Playing Lars Von Trier to Tom Hart's Jorgen Leth

My good friend Tom Hart recently watched The Five Obstructions, in which Danish enfant terrible Lars Von Trier challenges his mentor Jorgen Leth to remake his short film The Perfect Human five times, each time submitting himself to constraints--or obstructions--to be chosen by Von Trier. It's an excellent movie about the creative process and about productive collaboration.

Tom has been doing a daily strip for New York and Boston's Metro newspaper for a while now and has been looking for ways to keep it interesting and lively for himself and his readers, so the movie inspired him to ask me--we've actively shared an interest in Oubapo and experimentation in general for years--to come up with some constraints for his strip.

We have decided to make the dialogue public: my constraints, his creative process, my reaction to his results, etc. You can read his introduction here and my first constraint here. Be sure to keep checking his blog over the next week or two, it should be interesting.