Chroma Starlight

Looks interesting, I already like the idea of a show that opens up artistic process as a piece of entertainment because familiarity makes artistic process feel more accessible to more people while also promoting an arts culture. Syfy's Face Off was brilliant and delightful, for example. In Second Life the emphasis might change from the show. Some starting artists may be apprehensive about competitions or performances or judgements as they build up their confidence and experience. Positive guidance and recognition of good work shared with the group could be appreciated. As more people become involved in it, I would think you could quickly wind up with people who are bringing very different experience levels in with them, and so the non-competetive format maximizes the ability for artists at different levels to participate in the same event together as a class where everyone with the right intent wins. (Experienced artists already know successful works will be admired by other artists and they groove on that as its own reward.) The time-constraint helps to emphasize the art process and also helps participants learn to better manage every stage of their own process in relation to a work and the time given. Then maybe they are forced to grow in new ways when run up against limits of what they can accomplish with a given approach in thirty or sixty minutes. There was enough consistency in the format that hosts could focus on the theme or scene required for each new event day, and participants could compare and contrast their own performance from event to event. Because it isn't a competition or a graded class, participants can feel more at liberty to take risks and try new things. There can also be enough variation to keep it interesting for everyone, with a few surprises along the way too. There are many elements here that you would find in a studio art class, but just it's loose enough (and with only time invested) that it can be fun or a serious challenge as preferred by each participant. It's hoped that for many casual or questioning artists, the format would make it so that they are more likely to show up and to come back. To get everyone coming back and participating, to promote individual artistic development (a lot of low hanging fruit here for artists starting out or shifting medium), and to foster a shared community culture of art-- these are the intents that make the event really special. These are ideas gathered from prior versions of the event as developed by their hosts, though I believe that it emerges from some universal thinking and hard-fought experience.

I didn't realize this year's SciFi Expo Event started today, and so thanks for mentioning the FWF event. The video's fun! n__n

Therapeutic dose for Trump derangement syndrome, that's how it goes? The authors of the memes of our apocalypse were some sure something, just imagine if even a few well-crafted memes got that kind of amplification behind them. Things would shift at a rate that would be hard to even follow. Say, I've been thinking-- I'm sorry I created such a scene by being so disagreeable and following the subthread past my first comment. I can see it upset you, and the last thing I intend is to create a disturbance by expressing a minority viewpoint, but I was totally getting in people's faces and should really have just chilled out. We're at a very strange inflection point for the world. I don't think the United States is willing to go down the path that a very irate powerful sliver of a minority have been steering this ponderously large democracy for. It's all fascinating, especially as a backdrop for my own healing process from spiritual injury. Anyway, I dropped my early ballot off, it took far longer to deliberate on the judge retention questions than anything else. It was weird seeing so many human beings coming together in one location. What does it all mean? I hope that people go forward with a great deal more determination, less tolerance for the intolerable, more love and bottomless forgiveness for themselves and the people around them, and a woken awareness of the dangerous vulnerable state of our liberal democratic system.

As far as I know, LEA is an ivory tower intended only to provide a boost to beautiful already successful artists who are flying high on amazing trajectories in their self-actualized creative lives. LEA exists to provide them and this community a platform so that they can Go Further, but it takes a village to raise an artist to a point where they could even consider approaching LEA looking for opportunities. It's not intended for budding or continuing adult artists seeking casual cocreative opportunities to develop and explore what they're capable of. It's not a space and time intended for people struggling to better draw a symmetric circle with a graphics tablet. Social as I intend it here means people who come out specifically for the purpose of doing things and sharing in experiences together, and then seeing it through the lens of each other. It's such a powerful cross-pollination. You can ask questions or even just provide one another with support and encouragement, or suggestions. Art is a lot harder to define, here I'm thinking specifically of drawing/painting work on models and still lives, deeply traditional basic meat and potatoes visual arts, you know, the essential classical foundations for all the other visual arts that developed over millennia. It's interesting to come at it now; it seems as though somehow the language of art is flowing through this mind much more easily than we ever remember before. Something has shifted, and that's no surprise. The entire game of art feels a bit more spiritually visceral this time. Somehow now we just sort of see what we need to do, we feel it more deeply than before as we gaze at the canvas, and it's mostly a matter of finding ways to put in the time until something new has been cultivated within using all this intuitive direction, but some community and guidance would go a long way.

headbumps thread There must be other social artists active somewhere. I will never believe any other answer. What can we do together to build a bigger network of love and opportunity for our so-clearly neglected community?

