Private: Debris of Dharmadhatu

Portfolio: annaluiselorenz_artistportfolio

You are on a walk. Winter clearly hasn’t arrived yet, however, heavy humidity makes your breath superincumbent, your mind dizzy. You pass by a lonely baby buggy. Hollow black eyes stare out of a fragile corpus from inside. In the background bodies collapse over the wet playground sand that is covered by a layer of rotting leaves. Tottering limbs against the yellow sky. A small finger guided by unknown forces ridges arcane signs into the sand, just to be later interpreted as flowers and butterflies by a loving mother.

One of those entities has once occupied this planet in your name. Assigned to a body that was not yet declared as your own, it used the void from where the essence of human psyche is supposed to originate from as a base to act on your behalf. This project proposes an expanded, alocal and nontemporal “chat” between your own and other people’s ancient and current baby avatars which haven’t yet managed to transgress into the “real” world via their first active memory. Half a scripted narrative, half a real-time encounter you will be able to enter into a primordial brain-to-brain conversation with the debris of consciousness, using brain wave detectors as a tool to reconstruct internal imagery produced by your primordial consciousness: unmediated by any known language, knowledge and sensory experiences: the dharmadhatu.

The “chat” is inspired by the architecture of text-based and conceptual games like “Zork” or “A beginners guide”, and is based on the artificial birth of primitive life forms in Stanley Miller’s primeval soup experiment in 1953.

In these 4 weeks the residency will be used as a starting point into research on primordial consciousness reproduction with brain-wave detectors and the creation of a basic narration for the expanded chat.

Anna-Luise Lorenz (*1986) is an artist, graphic designer and researcher based in London and Berlin. She gained a post-graduate degree in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art, London, and completed her undergraduate studies in Communication and Type Design from Augsburg and Prague.
Her work revolves around the anomalies of empiricism and rationalism, the paradoxical, the impossible and the failed as a means to explore parallel spheres of reality that emancipate us from a world that we all agreed on, synchronized by knowledge and created by those who are in power: natural sciences, capitalism, tech reviews.