All of those nightmares are here with us today and no one around me shrugs their shoulders anymore about them being outlandish suppositions, that is because they are very real. More troubling perhaps, is the fact that twenty five years later, we remain culturally unable to cope with these problems and far away from any convincing solution scenario to deal with these calamities socially, culturally, scientifically, economically or politically.

My work of the 80's and 90's focused, on the investigation of an element of utility that "art" could use to reconcile itself with life. By "life" I mean, the appreciable perception of the human drama and its relation to the space and environment in which it occurs. Furthermore, the relation of such environment and that of the extended environment of the Earth and the universe at large.

Utility in art is not new, however the sense of utility in fine art was obscured by fine art's appeal to aesthetic beauty and spiritual significance outside of physical utility. Understandably, the longer that art remained on that purely conceptual direction, the further away it wandered from its relevance to the physical world and the very sources of inspiration that sent the arts in that direction to begin with. The colorful plumage of the peacock is an aesthetic statement of the bird's beauty and of nature's mysterious spirituality; however, the plumage would be useless if it didn't have a utility vital to the continuance of the species.

Similarly, the element of utility that I have endeavored to reintroduce to the fine arts, is one where the appeal to aesthetic beauty and spiritual content, is amplified to accommodate a larger frame work of reference about reality itself. Reality in the 21st century is no longer the static conception of ideas and factoids of a 3-dimensional human consciousness, reality is emerging as a dynamic and expanding  four dimensional object, flowing parallel with the universe and accessible to the human mind.

I said, reintroduce an element of utility to fine art, not because it was there and was ousted by some movement, but because it was a part of the human experience in antiquity when the appeal for beauty and spiritual excellence took place in the grand installations designed to do so, before art was art, and the masses rallied behind their construction and the celebrations of their cultural purpose as means of social and spiritual identity.

The challenges aforementioned facing human civilization are great indeed and we know, that they cannot be addressed with the means at hand. Albert Einstein said that "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." Art cannot provide the solutions but it can create aesthetic models of the relationships needed to upgrade the level of thinking.

The arts during the 20th century ushered in a wave of expressive freedom unparalleled in art history, however, that freedom was gained at a price. The conceptualization of the art object was  pushed to an extreme, where the art itself became eloquent markers, indicating to civilization that we had arrived at that moment in time when in order to avoid total decline, civilization must transform itself or perish.

In the year 2002, Worldwide Peace Marker Project was launched, the project followed some 237 works of public art that included temporary and permanent installations, performances, lectures, and large scale environmental works whose documentation represent my completed thesis, and constitute the basis of my contribution to that new voice for arts in the 21st century.

Worldwide Peace Marker Project is therefore the global maiden voyage of  "utility" and reconciliation as part of the objective and rationale of installation art. The collaborative nature of the installation, the 198 artists from around the world and the exponential number of people associated with the project, will, by the time the project is completed, witness a global first step in the reconciliation of art and life on behalf of civilization and civilization reaching for the first time for world peace. That effort if fulfilled may illustrate among many things that civilization has a opportunity to evolve beyond our current state. That  realization may constitute a source of great hope for the future of our species and life on Earth.

It was shortly after my exhibit "Millennium III" at the Cape Coral Arts Studio, which opened on April 14 - 28, 2000, that I felt truly comfortable with the work and the data obtained in the preceding decades, so as to take the next step into the 21st century with confidence and a sense of security in my work. It had been a long journey filled with hardship loneliness and virtual invisibility of my work even though one preparatory work arose taller than the Empire State building and another, an installation that stretches over 6 square miles, continues to be kept a secret by those authorities in charge of promoting culture and tourism, however, the work is enjoyed daily by those who travel the waters bordering Galt Island in Lee County Florida and whose accrued number is now in the millions.

Fortunately the initial idea of exploring an art form that could incorporate utility had not only survived the test but had also grown to bear fruit.

Stephen Hawking remarked after his discovery of what is now known as Hawking radiation, an important contribution to the understanding of the mysterious black holes, that "ideas guide themselves". That observation held true for me as well as I basked in the knowledge that my work had a real chance at contributing to the arts a shinning new idea and perhaps a fresh new promise for humanity.

The idea of "peace" has always been at the center of my work, perhaps because I have witnessed so much horror and inhumanity in my lifetime. In addition, history itself turned out to be mostly a recantation of thousands of years of war and to my further dismay, it now appears that war may in fact be a survival choice made by our primitive ancestors millions of years ago.

What is peace, is a question that on our present cultural course is likely to be answered in the silence following our total annihilation. Presently, our highest concept of peace is only attainable in death as in "rest in peace." Outside of that, peace is confined to talks, hopes and wishes of a state of affairs that our present worldview sees only in the after glow of war.

Why is that so?

The answer is that nobody knows, but the best clues are; that the answer to peace lays just beyond our immediate cultural horizon, and that the answer will manifest itself not as peace in the absence of war but as peace and war balanced over the fulcrum of "aggression" rediscovered as a mechanism of natural sufficiency.

Clearly that is a lot to take in one bite, however, the statement declares a postulate that was integral in the design of Worldwide Peace Marker Project (WPMP)

Furthermore, the fact that we have found no peace in over 5000 years of war is indicative of the tactical deficiency behind the desire to achieve one at the expense of the other.

I do not pretend to have all the answers but something unique has surfaced after a lifetime of grappling with the question, and I see an opportunity to find some of the answers or at the very least explore the aesthetic symmetry of the problem under a new light.  

Worldwide Peace Marker Project could be seen as a probe, like the ones we have sent into space to visit far away worlds with the mission to send back to earth their findings. Similarly, WPMP even though only a work of art, is nevertheless an aesthetic probe launched on November 30, 2002 into conscious space.

The mission (following the analogy) may be described as a conscious journey around the world to establish 198 points of peace, which in terms will constitute a "unit of structure" for worldwide peace. Beyond that, the probe will continue to expand its cultural signal exponentially until worldwide peace can begin to be seen as a cultural feature that has social, political, spiritual and economic implications, implications which where thought to be exclusively operational features of war.

Peace as we know it can only make martyrs out of poor men and women, because peace on those basis has nothing of physical value to offer. War on the other hand, makes kings and Queens out of wealthy ladies and lords because war has physical value.

The WPMP probe may give us the first glimpse at peace becoming an untapped new resource where unimaginable new fortunes are to be made and civilization may learn to balance aggression in such a way, that the 21st century may become the millennium of peace and war on the balance.