INTEGRAL ART

(reported by Matthew Dallman)

The Integral University Art Domain will be the premiere source for community, knowledge, and training surrounding Integral Art. It will feature a field directory of integrally informed organizations, resources, teachers, and artists. There will be a library of genuine AQAL resources for artists in all disciplines. The Domain will offer online courses, threaded discussions, conference calls, and private consultation/coaching. It will also provide ongoing 3- and 6-day seminars led by certified AQAL teachers. Integral consciousness is fast reaching a fevered collective pitch, and the Art Domain will both house the waves of artistic past, and also function as an experimental laboratory for the present and future of continued emergence of integral art.

The Art Domain will focus on at least three primary areas. One applies the integral model towards integrally informed artistic practice. The artist can nest his or her artistic endeavors within a larger life practice. Inspired by pioneering frameworks such as integral transformative practice (ITP), the Art Domain will feature resources that amplify the means that artists have to, in short, exercise body-mind-spirit in self-culture-nature, as an artist. Artists can tune the body-mind so as to allow the waves of the Muse to shine forth in their day-to-day endeavors. The Art Domain can provide art students as well as mid- to late-career artists the tools to become integrally informed practitioners, and thus enhance their felt-experience of everyday lyricism of the contemporary world.

Another focus of the Art Domain that promises to break new ground is the study of integral artifacts. Works of art (or "artifacts") have the potential to convey a spectrum of meaning, from primal and raw energy to radiant and transcendent energy, and everything in between. Simply put, artifacts speak a language. In fact, artifacts can speak multiple languages. An examination of this capacity, and the specifics of each art medium, can occur through use of a vibrant model of integral semiotics. All of this is geared to be of immediate aid to artists as they tune their works of art so as to entertain, educate, and enlighten audiences, as well as themselves, through the mysterious transmission and reception of artistic vision and energy.

The other primary focus is the theory and practice of integral art interpretation. Through coordination of all of the major schools of art interpretation, we can openly tap into those sources and find the experiences that nearly all lovers of art seek out: the meanings of art, enhanced. The Art Domain will feature preeminent art critics and students in conversation with contemporary avant-garde artists, in an integrally informed tetra-creation of deeper and wider interpretive space. Courses that the Domain offers will aim to increase the presence of integral art interpretation in the greater critical world. Thus the capacities of artists as well as art lovers to gain meaning, insight, love, and energy from extant works of art, past and present, can be enhanced and supplemented by the integral model, applied towards art interpretation.

Ken Wilber charged composer Matthew Dallman along with poet Matt Rentschler to manage the creation of the Art Domain. They are working with Integral Institute core members, Integral Naked feature guests, other Domain associates, and countless artists in the field to generate organic, experiential AQAL knowledge that will inform the IU-Art domain with resonant sources of artistic energy. In its initial offering, the Art Domain will present scholarly AQAL statements applicable to all mediums of art. With that background drawn, the Domain will then quickly move to present medium-specific AQAL statements, so as to build and nurture energy for integral music, integral poetry, integral literature, integral dance, integral theatre, integral painting, integral graphic design, integral architecture, integral film, integral performance art, integral textile art, integral curatorship, integral interpretation, integral comedy, and so on.

We invite you to join us as we ride as individuals and collectives down the river of Integral Creativity, in ways that manifest the genuine emergence of that which pokes just over the horizon, and which lay behind every breath, of every person, in every moment. We invite you to be part of a worldwide community of integrally informed artists, the depth and span of which the world, quite literally, has never seen.