HOMO SUSTAINIBILIS

This past weekend, I had a revelation of sorts. It wasn't exactly out-of-the-blue. It was more a breaking over the horizon kind of revelation.

On Saturday, I dropped by the Burning Man offices where there was a conference-like gathering of about 150 folks all representing the various "regional" groups from around the country.

I went to see my friend Tom La Porte from Chicago, present to a break-out session on how arts organizations (or even art disorganizations) can better navigate the ins and outs of government bureaucracies, the permitting process, police and fire departments, etc.

Though I wasn't at the conference for very long beyond that session.. in the time that I was there, I was much impressed with the people and the issues being discussed.

Different folks spoke of the projects they had been working on; in some cases, for long periods of time; civic projects, community art centers, large free to the public events, etc. There was clearly a dedication and an altruism that came through in what they were talking about. I heard several references to the "10 Principles" behind the Burning Man project. Those would be Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Decommodification, Radical Self-Reliance, Radical Self-Expression, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, Leaving No Trace, Participation and Immediacy.

What united the various speakers I heard was this; each person was speaking to the point of what it would take for them to succeed on their own terms. What they were there to do it seemed was simply to help each other to sustain their various collective visions.

What defines "sustainability?" That was the question I found myself asking.

And what I began to see more clearly was how an expanded definition of that term, "sustainability" - could apply across a much wider spectrum of disciplines and activities than I had heretofore imagined.

The key for me was in seeing sustainability not only as a process, but also as the organizing principle by which that process is generated. What I saw was how sustainability could stand as a new and more specific definition of "collaboration" - a word that I had long been familiar with and whose meaning I had by now long absorbed into my core - and perhaps taken for granted.

Sustainability could then be seen as a system-wide ability of several levels of collaboration components collectively striking an effective and economic balance among all those parts so as to enhance the competitive edge and influence of the larger system. Thus the system could better hold its own alongside less distributed but perhaps better "armed" systems in the subsequent scramble for resources and public mind-share.

We tend to think of political systems and economic systems in this way because of the great number of components and "collaborative" participants involved in their operations. But the same principle could apply to 'art' systems as well. Art, at least art that is created by more than one person is by it nature collaborative. We know that. What we are less inclined to see is art as a broad social movement, as a more public and even civic-minded pursuit.

In its persistent way, and by cleaving to those 10 Principles, particularly to those radical ones.. Inclusion, Self-Reliance and Self-Expression, a great many people who have been through the Burning Man experience, and might not otherwise have seen themselves as "artists," have now become responsible for initiating all sorts of actions and techniques that are essentially no different than any of those practiced by artists who practice in more traditional ways.

Much of our current popular "alternative" discussion centers around alternative "energy" initiatives; solar, wind, bio-diesel, greening, re-cycling. And that's as it should be.

What hasn't been so obvious (at least to me) is how the act of working on such bottom-up team projects, can over time help generate new "prosthetic" affordances usable by all members of the system that has spawned them. This is the lesson people learn working inside their "theme" camps building art collectively. Afterwards, they find themselves changed in subtle but lasting ways. In a way Burning Man is art school for those who never went to art school. And if you did go to art school, then Burning Man is church for ye of little faith, in that it teaches humility, and makes a virtue of generosity, group effort and personal responsibility

If we accept in the bi-(ped) centennial spirt of Darwin, the primacy of "evolution" to all that we do and are, then we can perhaps see how such collectivized activities can have a completely unpredictable side-effect, which might be to steadily transform individuals into collaborators; into better team players, and by so doing, to extend the range and reach of our previously disconnected and isolated selves into entirely new dimensions of possibility. And whereas before, we could only sustain such activity intermittently, now we suddenly find ourselves more and more feeling the inevitability of this direction.

In a sense, a great many people by virtue of their being exposed to such seriously alternative versions of reality, have by instinct begun to "mutate," if you will, in this new and most promising, positive direction.

If the various prophecies of the future that circle us each day mean anything, it just might be that they are a call to follow this path.. to work together locally in collaborative realization of deserving systems and by so doing, to erode the focus and direction of those consumptive, isolating, and selfish principles that have brought us to this historical and globally frightening turning point.