No, it seems in your desperate scramble to degrade others you couldn't even be bothered to understand what was being described well enough to emulate it intentionally despite all the necessary elements being laid out, you still couldn't narrow you scope enough. You're like an unfocused projector of lower frequencies, aren't you? But I like how you went on record. So, good luck with that and your predilection for pointless empty cruelty for cruelty's sake. You certainly didn't gain anything else from your efforts. I've always been open about my tendency to ramble about the things important to me. Have you always been open about your cruelty?

Every night they raucously yell.

*collapses, pets kitty* T__T

I enjoyed the challenge of sending you these rejoinders. The "you dismiss" comment was specifically aimed at your certainty that you're correct in your understanding of what they're actually trying to communicate, and it might in fact not be out of some desire to be angry but instead to bridge gaps of understanding for perfectly valid reasons. Anyway, experimental art on traditional media like forums shouldn't be taken seriously, not at all. But people still shouldn't ignore each other, if only for the sake of hilarious annoying trips. I guess bringing this the long way around to on-topic, I'm left with the lingering funky aftertaste of a question: But how is anyone going to put the world out there back together again after all this? If we can't even agree that people should talk through their differences and understand one another enough to see the bigger picture, it's probably hopeless to expect any desperately overdue progress in the next decade or more. It looks like no matter what the incumbent and manifestly subverted pro-oligarchy-pro-nuclear-hegemony-pro-sixth-mass-extinction one party two brand system establishment is capable of scripting, everyone loses this November without some deus ex machina. Meanwhile, all the terrible worthless things grind on against our will like an ungovernable nation of functionally psychotic immortal corporations above most laws most of the time, illiberal noxious allies attacking freedom and equality everywhere at once like a stupid bum rush shock blitzkrieg, systemic political attacks on globalism and equality from the incumbent minority power of receding relevance to anything actual, and destructive unsustainable economic models that grind up and extract the value of everything like rust or fire consumes, but without end. Of course the completely preventable pandemic purge continues while people are given a handful of reasons to believe it's something else, choose your favorite. You can't wave your hands and make it disappear in a political conversation this year. People have been AI-analyzed by the likes of Cambridge Analytica and brainwashed by vast teams of behavioral psychologists being paid to sow division and cognitive dissonance on a mass scale and who are scripting a false political reality into a kind of lively animation, albeit the people at the far end of those puppet strings aren't looking so good. None of us are under any obligation to conflate Psychological Operations with a legitimate activity in a Constitutional republic. Because money is not protected speech no matter what SCOTUS says, and because more speech through more money is not more equal or more balanced in any way that serves our best Enlightened interests, and can buy PACs and international conspirators and extralegal actions that run on dark agendas to disrupt democracy by any means necessary. Therefore, everything that results also lacks legitimacy due to the transitive quality of illegitimacy in an electoral process that refuses to patch its 0-day exploits because of all the lucrative side deals thus enabled for the operators of The People's system together with its sworn natural enemies who are, in fact, not a nation-state at all. Isn't late-stage capitalism exciting? Better make sure you're not underneath this sucker when it falls because it casts quite a shadow across the landscape and it's likely to leave a crater that is visible from the moon where it crashes. And oh by the way, I'm deep in its shadow and this is definitely not the place for someone like me to find themselves, and yet I don't know where to flee or even how, or even at what point is the point where I cut loose for anywhere not-here. But sure, then, one day long after that, we can have a nice polite level free market economy that operates with a social spirit for the equal benefit of all participants under laws applied uniformly to all as a shield to protect the integrity of equality and Universal Human Rights from the endless undead pernicious intrusions of pathological slaver culture's "great again" great great grandchildren: unregulated capitalism and feudalistic or cannibalistic neocolonialism at home and broad, and the pyramid schemes they tend to erect at the expense of everything and everyone. Who needs peace, prosperity, the pursuit of happiness, and goodwill among all humanity when they can have a red plastic cup of this almond-scented kool-aid on offer from their illiberal princes instead?

