CALL FOR INTERVIEWERS

Dialoguing On Fear:
An Art Project (2006-07)

-R. Michael Fisher, Ph.D.
Director & Fearologist

Brief Introduction: The Project

Many individuals, groups, institutions and nations (especially since 9/11), from diverse sectors of society, have been calling for a new attention to the problem of fear. For 17 years I have researched and taught on this topic using methods ranging from experiential therapies, technical writing to arts-based methods.

As Director of "Dialoguing On Fear," I invite you to participate in a multimedia art project. The overall purpose is to improve the quality of critical knowledge about fear in our world and develop skillful means to use that knowledge for the 'good' of all beings on Earth.

Today, there is no shortage of "talk" and "advice" about fear. This is an important change from past times when it was a taboo topic itself. However, it is very rare to find a sustained open dialogue on the topic of the impact of fear on our lives and how we can best manage it in an ethical way. We need to openly address the severe problem of those who unethically abuse fear to control others in harmful, violent, and non-democratic ways. How do we as individuals and societies define what constitutes the "abuse of fear," especially as cultural and political conditions change dynamically. Many believe, as do I, we live in a "culture of fear" today which is abusive.

Whether from "experts" or laypersons, there are many conflicting opinions and views on the role of fear and they deserve to be heard and debated in public. I previously was interviewed on my fearology work by the popular CBC Radio One host Shelagh Rogers (June, 10, 2004) of Sounds Like Canada, and now, I would like to facilitate more interviews and dialogue on the the topic fear (and fearlessness).

The CALL

This call invites you to dialogue through interviewing Dr. R. Michael Fisher, fearologist, for one hour at a suitable location using a digital video camera and/or audio recording devices. All you have to do is book a time with me and ask me anything you want about the topic fear (and fearlessness). I'll provide a step-by-step set of general guidelines for you to proceed in the interview with me, as well as a release form. You will receive a copy of the transcript interview with Ms. S. Rogers (above). We can also be spontaneous. There is no dogmatic 'one truth' to be found or shared by myself or anyone else. We have lots to learn from each other. By drawing me out with interview questions, a dialogue will ensue and you will be co-creating important knowledge that can be utilized by me (possibly others) in multiple art and educational projects. Contact me if you are interested and/or have questions:

rmfisher@shaw.ca www.feareducation.com (604) 224-3384 Vancouver, BC, Canada

The Pilot Project

Beginning August 1^st, 2006 to July 31^st, 2007 I'll be available to be interviewed by friends, colleagues, citizens, reporters, or anyone else. I wish to start with a grassroots group of people who, more or less, know me and a little about my research and art work on the topic of fear. Later, I'll invite others further afield from 'my circle.' If you have suggestions of who might be a good interviewer (besides yourself), please advise me as well.

The digital video and audio interviews done will be archived in my personal library and the data will be used for:

• art projects in the community, in art galleries, on websites, etc.
• writing articles, scholarly reports, publishing books, creating subvertising, making videos, movies, plays, etc.
• creating curriculum (or training) designs and materials for education and business.
• taking political action, as I seek to co-lead grassroots activist movements and/or other forms of cultural interventions to improve living in a world without the abuse of fear.

Interviewers will sign a release form allowing me to use the material from their interview with me, for future projects. I will use some material at some point and in some way from each interview. Credits will be given when material is used.

As Director, it is my job to ensure interviewers are contacted and communicated with, data is collected in a research manner, equipment is available, and ethical use of the data and materials is ensured based on the purpose of the overall project. Barbara Bickel, my life-partner, and artist-educator, will be Producer during the project and will provide creative ideas and editing advice for me as Director.

Director's Bio and Background [provided on another file]

1. Visual-Aesthetic Perceptions of Fear
In the early 1980s I became fascinated by the dominant biased ways we in the West are taught to value certain kinds of qualities and patterns. I was intrigued by how a culture teaches and conditions its citizens to see the world in certain aesthetic judgments which affect how we value and form ideas about reality itself.
	I began a series of drawings of four different ways to color and draw a square shape (see Figure 1). This eventually grew into what I called the Visual Metaphoric Values Test (VMVT). Without going into the details, suffice it to say that I’ve been amazed at the various answers people give to questions I have asked them about these four drawings in the VMVT. For example, Which is the ‘normal’ way of coloring and drawing in your culture? (choose A, B, C, or D). For example, Which is the most beautiful? (in your opinion), etc. In the 1990s I began asking various groups Which has the most fear in it? What do you think? Well… Of the nearly 100 folks I have asked this last question, the answers are approximately 50% chose A and 50% chose D.
Their answers completely contradictory and at opposite poles. How are they interpreting this? How do they perceive fear so differently? How will our culture ever know what fear is, if the population is split in half as to how they perceive fear? More research is recommended. By the way, my answer to the last question is D.

