The purpose of ConSpiritu is to create culture through collaboration. Another way to understand culture is to consider it as the world created by means of human imagination. The arts are the expressive mode of human imagination and are central to the formation of human cultures or worlds.
Human cultural worlds are related to what is often referred to as a “worldview.” What a worldview does is provide a particular cognitive landscape, a picture-place, which is believed to describe the world as it is, and which provides a way for understanding and living in that world. A worldview establishes a cognitive place which places limits and boundaries on behaviors, activities, conceptualization, and attempts to alter those limits. A worldview is not only a way of seeing the world, it fixes that way of seeing as a place which can be seen, and grants it ontological status. A worldview can be construed as a cognitive map which is experienced perceptually and imaginatively as a world. By “world” is meant that systematic ordering of perceptions, sensations, internal and external states, values, intellectual and cultural artifacts, and social and personal history in which a person participates intentionally or otherwise. Speaking of a “world” shifts the emphasis to the manner in which a person participates aesthetically and in an embodied manner in what is often described as a worldview.
The imagination functions by constructing worlds within the inner consciousness, and the various artforms externalize that world and transform it from being a private world into being a public world. For example, the performing arts extend the work of the imagination in its function of creating worlds. Performance brings what begins as an inward phenomenon within the imagination out into the sensory and physical world through the medium of the body, and thus affects the activity of placing the body into the imaginary world. By placing the body into a world which had hitherto existed only in the imagination, that which was imagined becomes real, in the sense of existing in an external physical realm which can in turn be experienced by numbers of people who will validate the reality of the experience.
Performance moves within the interfaces of these inner and outer realms. By placing the bodies of performers (and by extension, or by vicarious participation, the bodies of audience members) into the realm constructed by those same bodies from out of the imaginal realm, that imaginal realm becomes real, or better yet, realized or actualized. Performance as a form of embodied imagination is precisely that place-time in which perceptions, psychological states, knowledge and understanding are shared communally and where persons can enter into states in which the transformation of relationships within and between persons or persons and other entities is made possible.
Performance as embodied imagination can play an important role in the transformation of society. The liminality of performance creates the conditions wherein the possibilities for transformation obtain. The perceptual and sensory apparatus of the human body make it possible for persons to step outside of their received and accustomed experience of the world in order to consider other possible arrangement and relationships within and beyond human society.
Other artforms create worlds in a similar fashion, although performance can be understood to create worlds in “real time.”
Human cultural worlds are related to what is often referred to as a “worldview.” What a worldview does is provide a particular cognitive landscape, a picture-place, which is believed to describe the world as it is, and which provides a way for understanding and living in that world. A worldview establishes a cognitive place which places limits and boundaries on behaviors, activities, conceptualization, and attempts to alter those limits. A worldview is not only a way of seeing the world, it fixes that way of seeing as a place which can be seen, and grants it ontological status. A worldview can be construed as a cognitive map which is experienced perceptually and imaginatively as a world. By “world” is meant that systematic ordering of perceptions, sensations, internal and external states, values, intellectual and cultural artifacts, and social and personal history in which a person participates intentionally or otherwise. Speaking of a “world” shifts the emphasis to the manner in which a person participates aesthetically and in an embodied manner in what is often described as a worldview.
The imagination functions by constructing worlds within the inner consciousness, and the various artforms externalize that world and transform it from being a private world into being a public world. For example, the performing arts extend the work of the imagination in its function of creating worlds. Performance brings what begins as an inward phenomenon within the imagination out into the sensory and physical world through the medium of the body, and thus affects the activity of placing the body into the imaginary world. By placing the body into a world which had hitherto existed only in the imagination, that which was imagined becomes real, in the sense of existing in an external physical realm which can in turn be experienced by numbers of people who will validate the reality of the experience.
Performance moves within the interfaces of these inner and outer realms. By placing the bodies of performers (and by extension, or by vicarious participation, the bodies of audience members) into the realm constructed by those same bodies from out of the imaginal realm, that imaginal realm becomes real, or better yet, realized or actualized. Performance as a form of embodied imagination is precisely that place-time in which perceptions, psychological states, knowledge and understanding are shared communally and where persons can enter into states in which the transformation of relationships within and between persons or persons and other entities is made possible.
Performance as embodied imagination can play an important role in the transformation of society. The liminality of performance creates the conditions wherein the possibilities for transformation obtain. The perceptual and sensory apparatus of the human body make it possible for persons to step outside of their received and accustomed experience of the world in order to consider other possible arrangement and relationships within and beyond human society.
Other artforms create worlds in a similar fashion, although performance can be understood to create worlds in “real time.”
What the ConSpiritu logo represents:
The four interlocked circles symbolize the four intersecting concerns of ConSpiritu –
* Earth * Spirit * Arts * Justice
Woven together, the circles symbolize the breathing together and collaboration of those who come together on behalf of the transformation of the world.
The four interlocked circles symbolize the four intersecting concerns of ConSpiritu –
* Earth * Spirit * Arts * Justice
Woven together, the circles symbolize the breathing together and collaboration of those who come together on behalf of the transformation of the world.
