Exhibition, Transpersonal, Instructions

Jorge B. Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center

Year / 2019

Left:

What if a child dreamed of becoming something other than what society intended? What if a child aspired to something greater?

Matt paper with clean cut finish

Right:

It’s not an S. In my world, it means hope.

Matt paper with clean cut finish

Transpersonal Gaming

Printed Materials

Transpersonal Gaming is a collaborative practice that aims to bridge the conventions of artistic language and how this combines new shared discourses in craft, psychology and technology. The title points toward a specific transpersonal game, CYBERHERO LEAGUE, while transcending it by distributing moments that aim to communicate the power and possbility of the transpersonal narrative when applied to games that operate online and offine.

For this exhibition, CYBERHERO LEAGUE is presented in three photographs of an ongoing series.

The purpose of CYBERHERO LEAGUE is to empower youth with the ability to tackle global challenges. The game enables children to use their physical activity, in tandem with technology, to earn lifesaving aid for real people, animals, and the environment. The game is never removed from the real world because all the game’s adventures are created in collaboration with nonprofit organizations. As children play, they learn about issues usch as access to food, water, and medicine; destruction of rain forests, extinction of species and displacement of indigenous peoples. They also learn about methods of co-creating a sustainable future, for example, peace-making skills, biomimicry, and permaculture.

Exhibition / We Want Everything

Performative Lecture

Institute of Contemporary Arts, London

Year / 2018

Photograph of Mural in East Village, NYC, Dana Klisanin

Dana Klisanin: Heroism & Everything

28 Feb 2018

A Conversation at the Crossroads  

To want everything requires expanding our imaginations and embracing the furthest reaches of human nature. Wanting everything means experiencing states of flow, fulfilling meta-needs, experiencing bliss, awe and wonder - it means experiencing species-wide synergy. Wanting everything takes us far beyond personal desires to the transpersonal domain where we find our own needs inextricably bound with the needs of others: where even our DNA is experienced as sentient. Wanting everything leads us on a hero's journey, impels us toward heroic leadership, and empowers us to accomplish heroic goals.  

The new, multidisciplinary field of heroism science is poised to help us. In this talk, Dana Klisanin explores this open, participatory, embodied science, in which the arts play a vital role: it calls for an expansion of the heroic imagination and supports the evolution of myth. In the 21st century, wanting everything may mean finding midi-chlorians in the form of the 'hero gene,' using our smartphones as light sabers and recognizing activists—social, economic, environmental—as the heroes of a new, collaborative era.