About You

Yes. Believe it or not, this isn't about us. At least not in the usual self promoting blogospher fashion. This was from the outset conceived as a movement, a collective effort. And if our egos are getting in the way - let us know. Post your own stuff. Sorealism isn't anyone's property, and we get nothing out of this except a new way of looking at life. SOREALISM

However, a brief word about the origin of this collective blog - and that's best done from Marcos' personal blog from 2006. This tells you all you need to know about the beginnings of sorealism, but only you can tell us where it's heading next.

From Beware of the Blog, August 2006

I am a Sorealist, and I said this to my old friend Peter whilst pulling my vespa out of my parents garage one afternoon, and he said "I totally get that mate" he got it so well that half a day later sorealism.com was born.

Please do check out sorealism.com what is wonderful about Sorealism is as an artist, or a songwriter one gets to express ones self all the time. Sorealism and in particular sorealism.com is a place where people from all over the world and from every discipline and walk of life, form Falconry to Medicine to Politics or to Carpet Fitting can all get together and share thoughts from a Sorealist perspective.

Now let me explain that viewpoint a bit.

Surrealism we well know is that bendy not real way of artistic thought please see the Surrealist Manifesto for more for more. You then have you Realists, and let's face they are all boring, we all have that friend or family member that says "Be realistic mate" dull, dull, dull.

Realists generally like money to much.

Is from here that Sorealism stems, the space between the surreal and the real, is that place where real life becomes a bit trippy.
Like when your at a dinner table with friends, sitting around quaffing wine, eating food, laughing, slightly elevated, so much so you could be a bit stoned.

Sorealism does make Surrealism look stupid.

Sorealism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sorealism is a new wikimovement, founded by the composer Marcos D'Cruze and the writer Peter Jukes, in London in 2006. Like its 20th Century precursor - Surrealism - Sorealism claims not just be an art movement or literary school, but more "a way of life". [Sorealism.com] is also the first known instance of such a movement starting online, using groupware and social networking to affiliate its members to a general ideology

Soreal Philosophies

Though sorealism claims to be less interested in ideas than 'reality', this is clearly an intellectual stance derived from English empiricist thought, and going back to the atomism of Lucretius and Epicurus. Suspicious of any a priori forms of thought, Sorealism is heavily influenced by the deductive methods of scientific analysis. On the sorrealism website [www.sorealism.com] Richard Feymann is in prominent position, along with Albert Camus and Isiah Berlin. Naturally, given the empiricist slant, sorealism feels most at home in the realm of history rather than ideology, and it claims kinship both to realist historians of the 20th century, and the more idealist claims of liberal historiography.

Sorealism in the Arts

Though it seems to have a lot in common with naturalism or realism in the arts, the main focus of Soreal visual aesthetics is photography. The web manifesto claims that this because 'reality is better than anything we can make up'. But given the backgrounds of the founders of sorealism, the visual arts - though heavily referenced - are not the main focus here. Both D'Cruze and Jukes have collaborated on several theatrical and musical projects, so there main area of interest is drama, film, music and literature. In a recent blog discussion, D'Cruze claimed that sorealism was invented to "reclaim all the plus points of magical realism, just minus the bad bits, the magic". A common thread between both founders, which links them back to the founders of surrealism, is a mutual admiration for flamenco, the concept of duende and the work of Federico Garcia Lorca. Lorca was close to one of the surrealist avatars, Salvador Dali, for several years, before eschewing the increasingly shrill and controlling concepts of surrealism for something much more accessible and superficially realist in his later works. He is in many ways the main precursor of sorealism.

Sorealism and Science

Science is the sorealist method par excellence in that it uses doubt, hypothesis and proof: it is an open ended system in the classic topology of Popper, and therefore open to revision and improvement in the light of experience. One of the major claims of Sorealism is that it can, in the words of Jukes "unite both the arts and the sciences". They argue that belief, doubt and reinvention is the mental equivalent of natural selection in the evolutionary sphere, and their image of cultural propagation is not that dissimiliar to the memes concept of Richard Dawkins. However, it must be pointed out that both founders are practitioning entertainers or artists, and therefore their ideas of evolution are probably more 'creative' than exact.

Sorealism and Politics

Though there are some references to sorealist history and sorealist politicians in the website manifesto, there is no clear political line in sorealism as yet. This may not be a coincidence. The unfortunate alignment of surrealism with communism, thanks to pressure of Andre Breton provokes some of the more intense debate among sorealists: are they just creating an in-group which will exclude others, much like Breton excluded Bataille, or Freud excluded Jung. The Sorealist Movement claims to be the first ever wiki movement, and has an open manifesto than can be edited and revised much like wikipedia. But is this kind of openness really self defeating? Can you have a definable movement that doesn't define itself more concretely?

From Wikipedia Entry, August 2006