Manoush Zomorodi: Hello, friend. This is an episode of Note to Self, but from when we used to be called New Tech City. Same good content, just the old name. Enjoy. [music]

Manoush Zomorodi: From WNYC, this is New Tech City, where digital gets personal. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and this is the Bored & Brilliant Project, a campaign to rethink our relationship with our phone, to reclaim the lost art of spacing out, and to be more creative. Earlier this week, you accepted challenges to put your phone in your pocket, to take a break from photos. You maybe even deleted an app. In other words, you were purposeful about when you used your phone. Then we transitioned into challenges that hopefully got you to space out, to think more. Here's what's happened so far.

Speaker 2: I found myself inspired to pull out a notebook and start writing a poem on the train yesterday. I don't think I've ever been inspired to write a poem in my life, let alone on my commute.

Speaker 3: I've taken your challenge to heart and deleted a whole bunch of apps from my phone, but I haven't gotten over the amount of time that I usually spend with my phone. Now I just turn it on and look at it.

Speaker 2: It's been a challenge to resist the call of my phone, but I'm enjoying it a little more each day. I haven't checked Twitter in about six and a half hours, I think.

Speaker 3: It reminded me of standing at the refrigerator door, having opened it for the millionth time, wondering if perhaps some new food had materialized.

Manoush Zomorodi: Something is happening here. Now for your final challenge-

[music]

Manoush Zomorodi: A very specific exercise in creativity and a chance to get to know yourself a little better, all courtesy of the artist Nina Katchadourian.

Nina Katchadourian: Boredom is, in some ways, my cover for this whole-- [crosstalk]

Manoush Zomorodi: Boredom is Nina's muse, something that she's made a career out of. Here she is giving a presentation about her series called Seat Assignment.

Nina Katchadourian: Here's what happened. In 2010, I was on a flight headed from LaGuardia to Atlanta. I sat down in my seat, and I thought, "Here is two and a half hours of perfectly good time ahead of me. Why is it that somehow the impulse is to consider this time already wasted?" I thought, "Maybe what I could try to do is to think about this time the way that I would try to be thinking about time in my studio, where I was trying to be alert and optimistic." I thought, "Why don't I just give myself that task? I'm just going to try to make things the entire way to Atlanta."

Manoush Zomorodi: All Nina had to work with was the stuff in her handbag and in the seat pocket in front of her, plus some in-flight snacks.

Nina Katchadourian: A lot happened on that flight.

Manoush Zomorodi: Nina ended up making crazy collages with pages ripped from inflight magazines overlaid with lint from her sweater or pretzel crumbs, and then she took pictures of them. An ad for luxury skiing, for example, now appears to have an avalanche of lunch, causing Alpine chaos.

[laugher]

Nina Katchadourian: That's a very aggressive sandwich pursuing a skier.

[laughter]

Manoush Zomorodi: It's really difficult to describe how crazy, funny, and poignant Nina's work is. After listening to this, you've got to go to newtechcity.org to check out her work. Really. You won't be sorry.

Nina Katchadourian: This was made out of Lifesavers that I sucked down really thin and then made this SOS-

[laughter]

Nina Katchadourian: -sign out of.

Manoush Zomorodi: Now, over 150 flights later, this is pretty much how Nina works.

Nina Katchadourian: I spent a lot of time one flight making sweater gorillas.

[laughter]

Nina Katchadourian: These are sweater gorillas.

[laughter]

[music]

Manoush Zomorodi: My favorite is a series called Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style. Anyway, after seeing Nina's mundane yet eccentric, beautiful while neurotic work--

Speaker 5: Hi. [laughs]

Nina Katchadourian: Hello. How are you?

Speaker 5: You made it.

Manoush Zomorodi: We asked her to assign the final Bored & Brilliant challenge, and she very generously obliged. Nina, you're in charge of challenge number six.

Nina Katchadourian: Yes. I like assignments, and I like limitations. That's why I think we've arrived at this assignment the way we have.

Manoush Zomorodi: What's everybody going to do?

Nina Katchadourian: What I'd like everybody to do is to, first of all, put a pot of water on the stove, a generous amount of water. Then I want you to turn on the stove and watch the water come to a boil.

Manoush Zomorodi: This is how we'll get bored before we get creative. Remember in our first Bored & Brilliant episode, it's called The Case For Boredom, we talked to Dr. Sandi Mann, who specifically researches boredom and creativity. She did a study with cups where the people who got more bored in her lab were the ones who showed the most creativity afterwards. Watching water boiling.

Nina Katchadourian: Really traditional. A watch pot never boils. It will eventually boil, as you all know, but that's the first task.

Manoush Zomorodi: That's going to take a little while.

Nina Katchadourian: It'll take a little while.

Manoush Zomorodi: Is there an alternative? If someone doesn't have a stove, wherever they might be to boiling water, is there something else they can do as the boring task to prepare their brain for this?

Nina Katchadourian: Find a small piece of paper, and with a pen or pencil, I would like you to write 101010 as small as you can on the piece of paper until it's full.

Manoush Zomorodi: That's so boring.