It has often been said that the path to spiritual awakening can only be taken individually. Perhaps something conversely could be said about art.. that the path to artistic awakening can only be taken collectively. And that the crossing of these two paths can only result in a third new thing.. a more evolutionarily awakened species of human.

At this point, the call seems clear, the alternatives few. We have little to lose and much to gain by giving our hearts and minds to such generous and creative purposes. Where, of where, shall we each begin?

PATTERNS IN ALTERNATIVE ART COMMUNITIES

Let's see, howzabout we commence with a spoonish history of art in six lines?

You spend years making mistakes, false starts, following bright stars that blaze and then implode. You rise with every excitement and fall with every disappointment.. your heart breaks and then it is reborn. Surely it must even out, you say.. and it does, because over time, you realize that you are in fact the sum of all that. You respond to what moves you, you learn to practice what sustains you, and eventually you evolve a rather specific personal ritual-coded appreciation for what you consider beautiful - and with that vision tucked tightly into your cells, you go forth and paint the roses your own favorite shade of blood.

So, post-historical, what is it that keeps you going - especially when no one seems to be giving you the high sign and the road ahead is looking long and lonely. Where do you put your focus?

To the pattern, I say - to the finest and most intelligent pattern which you can raise from the blended chaos of your thoughts and those that lie embedded in the collective conscious of the time.

In my experience, I cannot escape the "impulse" - the impulse towards extracting patterns. It's what pulls us to archetype and to ritual, and what keeps drawing us back to the wellspring of the body and to those patterns of expression by which we "embody" our thoughts.

To see those patterns, we must hold multiple points in focus long enough for such patterns to emerge - like some kind of flickering 6-D image. There's a kind of "sacral" geometry to it.. to those ideas which we feel so physically, that they literally alter both our chemistry and our sense of balance. They provoke and offer us insights into where evolution has brought us - here inside this god machine physical body/bio-circus space bubble.

I am drawn to do this kind of pattern-making as a collaborative process - one to be engaged in with fashion designers, burlesque and belly dancers, circus performers, jazzy improvising musicians, beatboxers and deejays, puppeteers, unconventional ritualists and street poets, video mixers and arty visual finger pointers of all kinds. To my mind, together we reinvent the vocabulary of what is possible. Together, we become an ever more expansive paint box filled with beautiful and active agents, who each drawing from their own paint box of patterns, reveal evermore beautiful reflections of the collective death and re-birth experience.

Puzzles and maps reveal how things fit together. Art and culture forms through juxtapositions of points and places. When the relationships are dynamic, you take notice. You maintain focus long enough - your practice of patterning, becomes a pattern in itself. In this way, the range of your pattern-making expands, and so begins to appear with both greater frequency and urgency. This is the dubious gift that gives you extra aromatic insight when it is time to turn your attention back to the outside world. Through such a back and forth process, we train ourselves to reframe our experience in increasingly personal ways.

I saw an Alexander Calder show some years ago at SFMOMA. A real holy-moly experience that was.. every single piece balanced like an acrobat defying gravity.. shapes flush with color that opens on memories that glow with pure thought - like a great e.e. cummings line that teeters on the edge of expression - so very close to not being spoken, that once it does burst forth, it does so shockingly - like a newborn frog.

Makers of alternative cultures must draw soul and sustenance from inspiration wherever they find it and from whomever is willing to throw down alongside them in the name of truth and beauty. We must find the connective threads between unlikely instances - between what you cook and what I sew, between what he sings and what she hammers.

If you see it, you own it. That's the rule. What you see is yours by virtue of the fact that you made the connection, you found the hidden joint and you squeaked the hinge, and now it moves and so do all the tendons and ligaments connected to it. This is how new culture forms, and how with a WHOLE lot of focus, some section of that emergent web of influence and action might learn to speak in a more unified voice, and so better ask for what it needs to sustain itself, and even to one day possibly - oh, god-forbid, "professionalize" its radical ass. Not an easy thing to do when starting with only an empty bowl and little bits of silence, light and breath - not easy, but still VERY possible!