Okay, so there's no room in digital culture for higher expressions overlayed over mediums, even social media or forums, and people who are dealing with thoughtforms that ebb and flow over the course of a thread, well, they're just out of luck because you probably don't know what that means, and you certainly don't care to consider how there may be extra dimensionality to what's going on in front of you. You don't recognize the problem of interrupting someone's flow through your antisocial dissociative social approach to your own discomfort or think it's important there are intractable problems your ignore creates being left in your wake. You dismiss all criticisms as people taking offense, because obviously that is just to spite you, right? It's not actually about youtube or even forums threads, at the end of the day it's about basic human respect and understanding of difference and plurality. In a multilateral world, there is no center.

And that's the thing. Nobody credible says that everyone is going to experience the world like that, obviously it isn't so, as we see. But you have to appreciate that people's experiences are different than your own and if something being done creates harm for even a small class of those people, and your first instinct is to mock them, isn't that troublesome for the long-term progress in a civilization, be it virtual or material.

WTF are you on about? Do what on something you've poured a great deal of energy and care into. It becomes a space like a home, doesn't it? And so if someone strolls in and posts the exact same video a post or two below where you posted it, it's funny because it shows they're oblivious to what's going on in the thread, but if it's a result of an ignore, it takes on a willful aspect. They made a decision and now that decision is creating negative consequence for you and the people around you and none for them, and what can you say to them? Literally nothing. They can just come through and stomp on you and everything you are doing and it's game over. And it's like, obviously that's a huge zero-day social exploit inherent to the scenario I just described. And nobody realizes that leaving a huge problem in a community filled with people who are both brilliant and utterly compassionless, someone's going to 'gamify' this in all sorts of ways to create harm that sails miles above the pay grade of any moderator brought to bear on someone's distress. I'm just saying, it seems like one of those potentially unintended consequences worth contemplating further. It really should be an option of extremity and last resort for the sake of everyone in the long run.

Do it on one of my threads and I'm going to AR you, not ignore you. So please don't try that.

I mean, I get why people do this. I do. But at some point they as individuals and society collectively do actually need to do the hard work of either talking to one another or surrendering and holding their peace. I have been consistently disturbed by this entire solution to dealing with disagreement. I have yet to see it resolve a single thing in the long run, but it does dissociate the world, sometimes with incredibly harmful results. So far I haven't seen more than someone double-posting a new music video I had just shared because, I assume, they had ignored me, and the fact we posted that video means we're probably allies, but someone fed them this poison meme that they should ignore to solve any discomfort they may feel within, and now they're isolating themselves from potential friends and allies. Who thought this brilliant darkness up? Is this how the Tower of Babel fell, too? I can contemplate that as this person commits faux pas and don't even know it because of their inability to deal with realpolitik. There's some kind of symmetry there, but to be honest, I don't think it's worth the risk to ever ignore someone. Just tell them why they're wrong and how with no further intent than to inform them of how they've failed to consider the pluralistic aspects of our world.

As expected. Your sense of duty to society stops short of all others' wellness and ability to function and prosper under your ideology. It's not about a harmonious society, wouldn't you agree? Your function is to disrupt.

Are you saying you are not allowed to express yourself politically because of the restrictions on disturbing or in some cases literally CPTSD-triggering politispam?

In the past, there used to be groups and individuals who would come together periodically, have an art prompt, set up a live model, and/or a still life scene in-world, and then provide a timed period for artists working physical or digital media to come to observe it and to sit together while they sketch, ink, or paint the scene. It was just a wonderful social opportunity to be creative together and to celebrate the process. It was one of the most delightful things I ever participated in on Second Life and it was the main reason I was on Second Life at all 2013-2015. Art is such a powerful therapy; something about its meditative qualities and persistence of vision nurture such wholesome things in the garden of mind. Regrettably, the venue shifted further and further away from the free-spirited promotion of creativity and artistic community of any kind, and the individual who was organizing the event abandoned the effort some time after 2015, tragically, as near as I can discern. And that's a true loss, they could have been a force for something very positive. What a missed opportunity right when the world needed it more than ever. Does anyone know of any shared practicing all-inclusive scene, one for social developing artists that is active and ardent to promote in practical direct ways such as these the artistic development and enrichment of communities and interested individuals from our virtual society? How can this not already be a thing? It seems incredible, but if not, as a follow-up question, is this something that you would intend to participate in regularly if it popped up at a convenient time each week and was fun?