2. Children Drawing Out Fear & Life Without It

In the early 1990s I was increasingly attentive to my own children’s drawings of fear and love. They created narratives and illustrations, telling their own version of how fear came to be and what it does to human life. Figure 2 shows a sample from their work in which the symbol of fear is a dark cloud with yellow eyes, in contrast to their symbol for love which was red and heart-shaped. I am curious how fear takes on an ethereal symbolic form as a cloud—like a climate of fear in the air—and love, is more concrete, organic and represents an actual organ in our bodies. Of course, this led me to ask why most cultures have a universal symbol for love—like a heart—and yet, have no universal symbol for fear? Many of the ancient wisdom texts (from all religions) describe Love and Fear as opposite emotions or worldviews or life-orientations, suggesting that you can’t have one when the other is present. My own art work has often explored what a universal symbol for fear might be.

Later, I began asking primary grade children to draw what fear looks like (e.g., Figure 3)? And what their life would be like without fear (e.g., Figure 4)? I was inquirying with the method into the nature of the imagination of fear that exists in individuals and collective groups or cultures. Again, much more data and analysis is required, but the couple of hundred art works I have collected point toward several themes and hypotheses that I would like to test in the future. My intuitive concern, backed up by years of collecting data on value-aesthetic biases and children’s fear imaginary, is that the Western contemporary world has conditioned us to a very restrictive repertoire of possibilities for imagining fear (or fearless). This needs to be expanded in any good quality Fear Education, if we are to be better able to understand and handle well, the new species of ‘fear’ entering our popular cultural landscapes daily. The biggest problem I see, in a nutshell, is that the production of ‘fear’ has outstripped the general fear-consumers’ imagination to cope with (or heal it) and transform it to less toxifying forms, both individually and collectively.

3. Healing ‘Fear’: An International Collaboration To Create A ‘Fear’ Vaccine

In the late 1990s, while Director of the In Search of Fearlessness Centre and Research Institute, I was contacted via e-mail by Maria A. Solorzano, a family therapist working and living in Bogota, Colombia. She was born and raised in Colombia. Her and I had been independently developing the concept of a fear vaccine. Without going into the long story behind our connection, which eventually was suddenly severed January 30, 1998, suffice it to say that this idea of a fear (‘fear’) vaccine is something powerful and potentially healing for this planet. Maria’s work involved gathering many professionals and volunteers. She had teachers, psychologists, therapists, artists, shaman-healers and others gather together under the theme of producing a fear vaccine for the children of Columbia. Maria and I were convinced that the cycle of violence was not going to slow down or be undermined until we were able to help slow down or stop the cycle of fear.

As you may or may not know, much of recent Colombia’s politics has led to a good deal of vicious everyday violence in their country. Some officials have suggested Colombia is one of the most dangerous nations on the globe for visitors, especially North Americans. Maria was hired by the Mayor’s office of Bogota to create a “fear journey” for 50, 000 children and youth on Oct. 31, 1997, the Day of the Dead, what we in the Northern Hemisphere know as Halloween. The collective celebration and ritual activated what Maria and her colleagues conceptualized as a fear vaccine. The results of that experiment are not yet tabulated or published to my knowledge. But let us hear Maria, in her own words (Engl. as a second language) summarize the event and its magic:

The activities for fear journey wee absolutely successful. There was an
attendance of about 50.000 children and all activities had the artistic
and therapeutic value we expected, about the specific ritual for the
fear vaccination we interviewed around 200 children and taped almost 100
now we are going to realize the narrative analysis of these materials. We
began the day with a meditation at 6 a.m. and we prepared the physical
area, and asked for protection, in fact a very remarkable situation:
We were there until 11 p.m., and had no emergency situation, no accidents,
no robbery and no violence at all. At the end of the day I run a fire
ceremony the attendance for these ritual were almost 1000 people, for
these ritual we had lace in 20 different places as parks, malls etc. boxes
and we asked people to write down the fears they want to rid out and put
in the boxes. During the ritual the community that were present took the
boxes and in the name of the others that had written down burned the fears
and collaborated transforming the fear energy in hope and strength.
          (personal comm., Jan. 29, 1998)