We are all but babies, and yet so evolved.. so fortunate really to live where nothing is certain, and all is such fuel for revelation.

The tourists take the turn-off... they can't survive the thin air of growing older and still feeling amateur - and that's the way it should be. A calling - a reason for being, is not something you EVER want to fake. For those who hear it though, the echo of your own footsteps may be reward enough.

PHASSION GOES TRASHION!

As with so many things in the playa frame, what starts as a goof ultimately with practice grows into a conscious gesture.

Just as fire-art at Burning Man has evolved over the years from an anarchist hobby into a real discipline, so has fashion-art evolved as well.

The many glittery clothes creatures that skitter across the ginger-colored playa surface continue to undergo radical mutations.

Imitation plays no small part in the evolution of any art form. It was no coincidence say, that Paris of the 1880's produced such an abundance of "impressionists." In retrospect, we label it a "school," but in its time, it was a group of awake and talented individuals who upon seeing each other's work, couldn't help but compare what they saw to what they themselves were doing.

There is a rapid and subliminal conversation that goes on around art which makes it difficult to escape the influence of the milieu in which it exists. Burning Man gives artists a chance to view each other's work in the disordering and deep single-point perspective of the isolated Dali-esque frame, and to reflect upon what it is, how it was made and what "messages" it conveys. In the course of our annual visits, we learn not only to carry plenty of water, but also what kind of fabrics and building materials best hold up in the desert's rapidly changing micro-climates.

In the desert, everyone is a fashionista. It is after all something of an inalienable right, reducible to the power of one, to express and represent your self however you like.

But even beyond this broadly democratic cross-section of individuals, there stands the ever-evolving body of work of our "serious" clothing and costume designers who continually press hard against the boundaries of the possible.

It is rare to find any dedicated fashion designer who does not deserve to be called an "artist." That said, there exists quite a spectrum of variation along which that "body as art medium" might be displayed. 

Some of our local treasures are captured below in a compilation video (produced by Satsi & Mouse) of several 2007 BM-sponsored "Trashion Shows" that featured the entirely recycled (thus "trashion") designs of Bay Area designers Miss Velvet Cream and Estar, Bad Unkl Sista, Lucid Dawn, Domini and Patchwerk Press (Field Day & Remade In America)


http://www.vimby.com/video/life/us/all/detail/3512

www.trashion.net
www.missvelvetcream.com
www.badunklsista.com
www.lucidawn.com
www.clothingarchitect.com
www.remadeinamerica.org
www.fielddaywearables.com

BEAUTY'S TRANSFORMATION

A very bright light lifted into the upper atmosphere yesterday.

An artist and fashion designer who has probably done more to influence our local art and design culture than any other, has passed away.

Tiffa Novoa, known locally as part of El Circo, was a creator in the true and mythical sense. She designed not just clothing, but the shape of the beings who wore them.

She stood astride the crashing waves of fashion time with a legendary sensibility and prowess.

There is a point in any artist's life, when they must decide to what divine force they will dedicate themselves. Oh, to imagine that moment when Venus first called and Tiffa answered.

There is in the Greek, the concept of "Arete." It roughly translates as "excellence", but more essentially, it is that guiding principle that leads to the fulfillment of life's potential.

Tiffa's was a superior soul, one whose very presence provoked humility in those wise enough to know the difference between the great and the sublime.

How many did she influence and inspire? Look around you at your next gathering, at your next "conference of the birds." Will an endless number suffice? It will have to.

She was not on the cover of Vogue because no one at Vogue had yet developed the eyes to see the "excellence" that Tiffa herself saw. They would have come around eventually, assuming Tiffa was still interested in such campy haute b'ness.

The point for her, I don't think was fame or money. I didn't know her well enough to know for sure, but from all that I have seen and heard and all that I read in her face and in her words, I would guess that the point was transformation - the inevitable transformation of humans into what they might become; given enough light, given enough beauty and given enough love.

