The Spirit of Proximity  2008
Journal of Aesthetics and Protest #6, Los Angeles
What is the lifespan of the spirit of revolution? There is a spirited potential at the beginning of any new movement. Over time, this spirit may devolve into something completely unintended. Generosity and reciprocity may become fear based, protectionist, and adversarial. Where does the threshold between possibility and fear lie? How are these thresholds parallel within individuals?
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You Who Looks, May Not See  2008
Manif d’Art 4, Musee National des Beaux-Arts, Quebec City, Canada
Strange, that I recognized an estrangement with myself at an early age. I would look at myself but who would look back? I became a foreigner. In this textual reflection, I look to see how I have been looking to see me in order to more deeply see you, with empathy, equanimity and reciprocity.
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Conflict, Mourning and Aesthetics, 2007
Shifter 11, New York, NY
Aesthetics, the philosophy of questioning the integrity of form, offers brilliant tools for how to see, question, disassemble, reform, reframe, speculate and unknow. Aesthetics does not distinguish in value between chaos and order, form and formlessness, and as such can easily find its way around and between the disruptions, internal and external, psychological and political, of conflict.
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The Aesthetics of Legal Process, 2007
Straus Institute of Dispute Resolution, Pepperdine University
I encountered the judicial system first as a citizen and then pursued a critical investigation of it as an artist. My personal text and video archives of the aesthetic investigation, titled The Visceral Viewer and the Court, is here mined to process, critique, and evaluate a critical relationship to legal process.
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Race and Mediation, 2006
ADR Panel, Los Angeles Superior Court
By shifting and expanding the definition of racism from a single incident to a larger cultural context, one could recognize that we each are inevitably at risk of harming one another to maintain social comfort for ourselves.
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The Prisoner's Dilemma: Artist In the Mirror, 2004
Straus Institute of Dispute Resolution, Pepperdine University
Just as one may mistake one’s reflection for one’s true self in the utopia of a mirror, an artist is prone to mistake his/her expression assynonymous with his/her true identity.
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Mediation and Aesthetics, 2004
Conflict Studies: New Generation of Ideas, University of Massachusetts, Boston, MA
How can we "see" our humanity behind our difference? This "seeing" lies at the core of deeply recognizing difference as both same and other. This recognition allows trust to take the place of fear, creating a space for transforming dispute to creative resolution.
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The Politics of Religion, 2003
Straus Institute of Dispute Resolution, Pepperdine University
To understand perceptions of religion we must also understand the politics of perception. What does authentic mean when each "believer" has his or her unique perception of the original? We each experience anew, no matter who experienced it first. Authenticity is in the body of the beholder.
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Quotes Reflecting Mediation (from my personal library), 2003
Complied from the personal library of Dorit Cypis.
"What we must fight is fear and silence, and with them the spiritual isolation they involve. What we must defend is dialogue and the universal communication of (wo)men." – Albert Camus
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