Contributism #2
About two months ago I went on a work trip to San Francisco to attend a Mobile Development Conference. I came out of that trip with the foundations on which Contributism is built on. During my first trip to San Francisco, I had met 2 Ukrainian people, Sergei and Ira. They are both amazing artists, and they had inspired me to look into my artistic side. After my most recent trip to San Francisco I was thinking of ways to express my artistic side, but something that isn’t just rehashing the same old concepts. I wanted to add something new and exciting, something avant-garde. I started to think about the artists that inspire me, Leonardo Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Raphael, Georgia O’Keeffe, Salvador Dali. I began to us my logical skills and saw a pattern, there was only one artists per painting. Artists express life in the way they see it, they express their visions on canvas. But life is created through the collective efforts and visions of humanity. So why are there not paintings with many people associated with them? And thus Contributism was born. An avant-garde art movement focusing on the collective contribution efforts of the community. Contributism isn’t necessarily constrained to painting, but anything where people contribute a little piece to make something happen.
With this being such a new movement there is not a concrete philosophy behind it. Thus I started experimenting and creating it. After a few days of thinking on it I had thought of an interesting philosophy and meaning behind the painting aspect of Contributism. As each individual walks up to the canvas, depending on when they walk up to the painting, they will see a different stage of it. This individual did not choose how the painting looked like before they walked up to it. This is a metaphor for an individual being born into this world without choosing the past. But this individual has the opportunity to add to the painting, similar the individuals also has their life to add to humanities story. Another way of thinking about this is that the brush strokes that each individual adds to the canvas is the microcosm and what they do with their life is the macrocosm. This could be something beautiful or not, the choice is theirs. The progression of the canvas is a metaphor for the progression of humanities story. Each of us adding the next step to it.
Being a Contributist is about consciously knowing that your life does have an effect on this world. Contributism is about bringing the collective vision of many people together to create an abstract and interesting work of art, while simultaneously showing every individual that their life does have an effect on this world.
In summary, the inception of Contributism was brought together through the marriage of my logical and creative side after an inspirational trip to San Francisco. The philosophy behind Contributism is that every individuals life has an effect on humanities story. The choice of beauty or grotesqueness is solely based on the individuals choosing.