The constellations in the sky were as god-like instructors for early man. Their names and powers were born from the stories that people made up and shared around fires.

Such stories were driven by extraordinary beings who came to earth to inspire us and to send us on great and adventurous journeys.

Look up there after tonight and you might catch a glimpse of a newly returned goddess dancing among them; her shoulders encrusted with tiny stars and laced by whispy seams.

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• Jenka's Social Creature Blog

A BARD OF US ALL!

I heard Sheila Chandra sing last night at Grace Cathedral. A British citizen of East Indian ancestry, she gained some fame during the Peter Gabriel Real World Records era. In fact, my friend Liz told me last night that she had danced a sixth grade dance solo to Chandra's 1982 hit "Ever So Lonely."

Shandra's voice is wonderful sweet and simple .. a very pure sound. The majestic shadowy cathedral provided a beautiful frame through which to experience her considerable gifts.

After a few songs, I found myself at once tuning out and tuning in - tuning out of her performance and tuning into my "experience" of her performance. It was as if the song somehow came alive in me - equally sweet and simple. This near seamless union of outer sense and inner imagination makes for a very compelling phenomenon. It's almost as if you can't tell the two things apart. It is also, in my experience, reminiscent of the type of ardent activation that occurs when a spiritual seeker comes upon their soul's teacher.

As she sang, it was as if she became a tree and I was the pool in which that tree found itself reflected. She splashed notes like a series of leaves and just so, the reflection of those note-like leaves rippled in me. It is simple, this back and forth - but at the same time, it happens so rarely - and usually it takes an especially gifted performer to effect such a transmission.

I experienced something similar many years ago, when I was invited by a friend to come hear a traveling "bard" who was in town just for that evening.  Beyond knowing that Shakespeare was called a bard, and that the phrase had certain ceremonial or shamanic connotations, I had no idea what to expect.

The audience of 25 or so gathered in a living room as this younger fellow welcomed us and began to tell stories. The stories were drawn from the native American Indian tradition... stories of coyote, of crow and of spider. I had heard most of the stories before. Their content was not new to me. What was new was the simple way that the young man told these tales. There was an ease and a steadiness - a very pure sound and rhythm to them. One thing he did that I found irresistible was to interject every so often a repeated phrase into his narrative. When he would reach the end of a movement in the story, he would mark it for us by gathering us in his gaze and saying... "and it was just so." I remember feeling surprisingly reassured and increasingly glad each time he repeated that phrase.

By the time he was into his third story, something changed for me. I remember feeling as if he was moving farther away from me, and that I was no longer able to pay close attention to what he was saying. At the same time, I remember feeling completely absorbed in the listening experience. The only thing was - I was listening to him as if he were "inside" me.

Afterwards, when he had finished, I went up to where he was standing by a table, next to some cassettes tapes he was selling. I thanked him for his stories and told him simply, that they had made a deep impression on me. His face lit up and he said, "You know my favorite part is when you stop hearing "my" story and start hearing your own story." I remember the cassette tape that I was holding at the time dropped from my hand. Yes, exactly, I said - that is what happened. The "bard," I left thinking, was the storyteller that lived outside of time and inside of me.

Listening last night to Sheila Chandra - I felt that here too, I was able to touch the bard-like spirit that had manifested itself once again as the singer inside of me - inside all of us, raising its voice in simple songs of praise.

Blessings to creation for that little gift.

I suppose not so curiously, her selection of songs were largely drawn from the Celtic and Scottish folk tradition.

Methinks there is more here than meets the eye and ear.

• Imagined Village - An Interesting New Collaborative Music Project of which Sheila Chandra is a part.

FILM TAKES A LONG TIME TO DIE

I spent a good chunk of my life as an actor. From the beginning, I rather saw myself as a physical type actor – a comedian really. What captured me early on I think was the theatrical nature of the imagination and the blood-red notion of the holy clown’s tragic but entertaining fall from grace.

You know how it is, don’t you? By a spider’s thread, we hang… and when we do happen to catch the eye of god, it only seems fitting that we should be found expressing ourselves with something approaching an acrobat’s sense of commitment.

