Cerj Lalonde will create a monumental artwork: one square kilometer in size, floating on Biscayne Bay, in Miami, Florida.

It will be captured by satellites and diffused live all over the world.

It will be “exhibited” during ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH – the largest concentration of contemporary art on the planet.

It will generate a global discourse.

It will challenge and inspire tens of thousands of artists, art aficionados and collectors from everywhere.

Cerj Lalonde thinks big.

He aims at big goals and major causes concerning us all!

FACING THE SKY will be the size of a small island, more or less three-quart of a square mile. It’s been engineered to have no effect on the precious ecosystem underneath, but the effect it will have on people will be global. Millions will see it as it spreads on twitter, Facebook, and everywhere else within hours of the first moment of its luminous inauguration. As they share the image of this gigantic “face”, people will give it meaning. They will ask questions about why it’s there, what does it mean, and what will we do?

This visage FACING THE SKY is a major work of art, and therefore a mirror for us to face ourselves as a species. It will invigorate global conversation about the state of humanity, the biosphere, and how we will survive in the coming century. Considering the staggering challenges to all life on Planet Earth – environmental as well as political – we are rediscovering the critical role that art and artists play in human survival. Art is Imperative* to our survival.

*

Cerj Lalonde and I met online through our mutual projects – his FACING THE SKY – One Free World For All, and my The smART Peace Prize: Art Against Human Destructiveness. In our first Skype session we were like two excited children discussing their toys and figuring out how we can play together.

Cerj’s vision as an artist reaches out to a global audience. His project is a complex creation with a simple message: ‘We must face ourselves as a species if we are to survive, and the way to do this is through creative communication with each other – we must create new ways to balance our delicate biosphere and our self-sabotaging destructive behaviors”. With this project, Cerj shows the perfect example of what I describe as “artists as agents of cultural resilience”. I introduced this concept in my book The Art Imperative: The Secret Power of Art (2010). The core theme is that we, human beings, are the art-making species emerging when our Neolithic ancestors began making cave art 40,000 years ago. I believe that art confers greater survival value to our species – Art = Survival.

My first association to FACING THE SKY was to Isamu Noguchi’s Man To Be Seen From Mars (1947), a conceptual earthwork of a giant mask-like face to be carved in stone in a desert so it could be seen from Mars. Noguchi’s despair about Hiroshima and the cold war inspired him to create a ‘memorial’ to the human race should we annihilate ourselves with a nuclear holocaust. Cerj was unaware of this specific Noguchi’s project, but was amazed by the synchronicity of their visionary artist-mind. Another immediate reaction to FACING THE SKY was the practice of ‘sky-mirror’ meditation – I learned this while spending the summer of my junior year in medical school at the Dalai Lama’s compound in McLeod Ganj, Dharamsala, India. The ‘sky-mirror’ meditation is practiced by lying on the ground focusing on the entire sky for mindfulness. The experience produces a profound sense of oneness with the universe – the sky mirrors my face – I see my face in the entire sky – the universe is my face – I am the universe.

Cerj Lalonde is clearly driven by his expansive, creative mind, but unlike Noguchi, who was inspired by despair about human destructiveness, Cerj creates from positive, upbeat mood, daring participants to envision a better, more abundant future by reaching out to better understand each other and wisely make use of all the revolutionary technologies created, as we speak, at accelerating pace.

Cerj has his pulse on the cultural transformations that the human species is undergoing: Breakthrough ideas and revolutionary technologies are springing from the creative minds of art and science. FACING THE SKY is a perfect embodiment of the emerging ‘Global brain-mind’ created by social media and the internet. FACING THE SKY, being captured by satellites will be transmitted instantly across all social media, connecting everyone in a face-to-face encounter – Marshall Mcluhan’s “global village” has definitely arrived!

As an artist, family psychiatrist, author, and documentary filmmaker, I created The smART Peace Prize: Art Against Human Destructiveness. It is an online art contest and social media movement, a “global family therapy intervention” for a stressed out planet. Cerj and I realized that the underlying motivation of artists is to create works that provokes the viewer to raise curiosity and wonderment, and to trigger the calm-excited connectedness that brings people together. We both felt that we can amplify each other by sharing ideas.

The smART Peace Prize urges everyone to make art against our destructive dark side; we can generate a global “calm-connect-create” stress response through massive art-making, and in so doing, offset the more easily triggered “freeze-fight-flee” stress response that is fueling the mindless devolution of much of the world into destructive chaos and anarchy.

My new book,  ANDY’S BRAIN: A Brain-Mind-Art-Culture Look at Andy Warhol’s Genius, explores the life and work of Andy Warhol as one of the critical visionary artists whose work continues to influence cultural change and global connectedness. My model of a “Brain-Mind-Art-Culture scaffold” reveals how the oneness or singularity of these complex systems is continually morphing for human survival and cultural evolution.

In my documentary film-in-progress, “ART = SURVIVAL”, I explore this topic with artists Hiroshi Senju, Ricardo Mazal, Nobel neuroscientist Eric Kandel, and Neuropsychologist Dahlia Zaidel.

I intend to film such a conversation soon in Miami with Cerj Lalonde to dig deeper into his vision as an artist and his project FACING THE SKY.