ART FOR HUMANS FAQ [OR: Ask AFH Lead Artist Paul McLean] BETA

Who is Paul McLean?

From the standard Tweet-sized web bio, "Paul McLean is an artist accomplished in new & traditional fine art media and a pioneer in dimensional production and integrated exhibit practice." For more information on Paul McLean, see his bio page.

What is Art for Humans?

The simple answer is, "There are many correct answers to that question."

• Art for Humans (AFH) is a website, produced by Paul McLean [me, MGT, "we" etc.]. Shane Kennedy and I have been working on the AFH site since fall 2001. It has had many versions, hosted many online projects and virtual shows, blogs, photo galleries and video/audio archives, link pages, blogs or text-based vehicles, stores and so on. At the moment, AFH is migrating to a Web 2.0/3.0-rich format.
• AFH is a fluid collective of accomplished and emerging artists and creative professionals who produce sensory-encompassing, multi-disciplinary, multimedia dimensional art projects for museums, galleries, institutions, foundations, performance venues and alternative art spaces. Past productions include ART FOR HUMANS GALLERY CHINATOWN, HUM 10+1, Bar Codes, Rituals + Subliminal Tapes, and A Prayer for Clean Water, to name a few. Other collectives produced by Paul McLean [and esteemed collaborators] include DDDD, 01, the Monster Collective, the Friend Collective and the Journeyman Project. You can find ample documentation of these production on the AFH Flickr and AFH YouTube sites, and in the various AFH Blogs.
• Art for Humans is an iconic brand attached to an animated (moving) dimensional aesthetic formation. That answer requires a bit more explanation. The easiest answer, however, is: take a peek at the index page of the AFH website. If you looked at it for a couple of seconds, when you arrived at the AFH domain, you learned (optically) what the definition means ["an iconic brand..."]. I like old school web, and one of the oldest maxims is, if you want someone to engage with your website, you have to impact them, communicate your message to them, hook'm, immediately. To expand slightly, check out "Maciariello's Proof." I have written extensively for over a decade on dimensional art topics [including my recent Thesis] and continue to write, lecture and teach about dimensional art through AFH and other media. If you have a specific question about dimensional art praxis, please contact me directly or through one of our chat, comment or forum sections. I am working on a seminal text for Dimensional art, and when it's done, O faithful & regular visitor to artforhumans [dot] com, you will be the first to know! I promise!
• Art for Humans is both destination and point of origination.
• AFH answers, when parsed and shuffled, posed and reconfigured [in motion and over time, in space and suspended in not-space], "What is Art?" - [for Humans].
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What is 4D, or dimensional art?

Please refer first to the Dimensionist Manifesto, composed by Charles Sirato (Paris, 1936), and which nearly perfectly sums up the answer [N+1, or plus more]. By the time Sirato had penned his manifesto, 4D applications had already been applied to busines [Taylor, 1911, to invent "productivity"] and other disciplines, as a symptom of human perceptual evolution [most notably in physics]. Recently, great innovation in 4D theory has been demonstrated by the great mathematician Grigori Perelman, and in the computer sciences in algorithm-based applications such as data mining and push technologies, like "Cloud computing." Visual artists have consistently articulated the potential inherent in the expansion of consciousness in all directions and all-at-once, for the past 150-odd years, along with scientists. Businessmen have capitalized on our efforts, but have rarely shared their exploitations of our inventions, except when to do so provides them added power, access or prestige. Frankly, the greedy have outdone themselves in this regard, endangering all living things in the process. It's disgusting and pathetic, ultimately.

Where do I look first? There's so much stuff.

This site is based on concepts of free movement. So click and click to your heart's and eyes' content. The paths are fairly straightforward. "Digging down" to form associations through identification is the point. If you're looking for anything specific and can't find it, please don't hesitate to let me [MGT] know.

How can this be a collective website and an individual artist's website at the same time?

E pluribus unum, and vice versa. This is, after all, a dimensional model, not based on dualistic constructs, such as "US versus THEM." If anything, AFH is designed to reorient and solve those frameworks through a better POV. AFH is rooted in techne, not epistemology - that said. Which is kind of a funny joke, since HTML is a language.

What is for sale at AFH?

For most of its existence, Art for Humans has been free, and based on Open Source principles. We have conducted plenty of experiments with online sales tools, such as Ebay and an online store for ART FOR HUMANS GALLERY CHINATOWN, developed for projects [artMU & partHuman] that were torpedoed mostly by the cataclysmic financial sector shenanigans/"recession" and some production errors thereby exacerbated. At the moment, most of the work is available at low resolution for download for free. If you're interested in high-quality output/services, don't hesitate to contact [MGT](me){us} or my gallery. In November, however, I am planning on unveiling a new dimensional retail model for AFH artwork and artists, so stay tuned...