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.
This event was part of a series titled We Want Everything, programmed by Dr Stephen Wilson in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). The series was staged in collaboration with the ICA and the Chelsea, Camberwell and Wimbledon College of Arts postgraduate community. We Want Everything asks us to recognize the meaning of art and human life regardless of economic flows.
Given the neoliberal conditions we find our future-selves contending with, this public series of events explores human prerequisites such as citizenship, agency and the permission to experience any emotions. In an unstable field of bio-political inequalities, unconscious bias, data technologies, happiness industries and isolation, how do art and design practices maintain their love of complexity and deviation under the auspices of increased atomization?