10 posts tagged “art”
Every day I am reminded just how lucky we are to share space on this planet.
Life has been incredibly kind to me lately. Two weeks ago I started a new position at the USC Network Culture project working on events and experiments in virtual worlds, bringing together my interest in public good, philanthropy and social care with the art of this new landscape. It is a dream job, working with people I like doing what I love. I get to create brave new communities, if not whole worlds. My role is to bring together unique collaborations.
We have tremendous opportunities here to imagine our lives as we choose them to be, as we plan to manifest them. In the old world of magick there's no shortage of discussion about imagination and manifestation as the keys to creating any new presence, real or somehow collectively imagined.
New media and animation inspires me; this week the happy song has been this track from LemonJelly. Enjoy, and don't miss 2:40 on this video.
Deeply inspiring photo....this is from a series of photos where the artist, Johnny Shoepainter, shows his progress along with his painted shoes along the way. This is GreenMan9 by Howard Rheingold, also media lecturer and professor, writer and all-around cool guy. If you get a chance check out his art in Second Life or out in public art adventures around the world. You can read some of his recent work here on civic engagement: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/dmal.9780262524827.097
As many of you know parts of my job include creating new media shorts and immersion experiences for large and small audiences. Some of my work is very much designed for a niche audience, in this case those interested in philanthropy, law and the unique community-building challenges that entangle our digital lives. This emerging field of study has been led by USC, MacArthur and others as we try to chart a productive course through the etheric digital universe.
While some wrestle with the relevance of these spaces I am always encouraged to see 100+ leaders gather together for honest dialogue without the cost of travel or carbon in the air. We can do far better and we will continue to learn how to maximize these experiences for the masses. I for one need to learn how to buy new hard drives faster to keep up with the machinima documentary flubug that keeps infecting my mouse trigger key....lost the bulk of the footage today to a full disk!
Teacher, it's always possible to try something new.
Collaborate, explore, experiment, share, play with the possibilities!
Spent five weeks straight on the road, working on OYA and exhibiting and burning her in Black Rock City, along with trips to Boston, Vermont, New York and San Francisco. Here's a sample, more in the Flickr stream.
At various stages in one week I saw a lunar eclipse, immolation X10, a double rainbow with UV spectrum (11 bands!),
Every day felt like a new adventure, an experiment in potential as we raced out into the desert to find the next great inspiration. This year it wasn't in the art....it was in the people who reminded me that not only am I surrounded by love, i am love. I am AMO.
As our communities grow more tightly woven, it no longer matters what city or country you live in. We all share this love, this one fire with many flames burning brightly. How do you choose to burn?
Tell me how it feels for you to live with lightning in your hands....
Elucidate my friends!
Holden @ GiveWell challenged us this week to speak from the heart and get to the core of why we support our primary cause. This is your AMO Challenge for the week....write your own blog post explaining your contribution to the Giving Carnival and link your blog back to Holden by 8/4/07.
Why Do You Do What You Do?
My friend Tony Deifell asks it this way...wdydwyd? When he asked me a few years ago back when Omidyar Network was young, I considered love to be the renewable resource that could move us beyond our complex problems; love is the gift within all of us that must be held as primary for all other solutions and opportunities to arise. What I was seeing back in 2005 was a fundamental closedness and hardness within us towards the world, many layers of walls and boundaries set in place to keep away the pain and fear thrust upon us by unfriendly fire.
LOVE is still my primary cause, it's the root of the Amoration inquiry. But has my pursuit of wisdom through love brought greater or less impact in the lives of others around me?
There are certain things our avatars cannot fully do for us. For the past few years I have grown deeply quiet, speaking more through blogs and threads than through direct hand and eye contact. DIRECT CARE AND TOUCH is what we need now more than any other gift we can give to one another. As much as we need to plug in, we also need to feel the flow that we share with others as a direct current, a circuit formed every time we invest in each other.
Every motion we make in this world is an investment.
Our lives are full of practices that bring us closer to the world or away from it.
To be honest, right now I feel deeply wrong at some level, a bridge with little land to anchor in.
We have a great time moving others into AMO Action Dances, PeaceTiles project workshop, OYA and Sugar Arts there are missing pieces, ways that I have not been able to successfully bridge in my community. Serving on my local neighborhood council has been a trial by fire and I'm not made for long meetings in hard chairs. At heart I want to be home, creating, mentoring and working with others to amplify and spotlight their dreams in development.
Admitting imperfection in love gives me room to grow
There are so many things I would like to change about myself...first on the list is my weariness with the homelessness and displacement so common in our world (and on my doorstep!). It is inhumane how we allow so many people to suffer right in front of us without care or compassion. I do this every day, pass a homeless person without offering them food or anything that can help them. When I think of 10,000 people here, another 70,000 ejected from another refugee camp in Darfur forced to close by the Sudanese government....how can we let our people die right in front of our eyes in silence, without a tear? Have we lost all touch with ourselves?
