Anonymous!? It's time for civil disobedience to be distinct!

I'm thinkin' it's time to stop hiding behind anonymous hoods, scarves and masks. And I'm not talking about Halloween comic book character masks. It'd be better to wear masks of  real people symbolic of the unethical acts of corporations and/or the state: people like Ghandi or Americans like Edward Snowden, Aaron Swartz, Julian Assange, Chelsea (Bradley) Manning, or any one of media's harrassed, imprisoned or killed journalists! Or how about Leonard Peltier! The "Anonymous" mask is itself derived from a ficticious character. It's time for civil disobedience to be distinct!

Future Shock 2.0

If you ask me, we should be worried more about global oxygen starvation than for example  "treating" sleep apnea as a "dysfunction"! Like maybe with many a child "diagnosed" (and drugged) for ADHD we may have it all backwards. These increases in individual events are symptomatic of larger crises. Oxygen depravation and cultural psychosis! I strongly believe many of us are duped and focus on the straw syndrome instead of recognizing the full contexts of our times. Everything being industrialized and corporatized we've switched off our critical minds, in favor of immediate succor--rather than proactive precautionary behavior and preventative measures. We're stuck on a treadmill of production and consumption.  When will it stop? When the oxygen has finally dwindled to a death dealing level. Never mind tracking your carbon footprint, how about measuring the oxygen around your head, the air in your home, your work place, your PLANET!  If you're falling asleep at work alot, you may be tempted to open a window... one day that won't be sufficient anymore.

And if you your toddler is immersed in more devices and mgps-speed imagery than gradual conversant levels of engagement, disaster may await them in the form of impatience with the pace of classroom routine! Alvin Toffler may say "I told you so," but this takes technology to the end of the super highway. In other words, programmed obsolescence of your devices, or mental breakdown from high-speed trading, may be the least of our worries. Vestigial humanity, that's what scares me. We've already detached ourselves from nature and now we're becoming more and detached from each other. It used to be physical distance separated families, now it's a firewall between all of us. And this barrier even the NSA can't breach. So, you may breathe easy where you are now—you survivalists may even feel ready for when the "grid" fails. But without enough oxygen even the camp-fires will go out!

Why I abandoned the arts.

Back in the early eighties a friend at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit Michigan said something to me in a conversation about the conspicuous shapes I was seeing in all events. She said, “You should start a religion!”  That, accompanied with some other events at school, convinced me there was a grave problem for me with respect to creating art.

       Several things had happened to the larger context for making things which forever inhibited me from pursuing a “career” as a conventional artist. The most fundamental factor was that I was all too conscious of the plundering and polluting of earth for pigments.  Secondly I felt strongly too that our collective attitudes were converging—that our vocabularies, our disciplines, our professions and our arts were incorporating concepts from other epistemological areas of study or relevance.  Thirdly I felt that serious observation was rare, and sadly, unfairly marginalized.

       Ultimately, I envisioned a future where even environmentalism through mass movement was in danger of becoming totalitarian in nature and perhaps even anarchistic. Earth First had just formed though I was yet unaware of them.  And ”eco-terrorism” was soon to become a theme in the news media.  But these developments only convinced me further I was right to be skeptical of the veracity of any environmental progress.

       Now that’s a very brief introduction to my thinking on this topic. It truly is more complicated than that.  For I was indeed leaning toward a more spiritual life, but everything about our lifestyle was and still is repugnant to me.  My life as an artist then was in crisis and eventually I decided to just consider myself a conceptual artist. I was also considering performance and sound production as a better realm for expression but that opportunity too evaporated.

       For me, if I was going to maintain integrity as any kind of artist anyway, my work had to be consistent with both my spirituality and my environmental awareness.  In other words my aesthetic, spirituality and my scientific understanding had be in sync.  And that’s where the shapes came in and why I was mistook for a crazy shaman-like character.  So I began to fear such talk could lead to charlatanism, that absolutism waits like a larvae in many a profound solution to our predicaments.  After taking a very critical look at what I was after, I began to see my proposition more like an educational tool. I called it tri-attitude, and I envisioned an all-encompassing arbiform-hourglass-like bundle of disciplines, all united as a visual epistemology. This also took on an identity as “the mother meristem” in my poetry, and then more recently as “Panapsida” in my academic writing, which is still in progress.

Today, I struggle with the knowledge that to even pursue conceptual art I am somewhat dependent upon technology and thus plunder of the earth. To share it I am in collusion with the plunder. Better to stop altogether then?  How does one in such an age where all humanity now is so much closer to sharing their literal views of their experiences via the internet, manage not to reel at the disparity. (Streaming video by the way for example is even more possible now  with apps like Periscope)  Yet one is still distal to the staggering poverty and violence.  Is our supposed stabile condition dependent upon the other’s chaos one must ask?  Is our comfort just an illusion, or a temporary lag in our suffering.  Is it wise to consider hard work suffering?  Or is detachment from our earth the real tragedy?  However you choose to see it, it is happening regardless… and so whether I as an artist merely speak out about the hypocrisy or paint a violent “degenerate” image of it, I cry too often for I cannot stop the madness, the deplorable inhumanity.

And this very debilitating hypocritical and self-consuming condition is what I refer to in Neuroboros.