Welcome to the Crowdsourcing Mornings segment! Every weekday morning, Geek Alabama talks about and features one crowdsourcing project from crowdsourcing sites such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and others. The hope with Crowdsourcing Mornings is to feature and help a project be successful and reach its fundraising goal. Please enjoy today’s featured project!
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Climate crisis. The COVID Pandemic. Rising Extremism. Our phones ping us with relentless updates on the crises, and the forecast is not good. With all this catastrophe, magical thinking can become a survival strategy. In the search for certainty, many are willing to bend the rules of logic to find a story that can save us. And there are so many options to choose from: from wellness influencers who promise you can yoga your way past a pandemic to preppers who declare at least you and yours can be safe with the right arsenal and emergency meal kits. In the past few years, I have become fascinated with how the cultish stories spun by “wellness” devotees have come to mirror the extremism seen on the far right.
I’m Laura Parnes, an independent artist and filmmaker. I focus my work on people on the margins of the mainstream, but never before have ideas once discounted as crackpot conspiracy theories had more currency and power than in our present moment. My current project, “Magic Thinking” is a film installation that follows the relationship between Doug (Becca Blackwell), a human optimizer, and Nancy (Laine Rettmer), a meditation class teacher, as they grasp for certainty in the face of unrest. Their spiritual journey is tainted by hyper-masculine self-help gurus, burned-out ex-climate activists, psychedelic-pushing big tech entrepreneurs, and viciously Darwin-obsessed wellness influencers. As they search for truth, the limits of self-actualization for collective survival become increasingly clear.
In this moment of upheaval, we need radical artmakers. My work has always been independent, but as stories are being silenced, as writers and actors fight with the studios to get paid, supporting independent artists becomes even more necessary than ever. There are no magic answers. We need critical narratives to be able to parse our world, and we need artists to tell these stories, especially if we hope to do anything tangible to respond to the crises we face.
As of November 23rd, this project has raised $23,400 of their $25,000 goal. This project has 5 days left to raise the $25,000 or it will not be funded. For a pledge of $10, you will get your name on their website. For a pledge of $25, you will get to stream past works. To learn more and to pledge money, go to: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2132994446/magic-thinking?
Categories: Crowdsourcing Mornings Stuff
