The Body Tension Project.

The new era of today's emerging underground trends is in many ways reminiscent to the original Hip Hop Movement, with 2008 bringing more elements, participants, and merging styles than ever before. There is a growing tendency for this new generation of B-Boys and B-Girls to find the optimal balance of their passions through extensive psychophysical cross-training, and today's most innovative artforms communicate in vast arrays of ways to reach their audiences all over the world. This juggling of sometimes diametrically opposing styles creates a constant "body tension" and becomes a freestyle in itself to maintain this fragile balance.

A whole new breed of talent is emerging from these new blends, volatile but also vulnerable with limited representation in media. and FsM is here to support and document the evolution of these underground styles in a manner fitting the artforms themselves; the multimedia approach, told by the practitioners themselves, carefully organized by FsM with historical accuracy.

Body Tension: a term used in martial arts, climbing, and many more physical arts to describe the precise balance and transition of one's body parts to overcome difficult obstacles.

Every day, underground artists perfect their techniques within their artform in order to tell their stories more eloquently. The survival of artists depends on continuous amelioration of their art, and constant exposure amongst their community. Live performance becomes not only a unique and spontaneous experience and a means of communicating to a general audience, but a means to demonstrate and pass their version of this art on to their fellow practitioners.

The mainstream's attempt is to refine these fresh new trends and propagate them as much as possible. However, just like a painting can be overworked, creativity always seems to re-spawn from the streets. The freshest trends have always developed underground, which is decentralized but arguably as influential as any mainstream style, especially with today's interconnectivity in the world. The only difference is that mainstream media doesn't cover its broad expanses, mainly because of the challenge it poses in finding the true sources to this elusive network of people. For example, little formal documentation has been made of underground arts like breakdancing and bouldering, which are in a sense experiencing a renaissance in their traditional form as well as incorporation in emerging arts like Parkour.

This notion of interconnectivity and cross-pollenation is also true in many other creative blends found in music and the visual arts. Poor central modes of communication means that the author's ties must remain firmly planted with the underground community to maintain respect and awareness of its subtle nuances. Furthering one's personal forms of art also remains vital as to ensure credibility and respect amongst fellow artists.

The style of documentation can be referred to as ethnographic audiovisual anthropology. Traditional research methodology of participant-observation will be employed to not only mingle with and learn from, but also collaborate with various artists. This adherence to traditional methods will serve to educate and legitimize the underground as rising talent as opposed to juvenile delinquency. It will brush on and reference past social movements and forms of art in their traditional sense to provide grounds to relate these new emerging disciplines, but it will have been placed in its contextual environment through a pictoral narrative. Focus will be on today's most up and coming forms of art and their artists with respect to past tradition, so anyone ranging from young enthusiast to seasoned scholar will able to find insight in the work.

A special compilation from some of today's most eclectic underground musicians will also develop side by side with the book project, and be included with every copy of the book to give the reader an auditory sample of the beat of today's thriving underground scene. The book will be styled with the photographic and narrative impact of a National Geographic that would appeal to the intellectual shopping at borders, but with cutting edge design and layout that will draw interest from every underground venue.