by Ellie Blake

Off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, snuggled in the Persian Gulf, artificial and customized islands are being constructed and offered as exclusive hot spots for private estates, fantasy resorts, and tip top businesses. Made up of nearly 300 islands in the shape of regions of the earth, “The World” is a shout out to its larger host. As the project creates a micro-Southeastern U.S. and a micro-Indonesia, however, it also builds a space for its future residents to live free of the realities of these regions - a place for the wealthy to convene in a self-constructed rich world.

Concurrently in the Pacific waters off the coast of Queensland, Australia, residents of a new self-proclaimed autonomous Gay Kingdom depart mainland to build their own world – a state offering full liberties for GLBT folks. Like wild communities of “ferals” living in the rainforests of Australia, the new nation seeks to construct an environment all its own. The Gay and Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Islands organizes as subjects around an emperor and sports flags and postage stamps, its own constitution, and a warning to outside interruption.

Residents of these territories take their passions into the sea and the trees in order to design their own creative communities. Innovation, creativity, architecture, and construction are compiled in a new ways to allow for new worlds. And though a gay kingdom flag flying over the United Nations can help to spread the liberties of the 3 square mile gay kingdom over bigger lands, opportunities for creative community and celebration need not always be removed and private. Without escape and exclusivity, expression and escapade burgeon still along side intense intersection and interaction of local and global understandings. Chaos is a fundamental and a reality of existence. Why not just go with it?

Or at least break it down. Interaction and production through time have increasingly occurred according to processes of competition. Either as an enlightened idea proposed to increase innovation and invention or as an atavistic strategy thought to perpetuate human survival, the force inherent to a great deal of motivation throughout the world is one of ownership, control, and power. These are the goals of not only cultural suppression and war, but of academia, personal relationships, and self-acceptance. The blind attempt at Biggest/Baddest/Best subsumes individual skill, desire, and happiness for a blanket and singular approach to living for all, leading to economic disparity, social insecurity, and raging celebrity culture.

In addition, life is pervasively governed by a hyper-rationality based on models of the world. Assumptions are agreed upon, explanations composed, and phenomena essentialized to a single definition upon which rule and policy are then based. These strict terms reduce existence by defining our environments, our bodies, and our behavior, thoughts, and feelings.

Refusing to be captive to minimized rationale and a prescribed and bogus model of life, recognizing the value in activity based on non-competitive intentions, and denying exclusive space, the rules can be broken. Replacing competition with more peaceful intentions. Consciously evolving beyond a restrictive system and using cooperation as a force for creativity and innovation.

One method of this alternative evolutionary action is a familiar one, indeed. Deconditioning can proceed by way of non-rational action and breaking of boundaries and taboos. By implementation of celebration as technique.

In December 2004, a mass email called people in Chapel Hill to join a “collective act of open music making, joyful dance, and creative celebration of life, beauty, and love in all forms.” Proposed as an “alternative view,” “a beautiful view,” a carnival-esque march/parade down Franklin St. would culminate in a freak-out jam. It was to be “Not a protest of things we hate, but a celebration of the things we love – namely (but not limited to) creativity, music-making, friends, sharing and collaborating, laughing, improvisation and playfulness, joy, movin our bodies, doin what we feel” (street freak email announcement). The spontaneous fest, as well as other happenings like dance parties, leisurely walks, and playtime, “stand in sharp contrast to a blasé tv culture and its undercurrents of staid boredom, fear and violence” (street freak email announcement).

Celebration requires no particular location, no affiliation, no single influence or intent, and no result. It is the experience of itself, whatever is happening at the moment, real and attainable. Summed up by the name of The Nightlight’s noise fest, The No Future Fest, held in May ’05, making noise and celebrating is not about cutting a deal. It’s about allowing chaos and absurdity. It’s realizing we are not winners and losers, but magical creatures, myths in real time.

www.theworld.ae
www.gayandlesbiankingdom.com

Ellie Blake has been a dj since Spring of 2001. She will party if you do. Tit for tat.

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