Integral Cinema Project Newsletter moves to the Lived Inquiry MetaLab
With a Personal MESSAGE FROM MARK
Welcome to the subscribers of the Integral Cinema Project newsletter
Thank you to all the subscribers of the Integral Cinema Project Newsletter. We wanted to let you know that we have moved the newsletter to the Lived Inquiry MetaLab newsletter on Substack. Your subscription has been transferred to our new home; you will continue to receive the newsletter to your email inbox as before, and also be able to view content online and a whole lot more.
For more on this change, here is a personal MESSAGE FROM MARK…
(Followed by links to our most recent Integral Cinema content at the end of this post)
Dear supporters, colleagues, students, friends and family,
Sorry it has been so long since we communicated. It has been over a year and a lot has happened in that time, for me personally, for so many of us around the world and in so many domains of our lives.
On a personal level, during this time my health declined further and I was diagnosed with Lupus. As many of you know I strive toward turning my challenges into lessons to be learned and opportunities to evolve and grow. But I have to say finding out I have Lupus and have most likely had it in some form for most of my life has been soul shaking for me. Suddenly so many patterns in my life have shifted in my perception and so much of what I thought I knew about myself and my world shattered, while many things that I could not fully understand before suddenly make so much more sense.
During this time I was also grappling with all the changes in our collective field…
This last year we witnessed the emergence of A.I. and its rapid impact on virtually every domain of our lives, including the creation of stories, works of art and all forms of the moving image.
At the same time new research came out that called into question our very framings of human history and evolutionary development.
So basically everything I thought I knew about myself and my entire reality has completely shifted.
In essence I feel like I am in the middle of a complete reality make-over!
In an effort to own this new personal and collective reality I have been seeking for a way to continue my work and be able to share it with everyone. To be able to teach, or should I say “co-learn,” even though I am unable to teach live courses at this time. And to hopefully be able to communicate better and more consistently even when I am having what they call a Lupus flareup.
To that end I am attempting to consolidate all my work and communications in all areas to this single space on Substack. Integral Cinema Project content will now be integrated with all the other explorations of my life, including my lived inquiry healing journey and my sojourns into new ways of using art, media, technology, consciousness and perception practices and beyond for personal and collective transformation.
Because all these domains are in a state of what anthropologists call a liminal phase of change, I am holding it all under the most liminal framework I could think of: calling it the Lived Inquiry MetaLab.
This framing anchors me in the common thread of all my current and recent work, which is my effort to hold the mindset of Lived Inquiry, the use of everything in my life as a source of learning, growth and discovery, making all of life my laboratory without walls. This “everything as inquiry” framing allows for holding and exploring the liminal reality of all the domains of our existence that are in flux.
This frame has unfolded and evolved naturally for me over time arising out of these personal and collective challenges and from a need to create a vehicle for me to try to attain additional funding in support of my healing, since my healing and my research are one. This is an urgent need for me since I currently do not receive enough funds from disability and food stamps to cover my out-of-pocket medical costs and to afford the proper food to help me stabilize my health fully.
That said, I will continue to offer all my work free to all via a Free Subscription to my SubStack.
I am also offering a Paid Subscription plan for those desiring more direct contact and community of practice work with me via chat. There will be community of practice chat spaces (Labs) for the transformative media course community, as well as chat spaces for perception practices and transformative art and technology practices.
There is also a Research Member Subscription level that gives you the capacity to initiate topics of inquiry and post projects you would like feedback on from me and the community via chat.
I have to charge now for more direct interactions because in order to do so I need to pay for medicines I currently cannot afford.
For those who can’t afford the paid subscription but have taken our transformative media course and want to be a part of the community of practice, contact me directly at livedinquirymetalab@gmail.com and I will send you a Gift Subscription with access to the community of practice space.
And for those who want to go beyond the subscription level and make a Donation directly to my research and support both my work and my healing, you can make a donation to me through the Lived Inquiry MetaLab by clicking the button below…
A donation of $75 dollars or more entitles you to a live video session with me.
Eventually I am hoping to earn enough to get strong enough to do collective live video events and courses once again.
All subscribers will receive periodic updates on my research, my lived inquiry journal notes, my transformative art, media and technology experiments, and personal audio podcasts. In addition, Jonathan and I will continue our video podcasts exploring integral media and more.
And for paid subscribers, I will be posting lived inquiry and perception community practices, along with in depth emergent research topics for us to explore together…including:
The emergent new form of Metamedia along with its new forms of storytelling;
Mapping the emergence of a MetaParadigm field out of the global hunt for new paradigms and exploring meta-paradigmatic forms of storytelling;
Using exponential technologies for transformation and exploring their potential for helping us beta test the future while awakening us to a new form of MetaSelf awareness;
Exploring a new MetaDevelopment framework derived from the latest research on human development and evolution and its impact on transformative art, media and beyond.
As for our Integral Cinema work…we would like to thank all of you again for your support over the years…and assure you that we will continue this work, but in a different, more emergent-oriented approach as we seek to explore the further reaches of the evolving edge of this new reality emerging within and all around us, and the new forms of multi-sensory creative expression arising from this liminal phase.
My own previous work in the domains of art, media, technology and consciousness still lives within me, yet the frames in which I have held this work are deconstructing.
What is art now that A.I.s are generating a wild new stream of art out of the collective consciousness of humanity?
What is media when there are so many new forms overlapping and inter-mingling with themselves and other previous non-media domains?
What is technology when it is transcending all its previous boundaries and becoming alive in strange new ways?
And what is consciousness when our human world appears to be going mad while our machines start to think like us?
Together we can explore these questions and more.
I believe that in this liminal phase we are all called upon to be lived inquiry explorers, beta testing the future as it unfolds within us and all around us, so that we can help ourselves and each other navigate our way toward a more positive future. For me, these questions are a calling for us to turn our lives into labs without walls, without boundaries…a meta-lab of lived inquiry.
Thank you again for your continuing support and interest in my work, and deep gratitude to all my students/co-learners who have taught me so much and inspired so much of this new work. And again, if you’d like to support my research and healing journey directly you can do so here.
Stay well, Stay safe, Stay awake.
Mark
Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D.
Founder and Executive Director
Integral Cinema Project
Recent Integral Cinema Related Content
Articles
The Lived Creative Inquiry of the Masters of the Cinema - A co-generative exploration of the use of lived creative inquiry as a foundational tool of mastery employed by master filmmakers and artists
What it means to be a Media Shaman - A foundational overview of what it means to be a media shaman within context of transformative media theory and practice
Podcasts (Video)
Last year had three major groundbreaking integral cinematic works that we reviewed in video podcasts: Everything Everywhere All At Once, Wakanda Forever and the first season of the new Star Wars series Andor.
Lived Inquiry Field Notes (Audio)
Finding your Higher Purpose and Passion Framework - This field note explores the notion of working with a perceptual framework for finding and holding a higher purpose that ignites and sustains your passion. Includes an example of using this framework on a film project.