#performance philosophy

[performphil]

For abstracts and bios, see this program. 

[kimhebert-blog-blog]

. . . like writing your name on a tree and saying 'Jason was here,' [i]t's a way of saying 'I experienced something and it matters,' a way of throwing an anchor into something that's ephemeral and trying to hold it in stasis. That's what we do with all of our art. A beautiful cathedral, a beautiful painting, a beautiful song---all of those are ecstatic visions held in stasis; in some sense the artist is saying 'here is a glimpse I had of something ephemeral and fleeting and magical, and I'm doing my best to instantiate that into stone, into paint, into stasis.' And that's what human beings have always done, we try to capture these experiences before they go dim, we try to make sure that what we glimpse doesn't fade away before we get hungry or sleepy later.

Jason Silva in Ross Andersen's "A Timothy Leary for the Viral Video Age" | The Atlantic

[kimhebert-blog-blog]

"Movies have these transcendent moments where everything is just right . . . the film breaks through the screen and does something to you. And so those moments were what I wanted to create, and it just so happened that my craft has always been speaking. There has always been this narrator in me---I loved ideas, and part of the great love affair I would have with ideas consisted of talking about them. Talking about an idea was like having sex with it."

[0xcctylerneely]

[olena]

by { notthisbody }

In our work, we use the tools of editing: we juxtapose 'transcalar' imagery, cutting and overlapping the very small and the very large... From the nano to the galactic, stretching and compressing time, we feature time lapse to reveal the repetitive and recurring patterns across different scales of reality. The aim is to provide multiple perspectives all at once, whose simultaneous presentation might cause spontaneous epiphanies. “These patterns are omnipresent, but only when we see these patterns in a more compressed mode of presentation to we start to attend to them as such.” — This is KEY! Paul Stamet's superb book, Mycelium Running, begins with a discussion of what Stamets calls the mycelial archetype. He compares the mushroom mycelium with the overlapping information-sharing systems that comprise the Internet, with the networked neurons in the brain, and with a computer model of dark matter in the universe. All share this densely intertwingled filamental structure. A recent profile of Stephen Johnson on Dumbo Feather described his work like this: “Johnson uses ‘The Long Zoom’ to define the way he looks at the world—if you concentrate on any one level, there are patterns that you miss. When you step back and simultaneously consider, say, the sentience of a slime mold, the cultural life of downtown Manhattan and the behaviour of artificially intelligent computer code, new patterns emerge." On their own, these areas of study are fascinating. Together, a more profound view takes shape. The article continues, "Put simply: cities are like ant colonies are like software is like slime molds are like evolution is like disease is like sewage systems are like poetry is like the neural pathways in our brain. Everything is connected.” PERFORMING PHILOSOPHY: Our stated goal is to re-ignite the art of the "performing philosophers" ... like Timothy Leary and Buckminster Fuller... A post from Wildcat here on Space Collective speaks about “thinkers who act as substantial agents of change, who drastically alter the infocologies they interact with, in the process transforming and meshing the different dimensions in which our minds operate.” We care about the pleasures derived in forming new connections, mash-ups and innovative solutions for the next step in human evolution. We are working to articulate our understanding through the creation of recombinant media mashups meant to epiphanize audiences——the creating and sharing of awe; "performance philosophy" in an age of collapsing boundaries and exponential creativity. Artist Michael Garfield referred to it as "playing hopscotch across illusory divides in the intertidal zone between technology and spirituality, science and art, self and other, individual and collective.” The director of the Imaginary Foundation described our work as “some kind of Ontological DJ'ing, recompiling the source code of western philosophy by mixing and mashing it up into a form of recombinant creativity, which (hopefully) elevates our understanding from the dry and prosaic, into the sensual and transcendent.” “The goal is to prove a fresh framework and a new narrative to fill our old storytelling needs in our ever-increasing process of self-description.” Information technologies have become instruments of mind expansion, sensorial scaffoldings that increase and augment our capacity to process greater amounts of information, allowing us to extract richer gradients of meaningful data about the world and our experience. Whether its a telescope, a microscope or a marijuana joint, we need to think of these tools as aids, contact lenses through which we can see so much more than before. In the digital dimension we use the term resolution. Certainly we can appreciate how much more can be 'revealed' by having higher resolution..... and technology offering complex visualizations literally ups the resolution of our internal and external perceptions . Different Scales and perspectives of reality show how much of what we perceive is dictated by our point of view—literally by where we are and how we think. The most exhilarating realization, then, is that we all have the power to shape our experience by our linguistic and creative choices.

"A random scrap of information can trigger just the right conceptual collision. It’s hard to know which scrap might do the trick, but that’s the beauty of things like social networks, interconnectivity, and these kinds of media mashups — they constantly produce potential sparks, for free.” - Seth Godin

*********** A collaboration of /Jason Silva and /Notthisbody incorporating the work of: /elliottsellers /flight404 /dangoods /proxelltv /kimpimmel /undream /brighteyecinema /hsgn /beeple /cerealspiller /Tim Borgmann /Shawn Knol /Andrew Filippone Jr. /Felix Norton-Barsalou /Daniel Zagórski /urbanintdesign