La République Internationale Des Arts was founded by two professional circus artists who, for the last decade, have been lucky enough to make their living performing and creating contemporary acrobatic shows in more than 20 countries.  In that time, the world of performing arts has changed dramatically.  The internet, which has brought so many people and cultures together, has diluted the quality of creative content consumed by the masses.  Proof?  Below are the three most-viewed examples of user-generated videos of all time:

#1 User-generated creative content (#6 Overall): Charlie bit my finger – again! (450,000,000 views as of May 1, 2012)

#2 User-generated creative content (#22 Overall): Tootin’ Bathtub Baby Cousins – Official (236,000,000 views as of May 1, 2012)

#3 User-generated creative content (#24 Overall): An Experiment (228,000,000 views as of May 1, 2012)

These videos have been seen nearly one-billion times, so it’s understandable that so many artists have given up on the internet as a platform for creative research.  But not all of them:

#1 Move (1,000,000 Views as of May 1, 2012)

#2 Infinity – the energy of Tokyo (6,000 views as of May 1, 2012)

#3 Planet B-Boy 2012 (27,000 views as of May 1, 2012)

These three videos have reached less than one-tenth of one-percent the views of the first three.  What’s more, we’re certain that there are hundreds of thousands more gems like them dissolving somewhere in internet muck.

As artists, it’s almost impossible not to drown in the deluge of reality TV and youtube virality.  La République Internationale Des Arts was founded with one sole purpose in mind – to provide incentives for artists from around the world to come together on the internet to share their work with others working with the same themes, to evaluate each others’ work, and to reward those artists who are elected by their peers as the representative voices and minds of their community.

With time, we hope that the incentives will grow.  With time, we hope that the contests will become monthly.  With time, we hope that the community itself will propose every contest’s theme.  We want to be a stage and a forum for artists and a classroom for the public so that when they are fed up with the empty noise and static of the internet’s infinite open stages we can show them that we, the artists, have not gone away.

This forum is not meant to replace, but rather to feed a growing need for face-to-face international artistic collaboration that should overflow the limits of the internet; the bonds forged here should take root in creation spaces around the world – informally at first – but with a growing and relentless momentum.

We live in a time when the whole world can become our studio and where every artist has immediate access to the best teachers and coaches in the world – one another.

So let’s start today.