Revised the manifesto I posted earlier and took out the boyish bits, the hubris bits. It now reads as follows:

We find ourselves standing at the dawn of a new millennium, like the vanguards of a new movement, facing the multitudes engaged in non-stop bartering and gratifying every whim and impulse. Multitudes, served by managers in the boardrooms of power, unperturbed by the black spirits which rage in the memorials of past and future wars started for economic gain and cultural dominance. While we stand as outcasts, beating our wings against the walls of modern society.

To take our energies, our fragile courage and our anxiety to the marketplace every day, that we cannot admit! What can we find in the old economy except the painful recipes of the artist trying to break barriers that no longer have any meaning, but that obstruct the full expression of her dream? Indeed: daily immersion in the market economy – that wasteland of futile effort, over-production and unrealistic demands – is as harmful for artists as is the accumulation of richess.

The art world has been devoted to the marketplace for too long! Shopping malls! Truly identical in their sinister juxtaposition of shoppers that do not know each other but fall over each other in search of the best, the ultimate purchase. Public spaces where you walk side by side for ever with beings you hate or do not know. Ferocity of the artists who murder each other in the name of progress and lust after fame with outdated technologies of line and colour.

MANIFESTO OF CONNECTIVISM

1. We declare that the splendour of the world has been dulled by an age filled with blind consumerism and ruthless exploitation of natural resources.
2. Time and Space gave birth to Hyperspace. We are already living in it; we have created alienation and disconnectedness as a main characteristic of global culture.
3. We want no ideal Form stretching her form up to the clouds, nor yet a cruel Future to whom to offer our endeavours.
4. We want to embrace the here and now – the only cure for the world – and leave behind the beautiful but dangerous ideas of an ideal Future for which this last age mankind has killed and contempted itself.
5. The essential elements of our art will be courage, connectedness, love of the earth and the ability to travel through time.
6. We want to sing of the man and woman of action, the ideal of a life lived with a rhythm that is linked to an earth that is itself hurling along its orbit.
7. The artist must spend himself with energy and purpose to increase the bond between man and the primordial elements, between man and himself.
8. Beauty exists only in connectedness. There is no masterpiece that has not a convivial character. Art must be a cohesive assault on the forces of alienation.

Standing at the birth of a new milennium we declare our optimism, hope and forgiveness, for these are the elements that anchor us to the present and connect us through space and time.