During my senior year of undergraduate school I thought it would be a good idea to create a fictional Medieval French village on my dormitory floor. I set out a sign-up sheet outside my small room, and while I did get a number of sign-ups, there weren’t any peasants. A Medieval French village with an monk, a village idiot, a saucy tavern wench and a minor noble or three does not a village make, and sadly the project was scrapped.

Fortunately, some of the other collaborative art projects were more successful. Our Wall of Absurdity was a success, as was the collective scribbling assignment. The Puppet Theatre, tiled in old Far Side daily calendar pages, was a moderate success (many objected to being subjected to surprise renditions of Medea acted out by cut-outs of popular musicians from Rolling Strone), as was the web-cam-that-was-really-a-raisin-bran-box.

My personal favorite, however, was the Mad Cow project. I had one hundred index cards, all traced by me with a cow cookie cutter; each one was numbered. I left them outside my door in an envelope, and handed a few out. I got about seventy-five of them back, and each one was hung outside my door in the order it was received. Each one was hand colored or painted, and they were amazingly diverse and creative, from the seductive Moostress to the sinister Cownt. There was even a Cowndom, with a functional condom attached.

Art is not without its detractors. We had constant problems with people borrowing the carpet samples from the Wall of Absurdity. The Puppet Theatre was destroyed in a fit of drunken rage days before donation to the local Elementary School. The web-cam-that-was-really-a-raisin-bran-box was abducted (and fortunately recovered), and the Cowndom was pillaged by a desperate student.