What is Integral Art? Why Integral Art?

By Mary Lin

Integral arts convey and embody understandings and inspirations on levels including personal, cultural/ collective, the sciences, and the natural world, all while intelligently embodying and usefully employing multiple modalities and systems that humans have devised to understand, to sciere or to scry the book of the Universe.

Where integral art succeeds it is transmissive, talismanic, transformational, or even shamanic, acting as a lever to further the perception and understanding of wholeness and integration. As Integral artists, we seek to reach the viewer, audience, and participant on multiple levels of consciousness and awareness. If we are successful, we have woven levels of meaning into the work such that they can be grokked, understood, or appreciated on one or many levels, simultaneously or sequentially.

That being said, our work has been observed to explore the relationship between art and science in particular. If it sheds any light through this exploration, we are grateful. The sense of duality between the human and natural worlds which many decry has been blamed on both art and science, and the development of artifice, artefact, and technologies through both art and science which serve as barriers to, even as they often serve as interpretations of, the immediate, nondual, immersive experience of reality. Thus we aim to foster collaborations between artists, scientists, and knowers across disciplines whose creations honor the trajectory of human achievement and consciousness while fostering a return to a nondual state, at a higher turn of the consciousness spiral.

E.O. Wilson, in his 1998 book Consilience, asserts that the arts, sciences, and humanities emerge from a common objective; that is to convey "a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws." Perhaps; if this is so, then would not the conscious collaboration between these ways of knowing offer new insights into the Perennial Questions?

The Universe kneels before art made with science that we may climb on its back for a view of the starry heights. Science comes from the Latin verb sciere, to seek to know. The intention to know, and to create from knowing, gives birth to works of art that serve as eyes through which the Universe sees itself.

It is thus that it can be said that science is art with one eye open, and art is science with one eye closed.

November 5, 2010

Read about Art in the Context of Integral Life Practice
Read Ken Wilber's thoughtful essay on Integral Art : http://integrallife.com/apply/art-entertainment/integral-art-and-literary-theory