Artist and designer Steven Sanders, curly of beard and intense of eyes, launched a Kickstarter yesterday for his new project Symbiosis. A massive 100+ page art book, Symbiosis is designed with the idea that people will be able to take the ideas and visuals created by Sanders and do whatever they want with them. They can spin it off into their own stories and creations, building a larger world outside the book itself.  sym1

Incentives include props designed and seen in the book, as well as shirts and PDF versions of the hardcover. Sanders, who you should by all rights remember from books like SWORD, Our Love is Real, and Five Fists of Science, lays out the central idea thus:

I’ve spent a lot of time in the fan-bases of various genres, and feel that inside of every consumer is a creatorThe fans are just as much a part of the process of story-building as the creators are. At its core, that is what this book is about: you becoming my co-creator. Symbiosis is a world-building art book that tells the story of a woman’s travels through a world where the symbiotic relationship that we have with technology is made much more visceral. All sources of power are generated by bio-etheric engines, with which the operators share a direct mental link. The story-telling is loose and mostly visualIt will be told with art that uses a variety of media and formats: fully painted, colored line art, black-and-white line art, and comic art.

What you do with this story is up to you. Enjoy it on its own merits, or take it and spin it off into any of a million different directions.

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So far the project is roughly 20% funded on the site, and I’m going to shrug off all attempts at objectivity and say that you should go have a look, and think about pledging towards the project! This is even more exciting than the prospect of a new Diana Vickers album later this year!