our goal for projects or people to find their final resting place at Omnibucket, but merely to use this space to grow and transform until they are ready to find permanent reservoirs in the public eye, a lifelong pursuit, or a mass media machine. Omnibucket is to be used, so please use it kindly.
If you’d like to dig further, here are a few other interesting ways of thinking about buckets.
• In the old master-apprentice relationship, it was part of the apprentice’s job to carry the master’s bucket. The masters methods were taught by having the apprentice follow him until someday he could do it himself. Since life is nothing except learning, you can think of Omnibucket as a bucket for all the apprentices of the world to carry.
• The most common and caricatured way of separating things is to put them into different buckets. This system is also essentially how our very brains work. They detect the edges between sensory forms in the world and the internal ideas and representations they form. It is the most basic part of our nature and is unchangeable. We have a bucket for music and a bucket for poetry and a bucket for sci-fi and a bucket for horror, a bucket for red and a bucket for green, etc. What if you made the buckets bigger though? Instead of a bucket for music and a bucket for poetry, you had a larger bucket for both? Our brains do that automatically as well, combining lesser ideas into larger ones. Now you have a “song” bucket, made of the contents of two smaller buckets. If you keep combining smaller buckets into larger ones you get new interesting combinations that create new genres and media, new ideas, onwards and upwords until the last, largest bucket is simply ‘unity’. The balance and co-existence of everything. The world. You. I. And all the truth therein. That’s the Omnibucket, and that’s the long of it.
• The short of it is we’re figuring out how to do things that aren’t easily categorized. Why? Because things that aren’t easily categorized are more interesting and more thought-provoking. Not philosophically, mind you, but physically. Our brains have no choice but to pay attention to things that aren’t easily categorized. Uniqueness and multi-media/multi-sensory stimuli invoke thought BECAUSE they are not as easy to categorize. Quite simply, they require more attention to process fully. The trick though is to do this while still maintaining that feeling of thoughtless inspiration that is found in the simple and sublime.