In any case, to be an actor is to try and learn more than you can possibly perform – so that you won't come up shallow when questions of lifelikeness are at stake. Young actors must be hungry to devour the world – and I was no exception.

One common thing that actors do, is immerse themselves in movies. In the period I'm talking about - before VHS, Cable and DVD, the class movies were all foreign, and the only way to see those films was in dark art house cinemas.

Among the filmmaking giants who dominated that 1960's to 1980's period, were two who died this week, both at ripe old ages. I am speaking of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni.

Closing the book on these two adds a lush posthumous infusion into the world’s collective cinematic memory.

These were two very different filmmakers, but each a master of the art form. Remember too, at the time of Antonioni’s birth in 1912, the art form itself was less than 20 years old! These men were of the generation that literally brought the medium to its first maturity.

Check out some very thoughtful writing in the New York Times (8.12.07) with Martin Scorsese writing a tribute to Antonioni, and Woody Allen in a tribute to Ingmar Bergman.

For a young actor looking forward one day to roles of substance and depth, projecting yourself into the films of Antonioni and Bergman was a very guilty and justifiable pleasure.

Now, add to these two, that other European icon of the World War II generation, Federico Fellini, (who died in 1993), and you have, what was for me, the greatest constellation of 20th century filmmaking.

As I am not likely to go back and write something separately on Fellini, allow me to add him to this triad of transcendent filmmakers.

Now, as this is a spooniversal musing you’re reading, you can be fairly certain that there is a trigrammatic graphic lurking hereabouts to help me illustrate my point. And here it is.

Of course, this is a crude simplification of distinctions overflowing with subtle complexities. But nonetheless, the extent of my tribute is simple enough that I can allow them to stand like totems in the following trigrammatical spread.

Bergman (Spirit) was a stalker of human moments. He told stories of the sort that emerged in the course of daily life. He loved women, and his camera was never in a hurry to leave contemplation and admiration of their joys and sorrows. His great gift to us was his unflagging fascination and energetic devotion, which was revealed again and again in his patience with and connection to all that was authentic in human character.

Antonioni (Action) was a stalker of the unseen. In his newly re-born into modernism post-war world, beautiful men or women were powerless to do much more than surrender themselves to the unfathomable vagaries of life and survival. They also had to surrender themselves to Antonioni’s camera, which he used with such devlish style, that one comes to feel both dumbstruck and enlightened by the glistening Italian geometries that he so meticulously inks onto our retinas. If in life we never know whom or why anyone is, then why should film know any more? For Antonioni, life was the mystery of life, and it was his job to reveal it through mapping unintended consequences against crystalline surfaces.

Fellini (Message) Our old friend Fellini – where did he fit in? Well, more than anyone else, Fellini saw the world as he would dream it to be. A child’s spirit caught in the cocked hat persona of a maestro – a dreamer who only has to shout the name “tiger,” for one to magically appear – right on cue and twice as pretty as a sunset. Fellini was the undying power of the imagination… that daily wakes us with a loving mother’s touch and sends us upon our day, assuring us that she will be there when we return from our little adventures out in the big, wild world.

More than either of the other two, Fellini’s moments are postcards of the imagined.

An Antonioni postcard would be a suspenseful glimpse into a world not so different from what is right in front of you.

Bergman’s postcard would capture the moment when revelation strikes.

That’s all. The wheel turns, but the conditions that brought these three filmmakers and 20th century film into being no longer exist. So, what we are seeing really is beauty and truth as it existed once in a long gone world – a world that thanks to these artists and their films, will never lose its appeal or its immediacy for those of us lucky enough to wander darkly through it with them.

pARTy/SCIENCE DECODED

I have always been something of a rusty hinge when it comes to squeaking on about the convergence of art and technology.

My first rants on this subject date back to the Mac Plus days of 1989, when I first began group conferencing on the WELL. That first encounter with "virtual" community (no web yet, remember) pre-dated by a few years the buzz over Virtual Reality, and by four years, the appearance in the fall of '93 of Mosaic, the first popular graphical web browser.

