“Netformance”, an internet based-performance, started in 2012. This is an interdisciplinary project with the objective to have audience at the heart of an art work looking at political ,social and cultural problems. Our goal is to use creative and innovative methods and ideas to help people’s voice about these issues heard. At this point our project is a social network collaboration of people from different countries.

 

Our most recent event, “kiss for peace” available at http://much-kiss-for-peace.netformance.org, aims at the nature of politics regarding Iran-US relationships. We started with the belief that past historical events (Such as 1953 coup or 1979 hostage crisis) has to be studied and learned from. However, we also need to move forward to a brighter future for peace (and kiss also!). This idea attempts to make a contrast with annual demonstrations in Iran on Nov. 3 to show a different view of Iran society and also introduce a different face of US to Iranians and Iranians to Americans. Public participation to such efforts indicates that both people are looking forward to new and innovative ideas, although many politicians find their interests in conflict and hostility. Our story was covered recently by BBC Persian and some other online and print media.

 

Our mission in this series is to find simple and sometimes ironic ways to encounter serious and complicated social-political or cultural issues and attract people and media attention to a different perspective. This is merely the first phase of our main project which is due to start within next three months. At this point we are completing our studies and also searching for collaborators and supporters. News agencies and journalists can be of great help to promote our ideas and help us improving our future performances.

 

We hope efforts like this one and more creative ideas will bring prosperity for people around the world. Currently we have participants from both US and Iran. Up until the time of writing this letter over 60000 people were exposed to our project on Facebook and 3000 people visited our website which was kicked less than a week ago. In our previous project, Jean Party available at http://jeanparty.netformance.org , we looked at a different issue regarding Mr. Netanyahu’s interview with BBC Persian. We had over 30000 Facebook users interacting or exposed to the project in the course of one week as well.