A Quest for the "Real Thing"

"A community is a group of interacting organisms sharing an environment. In human communities, intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, risks, and a number of other conditions may be present and common, affecting the identity of the participants and their degree of cohesiveness."

This is an open call for inspired individuals who have something to offer, This is your opportunity to perform and participate in my experimental family similar to the "commune". For practical reasons and the pursuit of ones previous commitments, we will remain and uphold our lifestyles and responsibilities. You will contact me and set up a friend date, with a specific activity in mind, We will meet, experience that activity together, document it with a photo, and then write a reflection. At the end of my experiment, I will collect all the photographs and reflections and publish a book. My intent is to embrace the ideas of community in a managable way, through a structured art experiment.

This experiment questions the importance of on-line communities that have been created to bring us all together, to shrink our world with an elementary network of messaging, photo-comments and friend requests. This is my "real life" friend request, my search for an available friend network. I want to experience the "real thing" I want to make real life requests, to replace photo comments with face to face compliments. Instead of reading about you, I want to hear it from your lips. I want you to teach me everything that you know, so that I can know it too. This is meant to encourage your sense of community spirit, and your belief in me as an active member, an essential personality. It's time to "RALLY" WE COULD BE BFF IN NO TIME!!!

The goal of this excersize is to challenge the ideas of the "perfect human being" and how the process of creating one can ultimately enrich everyone involved. It stems from systems of team building, pack mentalities, tribal rites and rituals, family values and dynamics and being a part of a whole. This is a challenge to find the time to make me a better person, to impart wisdom on me that will lend itself to my everyday life, so that I can recycle that information and pass it on. I want to spend time with you, I want you to plan activities for us, that reveal your inner most thoughts, dreams and desires. Human connections are slipping through the cracks one day at a time, wether it automated telemarketers or "self" check-out machines we are slowly losing the "human being". I want you to be a part of my Top 8...15...25....100, I need to experience the rush of the web friend conquest, and I need to document it!! I want to get to know you better, and I want you to know me!
So If this is at all interesting to you, and you are willing to participate in this experiment with me, please contact me!!
LET'S HANG OUT!!!
Leave me a comment, or send me an e-mail:

Whopgenius4hire@gmail.com

Friendship and Selfhood

When approaching the notion of friendship, our first problem is, as Graham Allan (1996: 85) has commented, that there is a lack of firmly agreed and socially acknowledged criteria for what makes a person a friend. In one setting we may describe someone as a friend, in another the label may seem less appropriate. We may have a very thin understanding of what friendship entails. For example, Bellah et. al. (1996: 115), drawing upon Aristotle, suggest that the traditional idea of friendship has three components: 'Friends must enjoy each other's company, they must be useful to one another, and they must share a common commitment to the good'. In contemporary western societies, it is suggested, we tend to define friendship in terms of the first component, and find the notion of utility a difficult to place within friendship.

What we least understand is the third component, shared commitment to the good, which seems to us quite extraneous to the idea of friendship. In a culture dominated by expressive and utilitarian individualism, it is easy for us to understand the components of pleasure and usefulness, but we have difficulty seeing the point of considering friendship in terms of common moral commitments. (op. cit.)

Our appreciation of selfhood is so very immediate - it is part of all that we do. Thus, to say that the way we as humans come to know ourselves, to experience our bodies, and to place ourselves in relation to others changes - over time, and between cultures - can be to challenge something essential.


This project addresses Selfhood as a four part approach;
the Individual as a container, a part of a whole, dialogical and a catalyst of multiple voices. The transaction of knowledge will be an inclusive process that clearly speaks to these four parts of a complex identity.

The Hippie Commune

The hippie subculture was originally a youth movement that began in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread around the world. The word hippie derives from hipster, and was initially used to describe people who created their own communities, listened to psychedelic rock, embraced the sexual revolution, and used drugs such as cannabis and LSD to explore alternative states of consciousness.

My Intentional Community

" Commune (intentional community), a community in which resources are shared. The commune movement is part of a reawakening of belief in the possibilities for utopia that existed in the nineteenth century and exist again today, a belief that by creating the right social institution, human satisfaction and growth can be achieved. An intentional community is a planned residential community designed to have a much higher degree of teamwork than other communities. The members of an intentional community typically hold a common social, political, religious, or spiritual vision and are often part of the alternative society. They also share responsibilities and resources. Intentional communities include cohousing communities, residential land trusts, ecovillages, communes, survivalist retreats, kibbutzim, ashrams and housing cooperatives. Typically, new members of an intentional community are selected by the community's existing membership, rather than by real-estate agents or land owners (if the land is not owned collectively by the community). Though intentional communities do not claim to be utopias in the sense of perfect places, many do attempt to live a different and better sort of society, and as such many draw on historical utopian experiments or ideas in utopian fiction." (Kanter)