The tantra of imagination in the public sphere

I'm a philosophy buff as well as being an artist. A favorite past time of mine is to take conceptual views of reality for test drives. After India certainly things made more/less sense when returning to America. Nonetheless, Public art/intervention remains a fluid form. Reality is the canvas, your body becomes the brush, and your intention becomes the paint (so to speak). When I say tantra, I point pack to its original and non-sexual definition, which is a "weaving" of the fabrics of reality, where all becomes holy and divine, and the launching pad for transcendence. As an artist, life becomes the ultimate creative act/action/experiment. As a lineage holder of the surrealist and atomic mysticism art movements I like to inject irrationality into the public sphere as an action, not only as a static image charged with symbolic potential knowledge. To weave play into the reflection becomes the intention.

My latest public action was a collaboration, mostly with my partner Djamilla, and some dear artist friends. I created for her a catalog of planets that she could fill in descriptions about. It was like a tourism brochure: "Don't like your planet? Visit one of ours!" Once it was filled out, she sold tours to people, and I used my body script to paint the boarding passes directly on the bodies of our customers (usually their right fore-arm). This was all done with a very straight face, as I asked them how long of a journey they would like to take (whether they wanted to travel one-way or round trip), and then I would send them down the line to my associates Frank Callozzo who was signing them up for Liability Insurance, and Shrine was making sure they had Collision Coverage. Anahata even showed up for some time to serve as the Galactic Linguistic Liaison. We called ourselves the Perpetual Epiphany Galactic Travel Agency, and probably sent 100 people on journeys.

The art in this piece for me is more in the intention of connecting people with imagination and play, where-as the results is the body adorned with different temporary paint indicating travel itinerary and types of insurance coverage. Our nomadic galactic office was temporarily set up at the Black Rock City art festival in Nevada.

Here are some pix of the crew in action. More detailed pix of my codes can be seen on my body art site: http://bodyglyph.tumblr.com/