But we're going to find out.
Stay in touch to find out when they happen: info at artinstall.org
Fellow enthusiasts and life minded people, greetings! We invite you to connect with us, a randy crew of artivists, in a black box evening of boundless potentiality, where audience is performance, art is ceremony, blank canvas our temple.
What is an Artivist? We aim to take the experience of everyday life and entertainment and extrovert it into the world of art, as we believe a much needed cultural shift has begun, riding on a wave of Romantics, Surrealists, Dadaists, Abstractionists, Minimalists, Modernists and Postmodernists, to the Digital Age of Electronic Media, Generative Evolutionary Art (music, visualization, digital poetry etc), to interactive noncommercial festivals such as Burning Man and Ecstatic Dances and beyond. We hope to bring deeper meaning to our experience as fun loving community of sentient beings in the modern age and avert the dystopic predictions made famous by science fiction and cyberpunk tales where splendid candy coated entertainments distract us from the true revolution, namely return to nature, reality and one-ness with the web of life.
Why Entertainment? People are not moved by the truth, they are moved by desire. We agree with the words of French artist Guy Debord, who felt passionately that vital art could only exist “beyond the ruins of the modern spectacle,” with the spectacle defined as the array of capitalist entertainments and promotions keeping people alienated from the natural world. Entertainment is the art world’s last frontier, and here in Hawaii the heights of Western culture are at the edge of another of incredible beauty, the meeting of which has the potential to re-connect and shape the earth in powerful, world changing ways. In this modern clash of cultures we do not agree with the art cognoscenti’s larger resistance to what is perceived as indulgence in gratuitous pleasure for the masses, namely easily accessible entertainment, the tools, traditions, and enjoyments of everyday life, or simply “parties”. In the information age we see meaning emergent on principle, we understand there is limitless potential in every interaction, patterns evolve everywhere that re-affirm life and our responsibility to honor it. In response, we who count ourselves as culturophiles desire to evolve into a state of natural appreciation, to strip away the distinction between art and entertainment, restore the sublime in joyous connection, and share our successes in that journey where we find them.
Why Art? In an increasingly Western secular world, we find the only spiritual sustenance comes with an increasingly materialist world view, but amid the materialism, art is the fetish still able to instill and facilitate a complex of psychological requirements: catharsis, self-atonement, elevated consciousness, identity transference, the creative drive. But works of art are not merely representations of the way things are, they actually produce a community's shared understanding, they can be world changing. We here in Hawaii have a chance to bring together our global connections but also channel from deep roots to the natural world thru our individual psyches and experiences. We can and must re-develop the aesthetics of entertainment, so that new temples of our artistic worship can re-connect and ground us in our daily lives and connect us with wellsprings of inspiration, responsibility, and trancendence.
Onwards, to Art Install. With this first foray into proof of concept, we understand meaning doesn’t reside inside the art object but in the context, space and interaction with it. We intend to turn the theatre black box into museum, or better, a temple, to oversee a kaleidoscopic array of recombinant materiality and imagery with intent to release the poetic mind. We intend to expose limitations of our mind, community, cultural priority sets, social constraints, and encourage people to activate from the subconcious and desire to be part of something meaningful. We recognize no problem can be solved by the conciousness that created it, but art can reveal the limitations to be transcended. We will examine the nature of the creative process and seek freedom from the tyranny of the mundane by giving it meaning in small, humorous ways we can easily appreciate. Thru live action we will destroy fear, embarrassment, and oppressive solemnity to find an energetic, honest and aesthetic way of praying as a community of complex modern individuals. This interactive journey is up to us, together we must find a way. Life and its sacred sources of inspiration is our guiding principle, our north star. Lets prepare the canoe in celebration.