The word “data” is used symbolically to encapsulate the entire history of our species as data containing all such information. Data is then used as a point of departure and the addition of “A” is used to suggest a first step forward from the known “data.” In other words, “data” stands for everything we have become and “A” stands for a first step towards everything we may yet be.

More detail? Read on...

This statement is about the fulfillment of an inquiry into the capacity of art to contribute to the development of a new vision of renewal for humanity and for the world.

My life’s work has been about creating a recipe for an alternative survival strategy for our species. I have reached into human knowledge and into Nature at large in search of the ingredients for the recipe. At long last, I have translated my findings into an art form capable of  fostering a dialog that is useful to the formation of such new cultural strategy.

Following is a brief of four decades of wide spread inquiry and experimentation that yielded the ideas that inform the cultural recipe I have named Data A.

Data A art is an attempt to unify the aesthetic notions of human nature with the dynamic process of Nature as a whole. It is art in the context of life.

Data A is an art form couched on the premise that, if human civilization has in fact reached a point in its development that renders its upkeep unsustainable, then a new strategy that embraces cultural and environmental renewal is in order.

Data A is therefore the name for a kind of art that is situated in between our present cultural strategy and the beginning of a new cultural strategy moving forward into the future. Data A, may be considered as a “transitional art” and can be loosely defined as a kind or art that embraces a vision of renewal for humanity and the world.

The word “data” is used symbolically to encapsulate the entire history of our species as data containing all such information. Data is then used as a point of departure and the addition of “A” is used to suggest a first step forward from the known “data.” In other words, “data” stands for everything we have become and “A” stands for a first step towards everything we may yet be.

Data A art - What makes it new?

To make the claim for a new art in 2009 would require a number of compelling qualities capable of setting the propositions made by Data A art apart from anything in the arts hitherto.

The new cultural components introduced by Data A into art are additions that have a profound sense of conservation regarding the achievements and history of art. The additions are intended as natural extensions into art’s new evolutionary requirements in order to embrace a new causal relationship with culture and nature.

The resulting effect may be a dramatic change in our established notions of art, artist, and artistic experience. Perhaps, it may even be a dramatic change in our established notions about reality. All of which will provide an indication that the boundaries of art have been extended and that a new wave of human creativity is at hand.

Data–A art – A listing of its components or distinguishing features

Data A is art that is placed in the context of life. In other words, Data A is an art about the reconnection of human nature with nature itself in a relationship new to the planet.

1. Data A is an art whose primary objective is focused on an intended, prescribed or predicted outcome. This component (outcome) was the first indication of the operative consequence of art in the context of life. Life may be thought as a process whose expression is punctuated by a consecutive series of outcomes occurring along the path of time towards the future.
2. Data A art, by reason of being in the context of life (as in life on earth) and by having a prescribed outcome (or consequence), becomes an art with some of the essential characteristics of nature. Time, in particular, is a dimension that enters the art work making it possible for the work of art to function in a four-dimensional framework. In other words, the art work enters life and moves towards its outcome in the same fashion that, say, an arrow is shot into the air to move through space and time towards a particular target.
3. Data A art, created in such close alliance with life, becomes variable meaning that the art undergoes changes as it moves through time towards the prescribed outcome. Therefore, a way to measure the state of efficiency of the work of art under variable conditions was required in order to ensure the best possible outcome. That requisite was filled by a phenomenon I borrowed from nature that I introduce as a term called “Sufficiency” (S′) that among many other things, acts as a gauge to measure the state of efficiency of the work of art. (more on sufficiency HERE)

Clearly, the presence and use of these components or distinguishing features in art implies a dramatic number of ramifications and new cultural consequences occurring at many levels over the entire scope of human affairs. Fortunately their effect is also an affirmative indication of Data A art as a transitional art form.

Ultimately, the best representatives of an art form are the works of art in which these ideas are manifested in the rich experiential content of the work of art itself.

It should be indicated that Data A art, because of its proximity to life, can be manifested in a myriad of ways using known media and media as yet to be employed. It must also be added that the complexity of the Data A works can also vary greatly in scope, significance and, eventually, in importance.

One example of which I and a number of colleagues around the world are working as a collaborative effort to become the flag-ship for the art form is the “Worldwide Peace Marker Project” (WPMP). This project uses the installation art format as a point of departure to create a distinctive example of Data A art at a terrestrial level.

The project embodies all of the components listed above and has become a source of great expectation as its intended “outcome” sets off a number of first ever incidents for art, for human culture and for the future of humanity.

The scope of the WPMP is within the reach of everyone - although the only way to embrace it is by acquaintance with the project over a period of time. After all, WPMP is the first global work of art in the history of our species, as well as, the first time that the arts go out collectively to deliberately create a completely new cultural conception of the idea of world peace.

WPMP is tracked through time on its own website, www.wpmp.net . The project was launched on November 30, 2002, six years ahead of this statement in order to verify some of the data and obtain the evidence needed before Data A could be released as a new art.

Data A is also supported by over 200 documented experimental projects carried out between 1981 and 1992 and a number of countdown to Data A art projects, some of which are referenced on this website Here or are documented in official and public archival records.

It is hard to believe that, in a peculiar way, it has taken me forty seven years to write this statement.

I firmly believe that art is perhaps the safest environment in which we can collectively see ideas succeed or fail.

If Data A art succeeds, which I think it will, humanity may have found a way out of the cultural predicament that we are in. If it fails, nothing that is not already compromised will be lost.