Jeff Collins, CBC Radio in Calgary interviewed me about the ‘fear’ vaccine art show I held at the Centre Gallery in Calgary that year, around the same time. Below is a short excerpt from that live interview:

JC: Imagine a world where all the children live without fear. That dream is close to the heart of Calgarian Robert Fisher [now Michael]. He’s initiated a project at his Centre for Fearlessness, in which children draw their fears on paper in response to some carefully worded questions, then Mr. Fisher puts them up in a gallery in downtown Calgary. It is a joint project with a family therapist and colleague in Colombia, South America. He’s hoping the exercise, will in a way, vaccinate these children against their fears. I dropped into his gallery yesterday, and he began by showing me some of the pictures the children had created.

M: We have an 11 year old girl here who has done her first drawing—what does fear look like?—and she’s got herself, a little tiny figure, and a huge tornado dark grey—and she’s got her house and two little flowers on the other side of the tornado. What was most interesting in this for me was that she had separated herself from her home by this tornado, which we could probably call fear. So, the next question was how do you feel when you are in fear? And here we see this young girl has drawn herself with this huge huge head, it almost fills the hold page, and a tiny little body and her eyes are closed and a sort of grimacing wide open mouth but almost nothing coming out of it. It is more like the tornado has gone inside her mouth. And it was like this great hollow… the same color as the tornado inside her mouth… this big black space. But the beautiful thing is in children and they will often do this, what I call the psyche will often do this, is to balance fear—it will often use love… or darkness it will use light. Here you see the little red heart on her shirt… a tiny little heart just to remind her that even though I am in fear, love is still there. This is the third drawing which asks what would it look like if there were no fear—this is great… the same girl, just writes “Powerful” huge letters, bright colors and this yellow exciting energy lines—so, here’s your liberated woman beyond fear.

JC: Tell me what you asked the kids to do here. You talked about questions, so what did you do with these groups of children?

M: Well, these three questions that we just went through with this girl’s drawing… these are highly designed with a lot of therapeutic insight. They are really intended to first of all get the child to show their experience of fear that is outside of them… that was the first drawing. It’s about objectification to get fear outside of yourself to show that we are not it. That’s the first thing. The second one shows you what it does to you. And the third one gets you completely away from it. So here is a therapeutic process but it is also a lot of fun.

MY EXPERIMENTS WITH ART-MAKING

In 1996 I found a gallery space in downtown Calgary and I talked the curator into letting me produce an installation called “At-Tracking ‘Fear’” – this was my first serious venture into creating with the subject of ‘fear’ as an entire exhibit. I had 10 full days in an empty gallery space to create. I brought in all sorts of materials, quotes, and you name it, to begin building a full installation in the space. I had no idea really, what was going to come out of this exploration. I just knew I was tracking ‘fear’ and well… the rest happened. By the 10th day I had the installation complete and it was wild. People came to the opening reception and well, I think they were pretty mind-boggled about what this mad artist-scientist was up to.

In 2002 I created my next full exhibition and installation in an art gallery space on the UBC Campus. It was part of my doctoral research, where I wanted to explore the culture of fear, and so I created 70 are pieces (collages) on small plate like squares that depicted something about fear and fearlessness. I called that show “Platinum ‘Fear’ plat du jour”—it was very successful in that it brought in a lot of young people and we had some great conversations on that whole show. I set the 70 art pieces (see examples, close up in Figure 5 and 6) on the floor on a dinner table cloth, accompanied by plastic glasses and forks and spoons… yeah, it was pretty informatively dense stuff with lots of metaphors and juxtapositions that were bizarre at times. I enjoyed putting the scientific names of phobias at each dinner plate—and then, my more messy artistic view of ‘fear’—it was the contrast that really was a visual way of challenge the power/knowledge about ‘fear’ and who gets to control it in our Western civilization. I also did a performance piece in the gallery space where I played an “Arab Terrorist” who turned out to have another hidden costume which was wearing a white business suit underneath… well, without going into the details, I’ll let some of my voice (excerpts) about that show come out below, based on a long interview I did with Jenny Peterson (a peer grad student):

M: … thinking about this exhibit as a table… a table of consumption…. When I started this whole project on fear in my research, I was interested to think about fear not merely as psychological—I wanted to get it out of the interior of what’s inside us—those physiochemical and neurological things, that we often define as that’s what fear is. I wanted to locate and relocate fear in a more cultural milieu—a sociological milieu—so it’s very much about a culture of fear and the cultural productions and consumption of fear—and the culture of wastes that go with fear….