"We wanted to say, there is something beautiful ahead, something we can create, and you can add your brushstroke to it."

One-fifth of Americans were born with no memory of the millennial paranoia that enveloped the globe as the curtains fell on the 20th century. Anxiety over potential glitches in digital calendrical transitions triggered fears of nuclear reactor shutdowns, airliners falling from the sky, and collapsing power grids. And end-times prophecies that historically ramp up at the close of each century fed those survivalist jitters.

On the other hand, there was plenty to be optimistic about.

Like the Berlin Wall, the Soviet empire itself had dissolved. The euro had become the coin of the realm that would mitigate ancient European rivalries. The bloody tragedy of Vietnam turned a new page with the establishment of diplomatic relations. Indeed, a political scientist argued in “The End of History and The Last Man” that “the universalization of Western liberal democracy (had become) the final form of human government.”

And at Sarasota’s Phillippi Estate Park, on the final weekend of 1999, an event called Sarasota 2K convened to reject fatalism and celebrate brighter possibilities. Joining the poets, dancers, musicians and other performers was a quixotic, Brooklyn-born, globetrotting artist/inventor named David Gittens.

Read more at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune