COLLISIONS
A FESTIVAL OF
PRACTICE RESEARCH
IN PERFORMANCE
26-28 SEPTEMBER 2017
Un-teaching Counter-meditation
Lior Lerman
Installation, Throughout the Festival
Photo Credit: Lior Lerman
Firstly, one must perceive the truth that all art is religious. Secondly, one must acknowledge that all artefacts of any kind are art. Every text is a liturgical manual, every image - a mandala, every gadget - a rosary, every youtube clip - a sadhana, every binge watching session – a haphazard sacrament. Any content whatsoever is liable transform one into an unwitting initiate, an incidental devotee.
This much is common knowledge, but wherein lies your spiritual practice and your faith?
This display presents selected images from a Youtube channel currently under construction. This channel is devoted to the practice of Unteachng Counter Meditation – a media mindfulness method for digital wayfarers ~ based on The Tempest by William Shakespeare.
My Research:
This enquiry introduces the study of media poetics to the field of performance research thereby re-problematizing concepts of mediality in the context of performance art. The productive exchange between these fields leads this enquiry to a practical and theoretical interrogation of performance art as a meta-language; a machine to think with about media change. This hypothesis is probed through a series of performances that adopt various media such as Tantric meditation techniques and Shakespearean plays, and adapt these media to one another. By so doing these performances activate such meta-medial questions as “is this art?” and “How do you know?”.
Lior Lerman is a visual artist, performance maker and lecturer, currently based in London. Her creative practice examines questions of meaning and story telling at the fulcrum between the analogue and the digital realms. Before coming to London, she studied at the school of Visual Theatre in Jerusalem. She graduated from the MA program in Performance Practices and Research at Central, and currently continues her research as a PhD. candidate at the research program at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.
'The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his action and of new knowledge in his own time.'
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964)
'In social terms the artist is regarded as a navigator who gives adequate compass bearings, despite the magnetic deflection of the needle by changing environmental forces. So understood, the artist is not a peddler of new ideals or lofty experiences. He is an indispensable aid to action and reflection alike.'
Marshall McLuhan, Through the Vanishing Point (1969)