Requilibrium
Requilibrium was a project completed two months ago looking at the idea of perceptions and judgments of ones beliefs through religions and cults. The Idea was for me to essentially create my own faith system and a religious philosophy based on my own beliefs influenced by 'A Theory of Justice' by political philosopher John Rawls. However, in this religion/cult, whilst I would preach about me own actual beliefs such as equality and justice, I would embed stereotypical cult elements and rules which explicitly contradicted the main two principles of my beliefs system. This was done in order to highlight a certain amount of ignorance and arrogance I discovered in all belief systems, ultimately realizing that all beliefs are flawed, regardless whether they are moderate or extremist.
I wanted to make sure people weren't actually aware that it was at first an art project. Therefore I created several layers to the artwork itself and how it was viewed. I firstly created a website (displayed above) which could gather responses but also inform people of what my religion/cult was about. I realized that if I wanted to gather an audience for the website I needed to promote my religion to the general public. This is when I added a performance layer to the artwork. I created business cards with the name of the website on them and began to preach about Requilibrium in Bournemouth Town Center Admittedly I didn't receive a great response on the actual website, however the act of physically preaching stimulated varied interesting responses from the general public. The responses and the journey of the creation of Requilibrium was recorded for the intention of allowing the general public and online viewers to analyse my project for themselves.
I have drawn my own conclusions as to what these responses mean in terms of how we express our beliefs and the social restrictions and limitations to preaching your opinion and other issues explored through the project. So please take a look at the Requilibrium website in order to understand the religion/cult and the beliefs it is based on, but be aware that I do not fully believe in the teachings and rituals of my own religion/cult. I do believe in Equality and Justice as key to making the world a better place, nevertheless the ways in which I express how to achieve this is not something I actually condone. These were simply a way of forming contradictions (among other elements of Requilibrium) highlighting the arrogance of all beliefs and the fact that we must be tolerant of anyone's views and opinions, whether we disagree with them or not.
More posts are to come, illustrating the development of the formation of Requilibrium in order to give you a better understanding of what the project was about.
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