About 2RE Factory
2RE Factory is my personal incubator for new projects. I give each one a number instead of a real name. Why? If a project tanks (and plenty of them do) I haven't wasted any energy building a brand around a corpse. My attachment stays with the idea, not the label. I borrowed this from Flagship Pioneering, the firm behind Moderna. They called the company LS18 for years before it became a household name.
Some projects never reach escape velocity. That's fine. A few eventually earn a real name, but the number keeps my head straight: am I building something that matters, or just polishing a logo? The incubator itself is 2RE00. The null project. Ground zero.
The top-level number is the project type. Example: 2RE01 is my postmodern art work. The sub-number is the specific piece. Example: 2RE02.06 is a 1998 photo of a cotton swab. (Yes, really.) I stole this scheme from software versioning numbers.
2RE
Pronounced "Torrey" as in my first name. Back in the '80s, arcade games only allowed three letters for high scores. So I'd put 2RE whenever I topped the leaderboard. It stuck. I've used 2RE as an online persona ever since, mostly for projects I'm actually proud of.
Factory
Two are two main inspirations for the Factory concept.
Andy Warhol's Factory, New York ('60s to '80s)
The Factory produced a huge volume of art, had great parties. and was the ultimate place to hang out. It also launched the careers of many New York artists. Most of what I do is solo, but I want to do more collaboration. I got a taste of that with Floorspace in San Francisco, which I have now retroactively named 2RE04.
Factory Records, Manchester (late '70s to early '90s)
Factory Records started as a club night in Manchester in 1978 and then became a record label. They gave everything a FAC number, not just the albums. Some examples are:
- FAC 7 - New Order's seminal track "Blue Monday"
- FAC 51 - their legendary nightclub The Haçienda
- FAC 148 - a bucket on a restored watermill
- FAC 191 - the cat that hung around the nightclub was
I only discovered them after I launched 2RE Factory, but it's eerily close to what I'm trying to build.
About me
More about me on my personal site: 2re.me
What I'm doing right now: 2re.me/now - including learning to be an electrician, traveling to Japan then Shenzhen to build robots, and rebooting 54 websites after a hacker trashed all my old WordPress sites