Inst Art

Installation art has a complexity which is impossible to be covered by this minimal essay, however, some interesting highlights can be presented briefly that I think will suffice.

The Worldwide Peace Marker Project is an installation work of art that to my mind, reconnects contemporary art to an epoch where art was not separate from our conception of life or reality as experienced by our distant ancestors.

To illustrate my point we will have to go back in time to the place and the authors of some of the earliest art, created during a time that specialists call the Upper Paleolithic era which began some 45,00 years ago. For the rest us, this was the time when early artists painted the cave walls with fantastic designs that were more than mere decoration, as they in effect represented their perception and interpretation of the world and their role in it.

I mean, these works were a representation of their values, their culture, their beliefs and their way of life. This implies that there was no separation between their art and their reality. These were human beings participating in the natural drama of surviving in the company of other creatures and the role they played in their survival.

Similarly although in our time, the WPMP installation is a response to the needs of a global civilization which most assuredly has to explore ways to reconfigure our presence in the world and our role in it as a species. a role that will require models of global collaborative efforts that can teach us how we can as a species tackle the new challenges to our survival and the survival of the rest of life that also require their share of the world.

Therefore, WPMP as installation art is not only revisiting an ancient approach to communication encompassing a whole community as it was the case with the cave dwellers of old, but extending its reach to the whole human community as members of the earthly global civilization we are today.

Installation art is about extending the space occupied by the work of art. WPMP does it by placing a critical component of the work, a Peace Marker, in each of 198 nations, in order to secure the globality needed to address the entirety of the human species.

Therefore the WPMP installation is a global collaborative effort introducing world peace as a survival strategy; a strategy that the work outlines by creating a working model with the minimal conditions necessary to experience the presence of world peace.

It follows that the installation having such a seamless relationship between the art and the real life experience, a relationship that WPMP shares in common with the art of the cave dwellers, brings to the surface an element of utility which gives art a renewed vitality and a new sense of purpose as an ideal vehicle to provide aesthetic models to cultural challenges that science, government and other entities cannot manage on their own.

Most of what we know from humanity's past comes from its art, why should not art also play an active role in the future of humanity. Well, we can and as history shows we always have.

Worldwide Peace Marker Project (WPMP) is an installation work of Data A art. The project is currently in progress. WPMP is becoming the first truly global work of art.

The project consists of 198 sculptural Peace Markers placed in 198 nations by 198 artists representing their national identity.

The specific objective or outcome of WPMP as a planetary artists’ collaborative is the creation of a seminal kind of world peace with a global geographical reference to its physical existence in minimal terms as points of peace.

The project is documented as it makes it way through time towards completion. The complex relationship between the artists, the individual and combined histories of each national location, the public participation and their contributing deeds and activities all constitute the documentation that will be offered as proof that a new kind of culture of peace in the context of life on earth has been created.

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