Nina Katchadourian: It's super boring. Good luck with that one. The task for you all after the water boils is to take out your wallet, empty it of all its contents, and then use the contents, not the wallet, but just the contents of the wallet, to construct your dream house. This should be a house that you think about also for a specific location. Could be the house you live in full-time or a getaway house, but just that house you've always, always wished was yours in a location that you really would like to spend time in.

I think you should take as long as you need to to construct this. I decided my dream house was going to be somewhere really warm. I decided on Mallorca. [laughs] My $20 bills laid down were going to become a sea of water, but then it looked very busy, and I decided to tear it down and start all over again.

Manoush Zomorodi: This is a little like playing Legos with your credit cards, spare change, and old receipts, but it does actually work. We've got photos at newtechcity.org/bored.

Nina Katchadourian: You build your dream house. Then I would really encourage you to think creatively, in fact, about how you document it. This is the time to get out your phone, not before you're done building. Once you're done building, get out your phone and think about angles to photograph the house from that will really show off its particularities and majesty. That may be a really low angle that makes the house look pretty big, or emphasizes the site that you imagine that it's on, or maybe you take a picture from an aerial view. Up to you.

Manoush Zomorodi: Should people name their house?

Nina Katchadourian: I would love it if you would name your house. I think we'd like a name, and I think we'd like a location. I think I'm going to call it the Pier House in Mallorca. Pier as in P-I-E-R.

Manoush Zomorodi: We are going to compile all of these and bring them to you, Nina. Perhaps there's some sort of way that we can sort them or rate them.

Nina Katchadourian: Sure.

Manoush Zomorodi: What will you be looking for?

Nina Katchadourian: I will be looking for an interesting relationship between the building and its site. I would encourage you to spend some time thinking about that. I think I'm also interested in seeing how personal you can make this building. What will it reflect? What will it make me think about the person who made it? How vividly can I imagine you through your house?

Manoush Zomorodi: Because, remember from our earlier podcast, another thing boredom is good for is something called autobiographical planning, that mind wandering time when your brain starts to crystallize complicated thoughts about what you want for yourself, your relationships, your life, like your dream house. Plus, what's in your wallet also does say a lot about you. We hope this exercise turns out to be creative, reflective, and expressive all at once. I find something very ironic about building a dream house out of the contents of our wallet.

Nina Katchadourian: [chuckles]

Manoush Zomorodi: It's weirdly consumerist-

Nina Katchadourian: That's true.

Manoush Zomorodi: -and yet anti-consumerist at the same time.

Nina Katchadourian: Yes. I'm a little distressed at my house in progress here that the most convenient way to hold up the credit cards to create a platform of sorts was to roll up all my money into columns. It's looking just really blingy. I think I might have to tear this house down and start again because this thing is looking like totally McMansion, money, money everywhere. That was not the vibe I really wanted, so I may be back to the drawing board.

Manoush Zomorodi: If you want to see what Nina ends up coming up with, we're definitely going to post it online, newtechcity.org/bored. I'm going to go make mine right now, actually.

Nina Katchadourian: All right.

Manoush Zomorodi: Thanks, Nina.

Nina Katchadourian: Good luck. [laughs]

Manoush Zomorodi: That's the last challenge. Enjoy it, and email a picture of your dream house as an attachment with a title and three sentences describing it to bored@wnyc.org, B-O-R-ED@WNYC.org. Tell us where it's located in your dreams. We'll be sharing your creations on our website at newtechcity.org/bored. It'll be a Bored & Brilliant dream house gallery. I cannot wait to see what you all come up with, and I want to show you my lady Wi-Fi beach hut. Next week Wednesday, on our regularly scheduled podcast, it's all the results and what we learned from our grand Bored & Brilliant experiment.

If you want to tell us how it went for you and maybe be in that show, record a voice memo about what worked best for you and what was the hardest. Email it to us at newtechcity@wnyc.org, or leave us a voicemail at 917-924-2964, 917-924-2964. One last very important thing. If you've enjoyed the Bored & Brilliant Project, just a quick favor to ask. Please rate us on iTunes. Your endorsement helps new listeners discover us, and it literally takes four seconds. I humbly thank you. Thank you also so much for doing this project with us. I have loved every minute of it. Wait. Maybe not every minute. You know the parts I didn't like that much. Anyway, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. This is New Tech City and the end almost of the Bored & Brilliant Project.

[music]

Manoush Zomorodi: This is the snow outside of Nina's house. Now I'm going to ring her doorbell, if I can find it. There it is.

Nina Katchadourian: Hi.

Manoush Zomorodi: Hello.

Nina Katchadourian: [laughs]

Manoush Zomorodi: How are you?

Nina Katchadourian: You made it. Have you been recording along the way?

Manoush Zomorodi: Yes, I have been. I recorded the snow.

Nina Katchadourian: Oh, that's cool.

Manoush Zomorodi: I know. I don't know if it'll sound like anything.

Nina Katchadourian: Exactly.

[00:13:30] [END OF AUDIO]

Copyright © 2026 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.