The initial version of Telecircus.com, which offered the first official websites for a bunch of local arts groups like Burning Man and The Residents, launched the following summer and looked exactly like this.


From then to now, it's been one twisty Wild Melt-O-Mouse of a ride; from desktops to laptops to PDA's to cellphones to blogs to vlogs to sensors and to GPS - one ongoing revision that plows under whatever came before, which in turn serves to fertilize the ground for the next leap forward.

There is no art without some form of technology. The origin of the word itself, from the Greek word "techné," says it all - "art, skill, craft, method, system." The ah-ha for me has always been around new communications technologies, and how they have generally served to extend the influence of the individual, as an increasingly autonomous node in an ever-expanding "network" of other similarly autonomous individuals. Rather than burying us all in grim and desolate anonymity, the cumulative effect of such cyber-evolution has been to greatly extend the reach and range of individual expression. The monstrous flows of talent referenced here in the right-hand sidebar provide ample proof as to the complexity of that diffusion - even within the narrowed spectrum of alternative art/circus.

You may choose not to consider yourself a "techy"-type person - fine. But like it or not, you cannot help but be increasingly drawn into, and at least partially defined and empowered by your various "networks" - by the reach and range of your multiple communication and collaboration connections.

Concurrent with Moore's Law, which defined the long-term upward trend of increased power and lowered cost in silicon circuitry, has been the unintended effect that such expanding power has had on the way that our daily lives shape, and are in turn shaped by, such inter-personal networks.

This drawing from around the same mid-60's time period as Moore's Law is from Paul Baran, the inventor of packet-switching and co-founder of the Institute for the Future.

Look at these three drawings and you can see how he saw networks growing increasingly decentralized, to the point today, where each of us (as in the third diagram) is a central node of our own network.

It will not be long before broader and faster untethered bandwidth give us each the ability to set ourselves up as a fully-featured hub of a "geospatial" web that while integrating GPS, social software and web 2.0-like features, will enable us to maneuver (as individuals and in groups) simultaneously and freely through both physical and information space.

Seeing as how circus is among the MOST collaborative of art forms, it has always seemed to me that activating and layering live circus performance/community "models" with the latest information technology models would result in an optimum new model of collective AND intelligent fun - fun that would be at once scientifically rich with deep "meaning" and pARTy-ful resonant with immediate "experience."

Many of us more experiential types tend to put distance between ourselves and these seemingly "invasive" technologies because we imagine them to be soul-less or unfeeling. That may be of course true to some extent, but consider how all technologies of the past have had to mature to a point where they too could became transparent to the various artistic and scientific efforts that served to shape them.

What is particularly different about the new mobile technologies that surround us today is that they are not entirely independent of our physical selves. Rather, they hold a position within us more akin to poetry, in that the range of these tools are increasingly integrated into the fabric of our daily lives, and so altogether more a visceral extension of us as individuals - who faced with a crumbling socio-political safety net, have taken to leveraging life inside these personal networks as a kind of alternate life plan.

One summer night back in the mid-1980's, before I had ever touched a computer, I was in Lafayette, Louisiana playing pool and drinking beer with my daughter's Cajun side of the family, when at some point, her fun-loving Aunt Janice, lifted her Dixie beer and referred to her local circle of friends as "party scientists." Impressed with the verbal and metaphorical fusion inherent in the notion, I took that as a company name and so have spent the last 20 years tracking our collective progress towards the convergence of those two alternating currents.

The rise of the Internet has of course provided us with the three-ring and four-dimensional circus of a medium that we need for advancing this convergent cause. Every major step forward seems to involve some further erasing of the wires and concealing of the gimmickry that would keep our art from taking wing and becoming "real" magic of the sort that will ultimately enable us to ascend to that highest of high wires and to balance there for a time - seemingly without effort and in angelic defiance of gravity.

Check out this video, from a recent TED conference, and tell me if the task to which this man has applied network technology does not "feel" like art.



For more info on this rather amazing fellow, Jonathan Harris.. go to his personal website