Sometimes it saddens me that two decades of love inquiry has not moved me past these fundamental fears. I still feel every emotion in the book and struggle with the silly ideas and presuppositions that my culture tries to thrust upon me. Inundated with messages on beauty, fear and imperfection as airbrushed fantasy....here is my ocean to bridge, the walkway to a reality where you are beautiful no matter what is going on at surface level. I strive to give room for these passions to grow into fruitful endeavors, large and small. Every movement, every moment.
Each of us has a glow to share....we choose how to let that out, how to share it with others and use it to power the lives we manifest. Love is the access point, the opening to life and energy in movement. I do not know if it will change the world, nor would I make such presumptions or claim to know The Path to Transformation....I know one path, my own, the smiles I see and eyes I look into every day. Making that decision to look into others eyes is the first step for me in an endless process of reaching out and holding those around me, no matter what background, cause or party they support.
I want to be more for you, and for me too
There's nothing too big, too impossible. We specialize in dreambuilding and love creating new visions for the future. I feel so blessed to live this life of creative pursuit yet want to do much more with this space, with you. Help me help you grow by telling me here what you need most and how we can help you create more love throughout your circles.
Visit the OYA installation in Black Rock City from August 27-31st for a demonstration of free energy flow using water as the primary source of electric power.
Make a gift to the AMO Arts team for supplies to help build this project: we currently need ~$2000 in construction materials to manifest OYA for this unique green technology project; you can help by picking up AMO goodstorm shirts, OYA edible love rocks and other gifts to help us grow. Our Next Toyshoppe Thursday Theatre (and OYA fundraiser) in Los Angeles will be August 16th; in Boston on August 9th we will also host an OYA resonance event.
Special thanks to Ryan Wartena at MIT, Elizabeth Marley (Farmlab, Growing Architecture), Brent Heyning (Toyshoppe Productions), Evonne Heyning (Toyshoppe/AMO) along with Carmen, Blue, Tomas, Crimson, Larry and the Burning Man community for helping this project grow from seed to full power.
Gabriel, Consuela and YuenLin are in Chad visiting Sudanese refugees and those affected by the genocide in Darfur. You can help by watching videos and taking action every day to share these stories from survivors.
Hello Friends of Amoration and ManorMeta!
Take a minute before 5PM on Monday at vote for ManorMeta at NetSquared Innovation Awards. Your support can help us win vital support; if you had trouble voting leave a comment on our page, email Britt Bravo and tell the NetSquared community that you want to see more of ManorMeta! See more below for details on this innovation award.
It's true...we're moving fast! We've moved offices and virtual spaces.
Our real world offices are located at 5067 W. Washington Blvd, 90016 in the Media Fabricators complex and our new AMO Island in Second Life is our new living learning lab for the virtual world.
Our Better World Island location became too small for our crystalline sanctuary and we wish our friends at Care.org and the Better World Scouts the best wishes as they build amazing aid and activism efforts inworld. We will continue to be active scouts and offer you AMO Island as a resort alternative for visionary communities in development around the world.
AMO Island is opening next week to the public with many project areas in development including an Integral Commons, a martial arts and meditation center, life science studies on brain and heart, the Amoration Amphitheatre, the Nexus Dance community and brilliant visionary artists. As we build you are welcome to join us; speak with In Kenzo directly regarding skylabs and other spheres at AMO. Join us for our first workshops on 4/20 at 6PM (Machinima for Educators) or visit all day during the Digital Be-In.
Our Second Life work is growing very fast and in the coming days we'll preview more of our recent Food Island build opening in early May at the national Food FMI Convention in Chicago. This groundbreaking experience in health and nutrition designed by Amoration team members at the Toyshoppe educates consumers before they hit the stores on how to eat well and enjoy the food around us.
NETSQUARED INNOVATION AWARDS
Thanks to all of you who are voting this week to support amazing innovation efforts! Over the last two years the ManorMeta/Amoration team has worked with over two dozen nonprofit organizations by directly helping these groups grow on the web, with constituents and in the virtual world of Second Life. A handful of the great groups we have worked with are also featured in this award process and we encourage you to get out and vote your passion!
A bit about ManorMeta's new opening on AMO Island in Second Life: we have been busily building a new integrated learning center for many different types of visionary groups to come together and experiment in the 3D collaborative world. Our work is very much in bridgebuilding as we gather a consortium of leaders from all disciplines with a common goal to share stories and solutions for complex world problems. ManorMeta is our living learning lab, but it's also a very complex real world networking system that provides space for innovators to connect. We thank you for giving us this role in your lives and hope you will get out there and vote for some of our partners and friends this week here at NetSquared!
So here's my personal slate for the voting process:
- ManorMeta (disclaimer, this is Amoration's project)
- HOOZE and WAGN
- Global Lives Project
- Anti-Genocide Community
- Building a Community of Modern Abolitionists
- SE Learning Games
- Games for Change
- Targeted development for social empowerment
- SourceTree Commons
- Grassroots.org toolbox
The Sugar Shack in the LA Times
Intimate, everything you wanted to know about nothing. I can't believe they talk about my romp life in a public newspaper without asking me! That's a very inappropriate way to treat a green fairy.
We've had many visitors come and say hi this week after the news article released. We're making new friends.
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