Creating a new idea, as hard as it is, is not as hard as it is trying to explain it. This is particularly true in the case of “sufficiency” which is definitely my most important contribution, because if art and life are about the reality of things, our interpretation of the world needs to be as accurate as can be, since that would be our reality.

The trouble is that without a way of determining the efficiency of our reality we will preserve the chaotic cacophony of 6 billion plus realities and miss the opportunity to move forward to learn that all realities are subject to change and fluctuation from moment to moment.

That is to say that reality is variable because it changes to suit the four dimensional characteristics of spacetime events in our universe.

Sufficiency therefore, is a fiduciary between the change and fluctuation of our accepted reality, allowing us finally, to begin to experience the world as an ever changing sufficiency of life and ourselves as a part of that sufficiency.

I have prepared an illustrative work about Data A that you may enjoy Here

DATA A

An art with a purpose, a plan, a direction and an ultimate outcome

Data A is art in the context of life or, more clearly, a resolute attempt to place art in the context of life in such a way that its practice reveals a new causal relationship between human creativity and nature. This new relationship can be put into use at this critical junction in the history of life on earth when “more of the same” amounts to social and environmental suicide.

Therefore, the motivation for this new art is the unsustainable character of human civilization and the erosion of the planetary environment in its capacity to sustain life as we know it.

Placing art in the context of life is analogous to placing an aquarium-born fish into the lake where its ancestors once lived. That is to say that the distance between “human nature” and nature, itself, is great indeed. But, the resulting art is as wonderful as it is effective in reconnecting us to nature.

Therefore Data A is art with a purpose. The purpose is to explore a cultural path that reduces the distance between us and nature towards an outcome where our creativity and nature’s experience with life can reunite in an effective partnership that is new to the planet.

The kind of work we need to do in order to secure our survival and the survival of the ecology that supports it requires a cultural model that emerges as an extension of our current and outdated survival model.

The amount of work to be done based upon the amount of damage that already exists amounts to rebuilding the world or, rather, creating a new one to suit the new conditions. Nature has done this on its own several times already. The difference is that this is the first time that major planetary changes can be made in a partnership between nature and the human species.

The creation of a new world is not just an idle idea. Rather, it is a must when the state of the planet and the state of humanity is considered. Personally, I see it as a worthy challenge for our species to set off once again to test the extent of our capacity to create and survive.

Therefore, I have created this diagram to illustrate the basic strategy behind the creative effort to develop a sustainable culture while there still remains an opportunity to do so. I call this illustration a “Recombining Strategy Diagram” because recombination between us and nature under new circumstances may be said to be the ultimate goal visualized by our species. Data A art is, in that view, a cultural precursor.

Notes on the Recombining Strategy Diagram

1. Represents the period of time from the earliest record of our species to an undetermined point in future time.
2. Represents the time trajectory up to the end of the 20^th century.
3. Indicates the time trajectory beginning on the 21^st century onward.
4. Indicates the beginning of our departure from the natural context of nature towards the development of our own context or human nature.
5. Stands for the duration of our species within the context of nature as reference of our origin.
6. Indicates a period of time when the impact of our human nature upon the world was not detrimental to the entire fabric of life on the planet.
7. Represents a period of time when our separation from nature was accelerated by the incremental growth of our creativity and the impact of the adaptation of our inventions to the world. By the end of the 20^th century we had become a force of nature that transformed the world but that also rendered human civilization unsustainable based upon the ratio of consumption versus the remaining materials to be consumed (to put it mildly.)
8. Stands for the envisioned transitional period between the beginning of the 21^st century and the time when we either decline into eventual extinction or transition into a new cultural model in closer relationship with nature.

8a. Represent the remaining non-transitional human populations.

8b. Represent the transitional human population on a trajectory to intercept nature                with a new causal relationship resulting from a new cultural model developed   during the transition.

9. Represents the ultimate outcome of humanity’s transitional journey and the start forward of a totally new relationship between a living species and the planet as partners in the creation of a new world. One could say that at this point we would, perhaps, be a new species separate from Homo sapiens.
10. Represent Data A at the critical junction between the 20^th and 21^st centuries appearing as a new art placed in the context of life as noted.

In conclusion:

If it turns out that we as a species, manage to realize that the way forward is to evolve and to make good on the promise of the better and kinder world that we set off to create when we left Africa some 66 thousand years ago.

Then, at this junction in our progress when we have the knowledge but lack the sense to do so, it is time to set off again not to conquer the world but to recreate it in partnership with nature.

There is an unpleasant worry connected with the timing of our departure towards the future, and it is that we may not have as much time as we need. Life on earth is like a house of cards, one card props up the next.

The trouble is that we are knocking the cards that prop us up faster that we realize it and losing them before we even understand their role in the scheme of life.

Data A art and the ideas it proposes are best kept initially as art propositions, however, I believe that they are seminal steps in the right direction. Besides, these ideas do not surface as untested concepts but as replicable and adaptable strategies.

In fact, there is already permanent and overwhelming evidence that data A art can offer the mechanism and the cultural structure that makes the transitional journey possible.

The applications of art in the context of life as proposed by Data A art, are as sanguine as those proposed by the discovery of fire or the invention of the spear. They all have in common the fact that they appeared at a time when the survival of our species was thrown into question by cultural and environmental conditions.

A new art is an indication that we capable to go deeper into the mystery, to grow again and to do justice to the efforts and dreams of our predecessors.  

Clearly this is just the beginning, let’s begin.

I dedicate this statement to the many thousands of people whose contribution of moral and financial support, time and especially trust, made it possible for me to stay focused on the work all of these years. Thanks to them I can now offer Data A to the world with no strings attached. 

Tiité

Cape Coral, 2009