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"The book was a celebration of the opening, which was a celebration of the book," says Peter Quinn, one of the masterminds behind publishing/performance art/music collective Creative Capitalism, in a circuitous attempt to explain Notebook, the group’s most recent project. "We wanted to present the book in a deconstructed form."

To that end, the Notebook project’s Current Space debut transformed the gallery into a factory of sorts, as volunteers wearing Creative Capitalism’s screen-printed "uniforms" hand-stamped copies of the book on a table that was microphoned for sound, creating an impromptu percussive piece. Additional volunteers soaped and washed the space’s front windows, and Raili Hamila, violist for Quinn’s band Lo Moda, accompanied the workers. Pages from Notebook adorned the walls, along with larger, made-to-order prints of some of the drawings featured in the book, and co-curator Michael Benevento set up a video display in the back room to show short films.

A slim, perfect-bound volume of collected doodles, drawings, and notations gleaned from more than 100 contributors, Notebook comes packaged with a DVD of short films that echo the off-the-cuff, DIY sentiment of the printed material. The content was gathered through an open call for entries on the group’s web site and through the same grass-roots social networking that powered Creative Capitalism’s first publishing venture, 2005’s Friends and Friends of Friends ("Getting Friendly, Arts & Entertainment, Aug. 17, 2005). According to Quinn, spontaneity was the Notebook project’s only stipulation.

"Surprisingly, a lot of people didn’t know what to send us, because it was so open-ended," Quinn says, surveying the drawings still tacked to Current’s walls. "The pieces that didn’t make the cut were the ones where people were trying to make art."

Still, off-the-cuff work by artists does form the core of Notebook’s content. Graphic designer (and occasional City Paper contributor) Bruce Willen, Artscape coordinator Gary Kachadorian, musician (and erstwhile City Paper contributor) Lexie Mountain, and artists Andrew Liang, Jackie Milad, Spoon Popkin, John Ellsberry (a City Paper contributing photographer), and Laure Drogoul are just a few of the local notables who donated their doodles to Creative Capitalism’s cause. Despite a decidedly Baltimore-Washington focus, the book includes sketches from Scotland, Singapore, and other far-flung locales.

"The idea was that there’s this worldwide underground of people creating things," says Quinn, who describes the project as a "process exercise." "The success of it was based solely on whether people participated or not."

As a "process exercise," Notebook is pretty impressive--in the vein of Found Magazine or PostSecret, the brown kraft-paper-bound book looks great on a coffee table, and it feels designed to be flipped through, rather than read in one sitting. Some works really stand out, such as Ellsberry’s sketch of Condoleezza Rice, and San Francisco contributor John Brumit’s tongue-in-cheek religious ad campaign for (apparently fictitious) Jem’s Crisp candy bars. Others are forgotten in the flip of a page, as ephemeral as their creators’ hastily scribbled thoughts.

The accompanying DVD is similarly hit-or-miss. The equivalent of having an on-demand short film festival in your living room, the disc features 22 black-and-white animations and live-action shorts that are half worthwhile, half bizarre self-indulgence, and very occasionally embody both extremes at once.

Laure Drogoul and Paul Baroody’s puzzling and more than a little disturbing "HAL 9000" finds Drogoul sliding across a stage on blocks of concrete, steaming up a space helmet as she quotes lines from 2001: A Space Odyssey and performs the iconic song "Daisy Bell," accompanied by Baroody on keyboard. It’s hard to know what to think, but the overall effect is undeniably creepy.

The DVD’s two standout pieces are equally bizarre. Baltimore DIY film collective Sike Trike’s on-the-fly, all in-camera-edited aesthetic fits perfectly with Notebook’s overarching conceit, and "Y2K Movie," its juvenile Lord of the Flies take on four Baltimore hipsters’ efforts to survive Y2K (inspired by viewing Leonard Nimoy’s Y2K Family Survival Guide, natch) is laugh-out-loud idiocy, and a nice break from the intentionally "arty" vibe that permeates much of the work on the DVD. Similarly, Anne Everton’s "A Historically Personal Account of the Sterility of Artistic Institutions" plays like a cross between Tarzan and Nell, as a naked, hooting, mud-covered woman runs howling through the forest and into a stone monument, coating the shiny marble walls with her muddy handprints. This is funnier than it sounds.

Creative Capitalism’s upcoming "product-not-product" efforts include planned fall CD releases by Lo Moda and Ponytail, and an "anthropology text" by CC co-founder and Johns Hopkins University anthropology Ph.D. candidate Todd Meyers with help from Richard Baxstrom, a visiting assistant professor of anthropology at JHU. There are also a couple of art shows in the works, facilitating an exchange of work between artists in Baltimore and Washington, and hopefully examining the artistic differences between the two cities. Across the board, though, Creative Capitalism hopes to continue to mine the unseen network of social connections that unites Baltimore’s art and music scene--and all of the group’s projects thus far.

"It’s sort of about the cross-pollination of aesthetics," Quinn says to describe Creative Capitalism’s overall gestalt. "It’s sort of like . . . if there was a caste system in the art world, these projects managed to escape that."

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